Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape

Daniel Sack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317335351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

"We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us." - Krapp

Samuel Beckett's most accessible play is also one of the twentieth century's most moving dramas about aging, memory, and disappointment. Daniel Sack offers the first comprehensive survey of Krapp's Last Tape (1958) with a general reader in mind.

Structured around a series of questions, five approachable sections contextualize the play in the larger career of its Nobel-Prize-winning writer, explore its major thematic concerns, and offer comparative analyses with Beckett's other signal works. Sack also uses discussions of significant productions, including those directed by the playwright himself, to ground interpretation of the play in terms of its performance and provide a useful resource to directors and actors.

Both a critical and personal exploration of this haunting play, this volume is a must-read for anyone with an interest in Beckett's work.

1

What happens

Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn’t enough for you.

Krapp’s Last Tape

In the end of 1957 – four years after the premiere of Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot in the original French) brought sudden international recognition to a writer who had toiled for close to three decades in relative obscurity – Samuel Beckett heard selections from his prose pieces Molloy and From an Abandoned Work read by the Irish actor Patrick Magee on BBC radio. Or, rather, Beckett couldn’t quite hear the broadcast clearly from his home in Paris, so he visited the Parisian office of the BBC and listened to the recording on a reel-to-reel player there (Knowlson 1996, 444).

The Irish author had been living in self-imposed exile in France for more than twenty-five years and had written the bulk of his greatest texts from the late 1940s onwards in his second language – French – only translating the texts back into English after the fact. He had composed in a foreign tongue to alienate his language, to dislocate himself from the conventions and influences that had marred his earlier attempts at original expression. Hearing Magee speak these words in the cadences of his abandoned homeland apparently left a deep impression on Beckett. Immediately afterwards, he began the play – originally titled Magee Monologue – that would become Krapp’s Last Tape a short six drafts and three weeks later. After composing his work in French for more than a decade, it was the first play he would write directly in English. And so, from the start, the play circled around a disembodied voice from a distant time and place, locked in a loop of memory passing from reel to reel.

Krapp’s Last Tape is Beckett’s most personal and most autobiographical creation. It is, perhaps, his most accessible work, his most realistic, and, perhaps too, his most moving. Beckett’s dramatic universe features worlds in which couples are consigned to trash bins (Endgame) or reduced to purgatorial imprisonment in urns (Play), worlds where a woman can be buried in a mound of earth up to her waist or neck (Happy Days), or reduced to a mere mouth speaking endlessly in the dark (Not I). These images of capture and claustrophobia sear themselves into one’s memory the way a recurring nightmare might resound interminably unresolved. Against these, Krapp’s Last Tape is the closest thing to everyday reality that Beckett would write for the stage. Indeed, we might recognize Krapp sitting night after night in the darkened corner of our local pub, bar, or café. The bartender might whisper about that man enclosed alone in drink – the failed author, the failed lover. We might see our future selves reflected in his stare, looking back.

So it was with me, when I first read the play in my freshman year of university, some fifteen years ago. I saw Krapp as a future I might inherit. At the time I thought myself an actor and a writer. I knew I was too young to play Krapp, but I feared I was already preparing for the role. For what if a script were a forecast, a kind of promise about how your life might unfold? Isn’t this what all dramatic scripts offer us – the outline of a prospective event to inhabit some day? The published script of the play begins with the suggestive time signature, A late evening in the future. Frightening words. Premonitions of a time at the other end of this time, not just an evening in the future, but on the far side of that future evening, too late to be up and yet sleepless, pacing or poring over material in half-light. We could certainly make the case that Beckett saw his future self in the faded writer, that the late evening in the future would be his own time many years hence: a portrait of the artist as an old man. So one wonders who happens in this play – the character, the author, or the audience/reader? The timeless voice or the aging body?

We will return to these questions in the next section of this book, but before exploring the identity of Krapp, it makes sense to ask what happens to him, and to thus provide a brief outline of the play.

At the curtain’s rise we see an old man – Krapp – sitting there at a small table lit amid the dark. He faces out, looking over a reel-to-reel tape recorder with microphone and, beside it, a pile of boxes. Checking his watch with a “great sigh,” as if to see if it is really time for the performance, he begins his ritual. Each year, near midnight of his birthday, he plays out the same game: he records his musings on the year past, using the tape recorder as a kind of audio diary. But first, he listens to a recording from an earlier year – perhaps to get himself in the mood, perhaps to mark the passage of time even more clearly.

The man is something of an old clown. Dressed in ridiculous clothes, white-faced with a “purple nose” and an awkward walk, he eats a banana or two and slips on the peel. His name may have fated him to a certain scatological orientation, which does not escape his bitter amusement and regret. Intermittently over the next half-hour he will stumble into a back room and pop open a bottle, succumbing to the vice of steady drink he has struggled to avoid for years. After his slapstick maneuvers, he begins in earnest, pulling out one of the reels in the boxes on his table. Relishing some over the sounds in his mouth – “Spool! (pause.) Spooool!” (218) – he reads out from a ledger the contents of the tape he has unearthed: “Mother at rest at last [. . .] The black ball [. . .] The dark nurse [. . .] memorable equinox [. . .] Farewell to . . . love” (219). He loads the tape into the machine and presses “play.”

A younger voice announces itself and we watch as Krapp listens to a recording from thirty years past. His 39-year-old self describes how he has, in turn, just finished listening to a tape from ten or twelve years back when Krapp was in his late twenties (27 or 29). This middle Krapp soon launches into his own “postmortem” on his thirty-ninth year. At first, the oldest Krapp identifies with the middle Krapp’s mockery of the still-younger Krapp in short laughs, but he soon begins to stray from that identification. Old Krapp mocks his younger self for his false preening, and yet presents himself a paler version of the same man. He cannot remember the meaning of words that readily sprang to mind in his prime, and is forced to look up the peculiar “viduity” in an old dictionary. Gone, too, is the memory of the ball he was throwing to a small dog outside the hospital when his mother passed away, though his younger voice is certain that “I shall feel it, in my hand, until my dying day” (222). The material experience of memory is no more; all that remains is the description of a recollection.

