Major productions of Krapp’s Last Tape are like buses. Less than a fortnight ago, Samuel Beckett’s one-man play opened at the York Theatre Royal starring, directed and designed by Gary Oldman; this week Stephen Rea returns to the role at the Barbican Theatre in London following runs in Dublin and Australia.
Though Oscar-winning Oldman was the more anticipated of the pair – particularly as the production marks his first stage performance in almost four decades – Oscar-nominated Rea makes the better Krapp. Still, you wonder why such an intimate play is being performed in these cavernous spaces.
Rea’s production, directed by Vicky Featherstone, feels more personal despite the Barbican’s 1154 seats versus York’s 750 capacity. Part of that may be the theatre – the Barbican website promises “an intimate feel with no seat located further than 20 metres from the stage” but it’s Paul Keogan’s lighting that plays a more pivotal role. Rea’s Krapp is silhouetted, almost drowned, by pitch-black darkness – he pops out at you. But really, the space is still too big.
Given Beckett’s notoriously stringent stage directions, which are still a requirement of his estate to stage his plays, the story is unsurprisingly the same in both productions. In his den on his 69th birthday, Krapp sits down, as he does every year, to record a tape summarising the year’s events. Before making this year’s record he listens to the tape made on his 39th birthday in which he recalls his mother’s death and a romantic liaison on a punt.
The younger Krapp has just been listening to an older tape too from his late-20s. Through the recollections, we see Krapp’s journey from boyhood to his twenties and into the man we hear on the recording and the man we see in front of us – broken by nostalgia and regret.
It requires an actor to act opposite themselves with more recorded than live dialogue. Rea made the wise decision in 2009 to record the younger Krapp’s parts and it makes for an incredibly clear delineation between the older and younger role. His natural Belfast accent fits Krapp’s vernacular like a glove.
On stage, Rea lean ins into the comedy; the clowning of the opening banana peel slip, revelling in the word spool – including an inspired brief reprise on tape – and shuffling off stage like a burglar in a farce, bedecked in heeled white boots.
The heightened comedy makes Krapp’s disintegration all the more tragic. By the end, as Krapp listens again to his younger self recounts the encounter with a ‘dark young beauty’ on the punt, we see thirty years of regret begin to etch themselves on Rea’s face as the younger Krapp and the girl agree that there is no point going on with the relationship. As the younger man says defiantly that he wouldn’t want the years of his youth back – “not with the fire in me now” – the lines on Rea’s face tell a whole other story.
Rating: ★★★★☆ (Very Good)
Krapp’s Last Tape was at the Barbican, London from 30 April to 3 May
Read our review of Gary Oldman in Krapp’s Last Tape at the York Theatre Royal here.
