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A tragic playwright, or a comic one?
"Krapp's Last Tape' by the Lantern
Robert Zaller
Samuel Beckett has been the rage in town lately, and the Lantern Theater added to its mainstage production of Happy Days last weekend with a mini-festival of readings, discussion and performances, capped by Frank X's performance of Beckett's extended one-acter, Krapp's Last Tape. As Happy Days is a tour de force for female actors, so is Krapp for males.
Krapp is a 69-year-old writer— at least by self-perception— whose annual ritual it is to memorialize his year on tape, while playing back a previous tape to regale himself with the shows of yesteryear. The tape he's chosen to play is that of his 39-year-old self, a feisty toper whose enthusiastic self-regard contrasts markedly to the elder Krapp's wheezing decrepitude.
Any diarist making the plunge back into a distant journal will appreciate the irony of discovering a person who both is and isn't oneself. The elder Krapp is fascinated by his younger self's sexual exploits, but sneeringly dismissive of the latter's description of a moment of spiritual rapture. The one thing that seems to unite both Krapps is their penchant for bananas, which Beckett converts into a bawdy sight gag.
Sex in a rowboat
The problem of the identity's persistence in time was a lifelong preoccupation for Beckett, whose very first book was a critical study of Proust. But time itself is equally problematic for Beckett. In Happy Days, the temporal unit he sets out to deconstruct is the 24-hour day; in Krapp's Last Tape, it is the year.
By working the forward and rewind buttons, Krapp segments his younger self's narrative into bits and pieces, obliterating all sense of sequence and order. The bit he wants to repeat over and over— a description of sex in a rowboat in which the tide's flow undergirds the up-and-down, side-to-side movement of the lovers— suggests the stasis at the heart of motion, the absurdity of imputing any forward progression to time, and the essential futility of attempting to chronicle it.
One punning question
The play's own title, like that of Happy Days (and of Waiting for Godot and Endgame as well), contains its own punning question about time. In what sense is Krapp's tape to be his "last" one? Is Beckett suggesting that he won't live to make another one, or that he'll choose not to make one? What will silence Krapp: death, or merely despair at making sense of the days and years any longer?
In some later works, Beckett dispenses with dialogue altogether. Mere silence, however, cannot interrupt the torrent of his speech. His characters are unquenchable, and that's why we keep returning to them.
The Lantern's laboratory staging of Krapp whetted one's appetite for a full-dress production. Frank X, who has an affinity for older characters (recall his excellent King Lear of a few seasons back), emphasized the drollery of the role to good effect. Beckett would be a great comic playwright if he weren't such a great tragic one, and vice versa. In the hands of the right actor, of course, the circle is squared, and he is both.
Krapp is a 69-year-old writer— at least by self-perception— whose annual ritual it is to memorialize his year on tape, while playing back a previous tape to regale himself with the shows of yesteryear. The tape he's chosen to play is that of his 39-year-old self, a feisty toper whose enthusiastic self-regard contrasts markedly to the elder Krapp's wheezing decrepitude.
Any diarist making the plunge back into a distant journal will appreciate the irony of discovering a person who both is and isn't oneself. The elder Krapp is fascinated by his younger self's sexual exploits, but sneeringly dismissive of the latter's description of a moment of spiritual rapture. The one thing that seems to unite both Krapps is their penchant for bananas, which Beckett converts into a bawdy sight gag.
Sex in a rowboat
The problem of the identity's persistence in time was a lifelong preoccupation for Beckett, whose very first book was a critical study of Proust. But time itself is equally problematic for Beckett. In Happy Days, the temporal unit he sets out to deconstruct is the 24-hour day; in Krapp's Last Tape, it is the year.
By working the forward and rewind buttons, Krapp segments his younger self's narrative into bits and pieces, obliterating all sense of sequence and order. The bit he wants to repeat over and over— a description of sex in a rowboat in which the tide's flow undergirds the up-and-down, side-to-side movement of the lovers— suggests the stasis at the heart of motion, the absurdity of imputing any forward progression to time, and the essential futility of attempting to chronicle it.
One punning question
The play's own title, like that of Happy Days (and of Waiting for Godot and Endgame as well), contains its own punning question about time. In what sense is Krapp's tape to be his "last" one? Is Beckett suggesting that he won't live to make another one, or that he'll choose not to make one? What will silence Krapp: death, or merely despair at making sense of the days and years any longer?
In some later works, Beckett dispenses with dialogue altogether. Mere silence, however, cannot interrupt the torrent of his speech. His characters are unquenchable, and that's why we keep returning to them.
The Lantern's laboratory staging of Krapp whetted one's appetite for a full-dress production. Frank X, who has an affinity for older characters (recall his excellent King Lear of a few seasons back), emphasized the drollery of the role to good effect. Beckett would be a great comic playwright if he weren't such a great tragic one, and vice versa. In the hands of the right actor, of course, the circle is squared, and he is both.
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