Krapp's Last Tape and Other Shorter Plays

"The premise of the play is an old man on stage sitting in a room. All you see is Krapp sitting at a table, with a spotlight over him, the rest of the stage in darkness. When he’s not at the table, he moves to the back of the stage into a room that we don’t see, but we know that he goes back there to pour another drink. We know that he is sixty-nine, and that every year he records on tape a record of what has happened during the past year. This is something that Beckett took from Samuel Johnson who every year would reflect on the year that has just passed. The play oscillates between Krapp recording his current year’s impressions, and listening to a past tape at the age of thirty-nine where the Krapp of thirty-nine is recording himself and the fact that he’s just listened to a tape of himself recorded ten years previously. So, we have a multiplication of Krapps. We have three Krapps across time. It’s essentially a reflection of a life and the way in which, as Beckett had already said in an essay on Proust that he wrote as a young man, that there is no such thing as an individual, only a succession of individuals. The play highlights this in its own way, because each Krapp couldn’t remember what they had said in the previous recordings. They have to look up words in dictionaries and think about things, because even though the tapes act as a kind of aide-mémoire , they fail because each of them couldn’t recall what they meant when they said what they said. However bad things seem to be, Beckett’s characters always find a way of carrying on. This is what provokes so many humanist readings of Beckett’s work, especially in the early days of Beckett criticism. I don’t agree with the idea that Beckett deals in absolutes. He famously said that the key word to his works is “perhaps”. Whether he actually said that or not, I do think that his work is about perhaps. But it’s also about resistance and about carrying on. If you think about Winnie in Happy Days , she’s buried to the waist and then to the neck, but she still carries on. And also in Worstward Ho , which we will come to. There’s always still something there that allows you to go on. “However bad things seem to be, Beckett’s characters always find a way of carrying on.” Krapp’s Last Tape shows, as it were, regret; there is definitely a sense of the nostalgia. That’s one of the reasons that I’ve picked it. It’s probably the most sentimental of his works. It’s definitely the one that does not shy away from a certain level of pathos, I think. Its literary virtues are probably secondary to its performative virtues. If you witness Krapp’s Last Tape in a theatre, it is an incredibly powerful play. It’s a devastating play, in many ways, because it’s the one that also refuses the light relief. In fact, the little light relief that you do get in Krapp was cut by Beckett when he staged it himself. If you think about the beginning of the play, it has the slapstick banana routine—he slips on the skin, and so forth. When he came to stage it himself in Berlin in 1967—it was the first of his plays he directed—he cuts most of the banana scene out. We have the annotated copy of his theatrical notebook here at the University of Reading. If you were a director directing a Beckett play, do you highlight the comic aspect of the play or do you highlight the tragic side of things? Whenever Beckett directed his own plays, he highlighted the tragic. Every time he directed his own plays, he tended to reduce the comic elements. That in itself is interesting, as that seems to be how he saw them himself. You could argue that there are two canons of Beckett texts: there’s the texts that we all know—the ones we’d buy in a bookshop—and the ones he staged himself. The two are quite different. “If you were a director directing a Beckett play, do you highlight the comic aspect of the play or do you highlight the tragic side of things?” There is a literary value to Krapp’s Last Tape , undoubtedly. It’s very poetic in parts. But I see it as a very powerful play when performed. It speaks to a lot of his other texts, whether it’s prose or theatre. The idea of the solitary human being in a room is a very common trope in Beckett. We get that in the TV play Ghost Trio and in the prose work Malone Dies . I think Krapp’s Last Tape is one of the most powerful versions of that trope. I think, very often, a lot of Beckett’s works start out not necessarily from autobiographical roots but certainly more realistic roots. Again, the manuscripts show this to a certain degree. With Endgame , there were references to the First World War there which he subsequently erases or ‘vaguens’ into the more abstract versions that we know from publication or from stage. With Krapp’s Last Tap e, you can make links there. The woman in the green coat on the railway platform is clearly a reference back to Peggy Sinclair, a cousin of Beckett’s with whom he had a relationship. You can also potentially relate the death of the mother in the play to Beckett’s witnessing his own mother’s death. You also have the joke about being a failed writer, about the fact that a few copies sold to circulate in libraries in the commonwealth. This is surely Beckett having a bit of a laugh about his own success as a writer as a young man because, actually, the figures are not that dissimilar from sales of More Pricks Than Kicks published in 1934. There are autobiographical echoes there, but I wouldn’t call it an autobiographical play."