Krapp's Last Tape
Barbican Theatre
★★★

PLAYWRIGHT Samuel Beckett’s semi-autobiographical one-acter has been performed by a whole load of old Krapps over the years — even though the legendary Irish actor Patrick Magee, who the play was written for, was a mere 36 when it was first staged in 1958.

The existentialist hour-long play ingeniously adopts the tape recorder as a device to explore themes of love, loss, loneliness, meaning, memory, mortality and regret.

Each year on his birthday, Krapp records a tape reflecting on his life and ambitions. But on the occasion of his 69th birthday, he is compelled to listen back to the one he recorded 30 years before.

Expertly rendered tonight by 78-year-old Stephen Rea, of The Crying Game fame, his take on Krapp packs an added punch: he had the foresight to record those earlier monologues himself in 2009, just in case he was ever asked to play the role. His decision has proved remarkably prescient.

This staging by director Vicky Featherstone and Irish Productions has been given a painterly chiaroscuro-effect by set-designer Jamie Vartan, evoking the silent film era.

The interplay of light and shadow from a looming door hangs over the desk where Krapp sits, extracting bananas from its comically long drawer, before hobbling out in oversized boots to fetch his reel to reel recorder and box of tapes — all the while taking a childish delight in pronouncing the word “spoooool.

Rea's Krapp is a cantankerous yet harmless fuddy-duddy, a hermetic eccentric who is slowly losing his grip on reality with age. This reading adds a poignancy to the playback of his more pompous younger self, who he barely seems to remember or recognise. Reacting with scorn, in his new recording he says: “Just been listening to the stupid bastard I took myself to be 30 years ago.”

Yet those earlier recordings contain all the hopes and dreams of a man in the prime of life, with the irony that in them he also derides his even younger 20-something self, suggesting the impermanence of what drives us in life.

Saddest of all is what has been lost: he has let the love of his life slip away, and all that remains is the ruins of his ambition.

Krapp’s Last Tape is ultimately intended as a chamber piece, and while Rea’s version hits the right notes, it would nevertheless greatly benefit from a more intimate venue than the cavernous Barbican theatre where the play’s claustrophobia is lost.

There appears to be a resurgence of Krapp, with actor Gary Oldman, 67, currently staging his own production at the York Theatre Royal. The concept of recordings as a personal archive takes on new meaning in the age of mass podcasting. It may not be long before Krapp’s Last Tape is reimagined for the digital age.

Run ended.