Krapp’s Last Tape

(Directed by Vicky Featherstone; Adelaide Festival, 7 March 2025)

Less is more with the great reductionist Samuel Beckett, although sometimes less is less. James Wood observed of Beckett’s late work that he had “smothered longings for riches, and [made his] reductions seem like bankruptcy after wealth rather than fraud before it.”* Take the best of Kafka and Jimmy Joyce, stir, and simmer.

Stephen Rea stars, if one can call it starring. In The Crying Game, he was upstaged by a penis; in V For Vendetta, by a Guy Fawkes mask; and a burning theatre in Interview With a Vampire. Here, he is a sad, lonely old man, on his 69th birthday, checking his old reel-to-reel tapes of years gone, from decades ago. It is a grand theatrical device, theoretically, with Rea’s voice recorded aeons ago, to capture the timbre of a younger man, as the current emanation rattles around and eats bananas, but it palls over the course of an hour, because, frankly, modern sensibilities, extremely fragile and self-absorbed as they are, can’t engage with nostalgic reveries about old Dublin town, the girl with the eyes (Irish eyes, put in with a smutty finger) whom he laid, mum, and so on, even with great lines like the closing ones, in which a lifelong atheist perhaps reveals a tincture of doubt:

“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.”

Stephen Rea’s performance is muted and unhurried, the set and lighting is minimalist and fine, but we could have done with a bit more noise from the actor, in order to drown out the squeaking and clatter of seats in the Dunstan Playhouse. Krapp’s Last Tape would make any audience squirm and fidget a bit, so where is the WD-40, AF?

[*The Broken Estate, 1999, p.26.]