Krapp's Last Tape, Barbican Pit: A superbly sour performance from Stephen Rea – but it lacks depth

Telegraph

01-05-2025

Despite the meticulous control of Samuel Beckett's estate, we have had two stagings of Krapp's Last Tape within the space of a week. At York Theatre Royal, Gary Oldman played Beckett's decaying 'wearish' curmudgeon as a man in a state of unravel, the overflowing papers on his desk and the detritus of his study reflecting the scattered fragments of his mind. By contrast, in the Barbican's version, Stephen Rea cuts a tidy, almost dapper figure. The desk is spotless, save the lamp overhead, the recorder, tapes and dictionary, there are no other props. The hair is surely combed. Squint and that black waistcoat might even be ironed. And those nifty white shoes – they might almost threaten a dance.
Vicky Featherstone 's production premiered at Dublin last year, but in a sense it began 10 years ago when the then 68-year-old Rea recorded the tapes that Krapp spends the majority of this monologue listening to, in agitated querulous communion with his younger self. (This nod to future posterity by actors is becoming a thing – Samuel West has apparently done the same.) The gap in age here is not significant, but it's enough to evince a degree of poignancy; because the recordings have a light English accent while Krapp the man has an Irish one, it also marks an audible separation between the Krapp we hear and the Krapp we see. The impression is one of physical, even pugilistic dissonance.
This is a contained, disciplined performance from Rea, in keeping with Featherstone's stylised distilled aesthetic. Light and shadow play together to claustrophobic effect, boxing in Rea beneath the single shaft of light from the lamp above his head. When he shuffles off stage to collect his dictionary and spools – in an overly performative old-man trot – a door appears out of the gloaming as a rectangle of bright light, suggesting a world beyond that contains all that has gone before and all that is denied him now. Or perhaps all that Krapp is denying himself: there is enough controlled vigour in Rea's Krapp to suggest his sequestered solitude is on one level perversely willed. He kicks the first banana skin off stage with surprising energy, and hurls off the second in barely contained fury.
Krapp's Last Tape both demands almost nothing from its performer – there are barely any lines – and at the same the ability to suggest an entire life. Rea's performance is sharply without sentiment. He's sardonic, cynical, cackles like a drunk, He is full of self-loathing and contempt for the delusions and ambitions of his younger self. But then, listening to himself recalling that doomed love affair by the river – 'I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes' – he hugs the recorder in awful anguished longing.
Exhaustion, regret, weary resignation: Rea hits every note. Yet this 55-minute shard of a play is also a journey through the self in its many previous forms. It may have an elliptical structure but it has a coherent psychological through line. Rea doesn't fully capture this descent through time and self, to the point that the play feels unfinished at the moment when it ends. Nor does he sufficiently mine the contradictions between the play's vaudevillian comedy and abject desolation. Perhaps it's partly a fault of the staging – Krapp's Last Tape really needs a small stage – but this Krapp is surrounded by a darkness that Rea's performance struggles to fully pierce.