Latest news with #Krapp
Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Krapp's Last Tape review — Stephen Rea is compelling throughout
Samuel Beckett's stage directions are densely detailed, but every actor does their Krapp their own way. Gary Oldman's current York production has his Krapp sitting listening to recordings of himself in an attic study crammed with bookish rubbish. Here at the Barbican in London, in a show first seen in Dublin last year, Stephen Rea is a rumpled figure in a mess-free monochrome vault. A stray banana skin or obtrusive tin of audio tape? He chucks them merrily into the darkness next to the sharp rectangle of light he occupies. He needs to check a word in his dictionary? He walks up a shaft of light upstage, then through a black door that slides open with Star Trek swishness. Same words, same costume of white
Evening Standard
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Krapp's Last Tape at the Barbican: 'Stephen Rea is oddly workmanlike'
Irish company Landmark did for this production, originally staged by Vicky Featherstone in Dublin last year. Though the play is about memory, loss and the encroachment of death, there'll be no more mention of dates and ages from now on, I promise. Rea is more enigmatic and less melancholic than other Krapps I've witnessed. Maybe each generation gets the Krapp it deserves.
Telegraph
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Krapp's Last Tape, Barbican Pit: A superbly sour performance from Stephen Rea – but it lacks depth
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.
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Holy Krapp! Gary Oldman and Stephen Rea unspool Beckett's masterpiece about memory
I am a Krapp collector. Since my late teens I've returned time and again to Samuel Beckett's brief but monumental one-act play in which a purple-nosed, 'wearish old man' spools through reels of memoir recorded each year on his birthday. Although performed by a single actor, Krapp's Last Tape is not quite a monologue. It becomes a kind of dialogue between the 69-year-old Krapp and his recorded 39-year-old self, who in turn reflects on how he behaved in his late 20s. It is, then, a tale of three Krapps. I've sailed past two of those ages: next stop, 69! Beckett's play has endured partly because it bottles the nature of regret – it asks us all to consider what could have happened if we had made other choices in our lives, how things might have turned out differently. Two current productions – starring Gary Oldman at York Theatre Royal and Stephen Rea at the Barbican in London – not only invite audiences to consider such questions but also give the actors a rare opportunity to reconnect with their past. 'Perhaps my best years are gone,' says Krapp towards the end of the play. The Crying Game's Rea, who is 78, disproves any such suggestion with an acutely moving performance, boosted by the use of his own archive recording of the younger Krapp's lines – done on a whim by the actor in 2009 and stowed away for future use. Rea worked with Beckett on Endgame in 1976 (and did a film of it in 1991) and brings to bear the great writer's note on that play, 'It's always ambiguous', with his interpretation of Krapp. Oscar winner Oldman, at 67, is two years too young for the older Krapp yet seems wearier than Rea as he creaks around the set in York, where he began his career in 1979 and played roles including a pantomime cat. Oldman, who recorded the younger Krapp's voice in the months before this production, has not acted on stage for 37 years – more than half his lifetime. In a programme note he uses a Krapp-like image to explain theatre's impact on his screen career, saying he always draws on his 'mental museum of theatre references'. The production, which he also directed and designed, honours past Krapps by featuring the same machine used by Michael Gambon and John Hurt in the role. When I talked to Hurt about his memories of Krapp's Last Tape, I said I'd seen it in the West End, the year after its 1999 run at the Barbican's Pit. He instantly replied that he wished I'd seen it in 2013, by which time he had withdrawn the anger from his portrayal. The recording of the younger Krapp that he made for the Barbican run was used for all his subsequent productions. Hurt was similarly critical of that audio performance. However, he acknowledged: 'The more I come to dislike what I did on the tape, the more it plays into the hands of the present Krapp.' In depicting a man who is frustrated – even deflated – by his past, both personally and professionally, Beckett's play taps into the self-critical actor's quest for the perfect performance. This gained an unexpected charge on the night I saw Robert Wilson's thundery expressionist production, featuring immense projections, at the Barbican in 2015. It left me cold, but I was nevertheless shocked when, at the curtain call, a nearby theatregoer was so unimpressed that they booed Wilson, who took his bow seemingly still in character as Krapp, and cast a hurt expression our way. Rea's Krapp, directed by Vicky Featherstone, twice looks over his shoulder at the pitch-black that surrounds him, which his younger self says, unconvincingly, makes him feel less alone. The spartan set, designed by Jamie Vartan, is more like a cell than Beckett's 'den' and brings an air of confession or self-interrogation. Krapp's desk comes with comically deep drawers, concealing his beloved bananas. Playing Krapp comes with high potassium levels: you usually see this number of bananas eaten by tennis players not actors. Krapp berates himself for tucking into them and keeps the fruit under lock and key – it's a rigmarole to reach them, much like his system for storing away memories that bring a similarly peculiar mix of pain and pleasure. Rea seems to inhale the scent of his first banana before taking a huge bite that leaves its stringy bits dangling from his lips. Malcolm Rippeth's sepia lighting for Oldman's cluttered set evokes a bruised banana; Oldman slings his skins to the floor and gives a sly grin before biting into his second one. Recognising that every sound matters in Beckett, Oldman fills the theatre with the sound of laborious masticating. Both actors excel at the comedy of Krapp: Rea skittering on and off stage with the reels, Oldman affecting a light and airy voice as he draws out the word 'spooool'. When Rea reads from the dictionary a description of the 'vidua bird' with its black plumage, the humour is increased by the actor's own mop of dark curls. Rea turns the memory of a 'bony old ghost of a whore' into a cantankerous standup routine, adopting the voice of Fanny, and dourly mocks his younger self. Each actor nails the self-satisfied 39-year-old's grand proclamation to be at the 'crest of the wave'; both emphasise how the older man has not changed as much as he might have wished in the decades since. Acting is reacting, so they say, and the relationship between the three Krapps is pivotal to the play, as suggested by the on-the-nose choice of We Three (My Echo, My Shadow and Me), a song about being 'all alone, living in a memory', as introductory music for Oldman's production. His set accentuates the clutter and resembles an attic as he seems to emerge from beneath to potter around boxes, crates and old furniture that form a lifetime of precious detritus. The set, which also suggests he is shored up on an island, even implies a connection between Krapp's ramshackle belongings and the fragmented scenes and gestures that Beckett wrote for the character. It's a play that really needs a much smaller stage than either the Barbican or York's Theatre Royal. Of all the productions I've seen, the venue that suited it best was the subterranean Jermyn Street theatre in London's West End, which has an impressive record with Beckett. Trevor Nunn directed it there in 2020, in a triple bill with Eh Joe and The Old Tune, recognising that Beckett's lonely souls gain a haunting collective force when presented together (as in Jermyn Street's Footfalls and Rockaby the following year). Nevertheless, even the passing references to other characters in Krapp's Last Tape emphasise its themes – like Old Miss McGlome who sings 'songs of her girlhood'. The first Krapp I saw was soon after reading it at university. That performance was memorable for being halted when an acrid smell wafted off the machine and the theatre's tech team were called in to investigate. I recall feeling cheated that they resumed at the same point and didn't do the 50-ish minute play once more from the top. I saw that show with a friend who died at the age of 41 – I now realise that the only tapes I own, boxed away in the attic, are compilations he made for me over the years. I have nothing to play them on, but will always keep them. A trip to Krapp's Last Tape in my 20s rekindled a romance that I would come to replay with my own sense of regret. The most striking lines of this singular play – where even the stage directions are longer than the speeches spoken live – are about a breakup. In the 39-year-old's recording, he recalls it like this: 'I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes.' It occurs on a punt on a sun-kissed afternoon, a wretched business tenderly evoked. In Rea's performance, he perfects the agitated state in which Krapp searches for the section – capturing Hurt's belief that Krapp is an addict. Addicted to what, exactly? To a hit not of nostalgia but of emotion – no matter how painful – for a man who has shut himself off. (In a fascinating new documentary, Rea says of Krapp 'there's a very sad life occurring', that passive verb capturing exactly the loss of control the older Krapp seems to have.) Future Krapp-like characters might be rabbit-holing on Facebook or Instagram instead, grasping for the right photo or phrase to stitch together a memory. Krapp is a play about memory-making: about stockpiling the moments that define us, not unlike assembling a mix tape or organising your iCloud. It's what the younger Krapp, an aspiring writer, calls 'separating the grain from the husks' – about as good a description as you could use for Beckett's precision as a playwright. But it is also about self-deception and not facing down the difficult episodes, such as the death of Krapp's mother. As you get older, and see new productions of familiar plays, you gravitate towards different characters. The last few times I've seen Romeo and Juliet I have been far more interested in the parents than the young lovers. Krapp presents us instead with one man's range of ages to reflect upon or anticipate. Like Lear, it's a role that actors and audiences grow into. So it was a masterstroke by Seán Doran, artistic director of Arts Over Borders, to ask Samuel West and Richard Dormer to each record the part of the taped Krapp when they were 39. For the Beckett Biennale in 2036, by which time West will have reached the correct age, he will perform using his recording; two years later, Dormer will do the same with his when he hits 69. ('Extremely early bird tickets' are available now.) This forward planning is fitting. In the opening line, Beckett tells us the play is set in the future – his masterpiece acknowledges the weight of what may lie ahead as well as what has passed. Krapp's Last Tape starring Gary Oldman is at York Theatre Royal until 17 May. Krapp's Last Tape starring Stephen Rea is at the Barbican, London, until 3 May and Pavilion theatre, Dublin, 22-25 July.
New York Times
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In ‘Krapp's Last Tape,' Gary Oldman Hits Rewind
For Gary Oldman, it is a homecoming of sorts. The English actor got his first professional gig at the Theater Royal in York, a small city 210 miles north of London, playing the titular feline in a 1979 pantomime production of 'Dick Whittington and His Wonderful Cat.' He went on, of course, to establish himself as a screen star, achieving global fame through acclaimed performances in movies such as 'J.F.K.,' 'Bram Stoker's Dracula,' and 'Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy.' Now, almost half a century after his York debut, Oldman — who lives in Palm Springs — has returned to the Theater Royal to direct himself in a revival of Samuel Beckett's 1958 one-man play, 'Krapp's Last Tape.' The run, through May 17, is almost sold out, and the playhouse has gone to town on merch, with signed posters and T-shirts on sale in the lobby. The story of this production is like an inversion of the play's: Oldman, 67, fondly revisiting a haunt of his youth in the twilight of an illustrious career, plays Krapp, an unsuccessful writer who, on his 69th birthday, looks back at his past self and sees only abject failure. Krapp emerges onstage, coughing and doddering, into a dusty study and sits down at a desk to rehearse an annual ritual: recording a monologue on a chunky, reel-to-reel tape recorder. First, though, he retrieves an old spool of tape, recorded 30 years earlier, shortly after a romantic breakup, and plays it back, pausing now and then to reflect and ruminate. The tape suggests a life waylaid by misdirected amorous energies and a penchant for drink. When Krapp finally passes comment, it is to condemn, matter-of-factly, 'the stupid bastard I took myself for 30 years ago.' The recorded voice has more lines than the flesh-and-blood Krapp; for the actor playing him onstage, the challenge is to achieve the right quality of stillness and silence, and to render the subtle shifts as he listens to the recording. Oldman, illuminated only by a single lamp above his head, draws us into Krapp's world by slowing down time. He eats a banana with excruciating deliberation, then immediately produces another one. Later, when he hears his younger self use a word whose meaning he has since forgotten, he shuffles slowly to a bookcase and pulls out a dictionary to look it up. During some drawn-out silences, the sporadic coughs of theatergoers in York seemed to converse with Oldman's onstage hacking. Oldman's face, set in brooding concentration, evokes a pained, vaguely incredulous mortification, which builds to a bitter, almost paralyzing ruefulness. His laconic, weary speech contrasts with the more expansive, and at times mannered, language of the voice on the tapes. Here is an irony: The younger Krapp was ridiculous but had a kind of self-belief; the older version sees things clearly, but is all out of juice. He dismisses his latest literary efforts in a single sardonic line, uttered impassively — '17 copies sold' — but the failed romance and subsequent decades of loneliness weigh more heavily. Realizing too late that he had blown his last shot at happiness, Krapp is sickened by his former hubris. The full force of it hits him as he hears his 39-year-old self declare that he wouldn't want his younger years back — 'not with the fire in me now.' Oldman's features gradually freeze into a rictus of despair, and the lights go out. 'Krapp's Last Tape' is, by conventional standards, a forbidding piece: one act, 50 minutes, relatively static and, despite moments of levity, emphatically bleak. Oldman's delicately understated rendering of Krapp heightens the curious dissonance between the play and the buzz around it. This 'Krapp's Last Tape' doesn't quite transcend the sense of occasion — but so what? A 'star vehicle' play can be useful if it brings high-end drama to a wider public. Sure, the production is powered by sentiment, and has some of the telltale features of a vanity project. (As well as starring and directing, Oldman also designed the set.) But the upshot is that 750 people packed into a regional playhouse, where they saw an ambitiously subtle performance of a challenging work. They were finished in time for dinner — a little demoralized, perhaps, but enriched all the same.
