"Krapp's Last Tape' in Brooklyn

Can it be? Is that the playwright onstage? It's the same spiked steely hair, the weather-beaten face, the furrowed brow, the gaunt gaze, the emaciated profile… He sits staring in stony silence, his frame frozen, craggier than Mount Rushmore.

But no, it's not Samuel Beckett's ghost onstage in Krapp's Last Tape. It's his doppelgänger, the great British actor John Hurt (of Elephant Man fame, and most recently Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the film that opened this weekend).

Hurt has been performing Beckett's one-act jewel for more than a decade, first at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1999, then in London, and thereafter back and forth between the two. And now he's playing it at the Brooklyn Academy of Music like he owns it.

I've always been mesmerized by this play. In 55 fleeting minutes, Beckett"“ father of theater of the absurd"“ gives us an icy blast of raging age with the same ferocity and velocity that Shakespeare provides in his full-length play King Lear.

Birthday ritual

Watching Krapp's Last Tape, you feel like a voyeur peering in on a private ritual meant for no one other than the celebrant. Krapp sits alone on stage, at a table that's bare except for an old-fashioned tape recorder. He is celebrating his 69th birthday by dragging out a stack of tapes made on each of his previous ones, and listening to them one by one.

The first tape he selects"“the only one we hear in the course of the play"“ is "Box Three, Spool Five," recorded decades earlier on his 39th birthday. Krapp listens to his younger self reporting on the bananas he has just eaten and recalling the events of "the year that is gone," during which his mother lay dying.

He fast-forwards to one passage describing a tender sexual encounter with a young woman in a boat, during which he and his lover "lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side." He rewinds and plays this passage over and over. The vision of Krapp's older, present, 69-year-old self, his arms embracing that tape recording machine in a reverie of remembering, is one of the most aching moments of longing that I've ever seen on the stage.

And that's about the extent of Krapp's Last Tape, as far as action goes. Krapp eats a banana (part of his birthday ritual, evidently); he listens to the tape he made at 39; he sings a song or two; he starts recording his birthday message of the day; and so on and so on, in a fragmented, repetitive pattern that you imagine will continue long after the lights go down on this slip of a play.

Stages of life

And yet, in those few fleeting moments, Beckett has conjured up a whole lifetime. Though Krapp never gets beyond listening to that one tape recorded at 39, I always imagine the stage filled with ghosts of Krapp's life"“ one for each year"“ the many ages of one man, all present, all alive, all raging against the inevitable.

Or are they? Ultimately Krapp's Last Tape isn't about the bitterness of aging at all, but rather a vital and stinging appreciation of every stage of life.

"Perhaps my best years are gone," Krapp reflects, "when there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back." Who would ever have thought that Beckett, whose work has so often been viewed as depressing, would have turned out to be one of life's greatest celebrants?♦


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