Krapp's Last Tape
Duchess Theatre, London WC2

Michael Gambon could have been designed to star in Krapp's Last Tape. This is not just because he is now, aged 69, the same age as Krapp. It is because he is the very emblem of the play's paradox. This short dialogue between a decrepit author, Krapp, and his younger self as recorded on tape is an essay on the fruitlessness of art. Yet Krapp is a wonderful piece of art and, in a sense, the nearer perfect the production and performance, the more Krapp's argument is undone. And here we have Gambon, who for years has looked worryingly deathly and dishevelled (his frailty is always belied by his nimbleness), finding the piece's lyricism, pathos and even lightness. His down-at-heel appearance speaks to Beckett's despair, his melodious speech to the playwright's almost involuntary faith in art.

Gambon, in this production from the Gate, Dublin, wisely plays down Krapp's clownishness. In the long (too long) 15 minutes before he speaks, under Michael Colgan's direction, he modifies the stage direction's business with a banana. Rather than slip, as instructed, on its skin, he tosses it away. Also contrary to Beckett's instructions, Gambon places it not by a waistcoat pocket but at his fly, dildo-like. His gestures are pathological, not clownish.

Krapp is addicted to the fruit, to booze and to women, but it is for words, we discover, that he abandoned his girlfriend 30 years ago. The older Krapp would like us to believe he has lost patience with words. When the pompous younger Krapp, on the tape, talks of "viduity", his later self needs a dictionary to find out what it means ("state or condition of being or remaining a widow or widower"). The 39-year-old Krapp is describing his mother, who that year "lay a-dying" and whom he has wished gone. Like a prototype Will Self, he gets off on recondite words, and that makes him sound callous. Yet old Krapp, too, is unreasonably excited by the simple noun "spool", which he rolls around his mouth, awarding himself "the happiest moment of the past half-million".

For all its artfulness, the account of the mother's death remains poignant, as does the young Krapp's description of how he abandoned his girlfriend during a romantic outing on a punt. She agrees it is no "good" going on, but he wants to look into her eyes, which are closed against the glare of the sun. "Let me in," he says, and one feels, even then, he might have been saved. Instead, thanks to some forgotten creative epiphany, young Krapp devotes himself to writing a magnum opus that sells, in due course, 17 copies.

One wonders, naturally, whether old Krapp would be quite so contemptuous of art and his younger self if the book had sold millions. At times, Krapp's Last Tape is too much like Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes" for comfort. Old Krapp is right, nevertheless, to call the young Krapp a "stupid bastard": he has bequeathed himself a future whose consolations turn out to be the bottle and whores. But the stupid young bastard is not talentless. When Gambon on tape, speaking in a mournful Anglo-Irish lilt, at last gets to recapitulate those final moments on the punt, the description is utterly mesmerising. Gambon in person, in his last speech, cannot destroy its beauty by insisting that he prefers his present anger ("the fire in me now") to that lost chance of love. One leaves wondering if Beckett meant us to realise that the stupider bastard was the older man.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times