When the account of the “memorable equinox” comes on, Krapp revolts visibly. He manually fast-forwards the tape, desperate to skip over the event. We can piece together only so much: a night alone at the water’s edge, great winds tossing the waves. Krapp recounts that in this moment it became:

clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality – (Krapp curses, switches off, winds tape forward, switches on again) – unshatterable association until my dissolution of storm and night with the light of the understanding and the fire—.

(222)

It sounds a textbook experience of the romantic sublime, where an individual confronts a worldly expanse that dwarfs all capacity to know or say and leaves one stupid, speechless. It seems that the darkness, ignorance, and failure that Krapp had kept at bay are here recognized as his source of strength. But listening from the other side of time, the older Krapp knows that the epiphany and the purported devotion to his work it will inspire lead nowhere.

Krapp skips ahead and suddenly he is in the midst of another sublime encounter. In lyrical language he describes an afternoon spent on a punt (rowboat) with a woman, during which Krapp decided to end their relationship. He lingers on the memory of her dark eyes staring up as “[w]‌e lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side” (223). If the scene on the pier presented the unfathomable depths of the world, here the sublime belongs to another person – to a lover abandoned. In both cases, the encounter exposes the intensely private Krapp to the movement of a world beyond his control. At the end of this intimate reminiscence, the oldest Krapp stops, drinks, and loads a new reel onto the machine to record his account of the past year.

It sounds a painfully diminished life: his great magnum opus forgotten, his outings reduced to occasional couplings with a “bony old ghost of a whore” (224), and a visit to a church, where he nods off in the pews. He wants nothing more than to lie back in the dark and “wander” in his memories: to “[b]‌e again in the dingle on a Christmas Eve, gathering holly, the red-berried. (Pause.) Be again on Croghan on a Sunday morning, in the haze, with the bitch, stop and listen to the bells” (225). These are Irish places: the dingle a peninsula off the southwest, and Croghan (Crohan) a mountain in county Wicklow, just south of Dublin. Places where Beckett himself spent his youth. It is sensation that grounds these memories, not story or language, and his reverie returns at its end to the image of the woman on the punt, lingering again on her eyes.

For Krapp, the past holds far more interest and desire than the present: he stops the machine and wrenches the tape free, in order to reload the earlier recording. He winds it to the passage about the punt again, listening intently and trying to recapture that fleeting moment. His younger self concludes: “Perhaps my best years are gone. 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” (226). It is clear to us that these words could not be more false, though it is less certain whether Krapp himself can see his tragic misapprehension. He stares out into the surrounding darkness, while the tape runs on in silence to its end.

It is a short play: some ten pages in The Selected Works of Samuel Beckett and usually some thirty to forty minutes in performance. And yet, as with Beckett’s other increasingly brief late works for the stage, a great deal coils around this small, contained event. Three different ages of Krapp appear onstage – a whole lifetime represented in this short span of time. And the questions raised are hugely existential, even universal. Can a person change or do the lies we repeatedly tell ourselves reveal our most certain character? How does personal desire intersect with ambition, the sensual with the intellectual? What does it mean to listen to oneself at a remove, to see oneself as another? These thematic concerns are integrated into the very structure of the play; they are how the play makes its meanings, as we will see in the third section of this book. Inevitably, in a play so concerned with time, this folds over into the following section’s questions of when time plays out. What is memory? Can it be controlled – cut off, or rewound and replayed? Or does remembered sensation only arise unbidden? Is life lived or remembered?

I have been describing the play as outlined in the stage directions of the first published edition (printed in the Evergreen Review in the summer of 1958, then in 1959 by Faber in the UK, and in 1960 by Grove Press in the USA). But Beckett returned to the play repeatedly over the next decades of his life, consulting on productions and eventually directing several of his own. In fact, it may be the play that Beckett revisited most often in his career. We will have a chance to explore the subtle refinements he made to the piece in the pages that follow. But we will also spend some while looking at significant productions by other directors. These often hinge on the performance of the actor playing Krapp, a role that has attracted some of the greatest performers of the last fifty years, including Brian Dennehy, Michael Gambon, John Hurt, Harold Pinter, and Robert Wilson, to name but a few who have played Krapp in English since the turn of the millennium (in the interest of brevity, this book only glances at the equally extensive performance history of the play in French or German). We will also consider some of the fundamental difficulties and fascinations with the text in performance. While I gesture occasionally to individual interpretations throughout the sections that follow, the fifth and final section focuses on where the play happens by looking at the specific choices made in particular productions by actors, designers, and directors, including Beckett himself.

A last thought before I get under way in earnest. Linger for a moment longer on this word “last.” Krapp’s last tape might be his final one, suggesting that he has given up on the ritual of recording or that this is his final year on earth. Death waits in the wings or just upstage. Indeed, when Beckett directed the play, he had Krapp glance behind him into the darkness several times, unconsciously checking in case some spirit of the end drew close. When directing the piece, he confided to an actor playing the part that “the man [Krapp] is dead the next day” (Kalb 1989, 212). “Last” also might refer to his previous tape which becomes the centerpiece of his current rumination. In this previous tape, his prior self reflects on a still earlier tape: the last last tape. In other words, each present tape responds to the one before. Or it might refer to the fact that the tape h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 What happens
• 2 Who happens
• 3 How it happens
• 4 When it happens
• 5 Where it happens
• References
• Index