Review: KRAPP’S LAST TAPE at Royal Court Theatre

For aficionados and devotees of Beckett, Endgame and Waiting For Godot are among the greatest masterworks in the Absurdist pantheon. Here, the newly devised curtain raiser imagines what may have delayed Godot on his way to meet Vladimir and Estragon. We find him fretting at an undisclosed location, responding to a mild-mannered but taunting and unseen female interlocutor. Played as a disembodied voice (by Flora Ashton) the captor insists that the business-attired Godot (Shakeel Haakim) acts out various trivial tasks — everything from thinking about how to be a better person, to jumping up and spinning around while repeating what she is saying. In true absurdist style, it is an entirely infuriating situation and with Godot’s mounting sense of frustration and concern at not being permitted to leave to meet his friends, their fractious interaction becomes expletive-laden and fraught, finally landing somewhere between exhausted and pathetically resigned.

After the appetiser has been consumed, the cluttered and dusty backdrop comes into its own. Beneath a suspended pendent light is Krapp’s desk, atop which sits the aged spool tape recorder/player. All around, are ranged the boxes and shelves redolent of a lifetime’s hoarding of books, tapes and sundry detritus. It is Krapp’s 69th birthday and after consuming two bananas, he digs out a tape recording of his younger self from 30 years before. We get a sense that little has changed and in the recording we hear him deride his even younger self as a whelp as he gradually unravels the disappointment of a physical and romantic liaison of his dim and distant past played out in the bottom of a boat during a sunny day on a lake.

The poignancy of the piece sits in our realisation that this is likely Krapp's last year of making and listening to his tapes and that his lifetime's achievements — such as they are —appear tragically scant. Crap in fact. He talks repeatedly in terms of light and dark, the black rubber ball given to a dog as his mother is dying and his aforementioned lover squinting in the bright sunlight and referred to as Bianca.

Beckett left little to the imagination in his exhaustive, almost ‘control freak’ stage directions and scene notes. This hasn't dissuaded Oldman from not only starring in the vehicle (which was previously presented at York) but crediting his own direction and design which includes the tragically apropos song heard playing at the opening “We Three (My Echo, My Shadow and Me)” by the Ink Spots.

Oldman’s a-lister presence has ensured that the production — part of the Royal Court’s 70th season program — is largely sold-out. I found it marginally more watchable than Stephen Rea’s execrable version at the Barbican last year, but somehow lacking the pathos of John Hurt’s embodiment of twenty years ago, but that may simply be the reflections of an older man, looking to his past. 

KRAPP'S LAST TAPE (presented with GODOT'S TO-DO LIST) continues at the Jerwood Downstairs until the end of May.

Krapp's Last Tape Tickets