Beckett is a master of metatheatrics. His dramas are as much about the concept of theatre itself – and the subversive act of watching them – as they are about anything else. So he would approve, I think, of the artistic choices the Royal Court has chosen to revive the single-act one-hander Krapp’s Last Tape, which first graced its stage in 1958, as the curtain-raiser to the English-language performance of Endgame. The curtain-raiser this time is a short new venture into the Waiting for Godot universe by Leo Simple-Asante, winner of the Royal Court’s Young Theatre Award, which invites us to imagine quite what was holding up Beckett’s evasive eponym. Sharp and knowing, slickly performed by Shakeel Hakim as Godot and Flora Ashton as a disembodied voice, it is a fitting a reminder of the blurring of reality we are here to experience.
The star, the unwavering Gary Oldman who was born the same year the play debuted, himself returns to the Royal Court after almost 40 years, just as the character he embodies returns to his past self through the decades via old reel-to-reel tape recordings. And those reels are played on the same machine, sharing the stage with Oldman like a seductive, gently clicking co-star, as was used by John Hurt and Michael Gambon when they performed the role. The tape recorder, like Oldman, has been here before.
Because the past, in the world of Krapp’s Last Tape, is never too far away. It lives on, in the crackling recordings our near-septuagenarian protagonist clings to as his only real legacy: an old man, listening to a younger man, who has just been listening to a man even younger still, all three reflecting on opportunities missed and lessons not quite learned. Oldman holds the stage – amid a set he himself designed, hopelessly scattered with attic debris evocative of mental unrest, lit by one lonely swinging lamp – with tenacious intensity. For the first long minutes he does nothing but frown, shuffle about, and purposefully consume bananas. His fingers clatter on the recorder’s buttons and gently wind the tapes spools (a word whose spondaic rhythms takes childlike delight in annunciating) with mesmerising determination. Years of emotions rise and fall in his expression as his younger self nudges long-submerged memories to the surface. Words he once knew. A dog he once admired. A girl he once embraced.
This is not a play about nostalgia, though you’d be for forgiven for thinking it might be. Nor is it a tragedy, not quite, even as the tears well. It is about endurance, regret, resilience, and the relentless marching on of time. Across 55 minutes, we see a not-quite-realised life unspooled in reels carefully labelled and catalogued across the decades. We see the folly of youth, then of middle-age, relived who through the eyes and ears of a man never quite learned better, but who might yet have more time than he realises. Quietly heartbreaking, painfully relatable, this treatise on ageing and perseverance and our reliance on technology as the guardian for our memories does not feel 68 years old. But then, which 68-year-old does?
[Further reading: Turandot, the last canonical opera]
Content from our partners
Related
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment