Some plays have a way of existing outside of time: Bring them out to a modern stage, resurrect them with a gifted crew, and no matter how many years it’s been since the work was penned, they’ll still move, inspire thought, and make us laugh. Then, there’s plays like Samuel Beckett’s one-act monologue Krapp’s Last Tape, where its existential gloom and relentless naval-gazing have little to offer anyone outside of Beckett devotees.
First performed in 1958, the play is a rumination on memory, a duet between the 69-year-old writer Krapp, played by Max Gillies, and a tape of himself at 39. It becomes apparent Krapp records annually one such tape as a document of the preceding year. With Gillies seated at a desk alone, and a single spotlight accentuating the desolate emptiness of FortyFiveDownstairs’ basement, the play dutifully rolls out the usual sources of older male existential pain: lost women, impotency, regretted decisions, etcetera. There’s some moments of genuine poetry here accentuated by Gillies’ reactions to his younger self, both in the promise he is sure will come to fruition and in the early signs of a decline into a life of loneliness. However, Gillies, a colossus of Australian performing arts, approaches the role with a whimsy that becomes tiresome very quickly: The slapstick moments where Krapp wanders around the void of the stage looking for the correct tape are mildly amusing the first time, and stale every time after that. Later, as Krapp is in conversation with himself, Gillies admirably brings out the humour in all the right places, but in a way that unfortunately undercuts the pathos of his character’s situation. When the focus is on the subject of the stark misery of being alone, failed, and approaching the end of one’s life, Gillies’ attempt at understatement make Krapp’s musings vague and insubstantial.
Many big names have played the titular character in Krapp’s Last Tape since it was written, its morbid emotional heft attractive for generations of directors. Unfortunately, this latest production of Beckett’s curio offers nothing of interest. While this play may have once felt boundary-breaking, insightful and fresh, that time is now surely long gone.
