Review: Krapp’s Last Tape, Barbican Centre

Samuel Beckett is a master of meaninglessness. He captures it and conveys it through words, observation and absence, making it an immersive and perceptible experience. And director Vicky Featherstone’s superb production of his masterpiece Krapp’s Last Tape at the Barbican Theatre articulates that fastidiously and coherently, drawing the audience into a wearied world.

Within the first few minutes we know everything there is to know about Krapp. He emerges from twilight, taking up a tiny space in the huge blackness of the Barbican stage; isolated. A door opens and closes on its own behind him, suggesting a man haunted by loss and ghosts of the past. He checks his watch multiple times as it records time and his advancing life labouring by. And there’s an absurdity to it all as he unlocks a drawer (why is it locked?) and pulls it out to an extraordinarily long length, only to extract a banana, which brings a little colour and flavour into his monochrome world. On his 69th birthday Krapp plays back recordings of his younger self from three decades earlier and reflects on his current state.

Actor Stephen Rea is completely invested in this work, so much so that his voice on the tape was recorded some considerable time ago, to ensure he would have a different tone should he ever be called upon to play the role. He enacts the grungy Krapp to perfection, with meticulous, polished delivery that hypnotises and wearies in equal measure. The beautiful economy to everything he says and does speaks boldly of a man with regrets and yet inability to make change. His timing is impeccable, holding the audience in long periods of silent tension, waiting for something to happen, before perhaps delivering a comedic moment that releases a peal of pent up laughter. Tiny, yet deeply meaningful detail tells us much about this pitiful character. An arm wraps around the tape player emitting a memory of his long lost love and he incrementally moves to almost hug and reclaim it, underscoring its absence. He tries to record a new tape but fails, finding its content – a record of his life – now squalid and insubstantial. And the performance is never overdone: it’s too easy to speak the word ‘spool’ in a clownish, OTT manner, but Rea manages to keep it the right side of playful and subsequently almost lyrically poignant.

Beckett’s use of language is extraordinary as the tape reveals memories of love and relationships long gone. There’s rich poetry in the descriptions of time lying on the floor of a boat, enacting the movement to create a clear vision of the experience in the mind’s eye and giving substance to loss. There’s also huge wit in Krapp’s cantankerous, self-aware recognition of two very different versions of himself inhabiting the same space, and this balances his wretchedness by causing vivacious laughter.

Featherstone’s wonderful direction gives distinct clarity to Krapp’s experience, creating a space that sees him isolated, floating in a dark void that he occasionally patters out from, back along a corridor of light or memory, yet always returning to his desk and this inescapably empty moment in time. It evokes a lonely man whose only agency is to replay a past life that he can comment on but never change, with a warm quality that now eludes him. This is a remarkable, deceptively complex production that movingly reveals simple truths about humanity, mortality and the tragedy of the mundane.

Directed by: Vicky Featherstone
Set Design by: Jamie Vartan
Costume Design by: Katie Davenport
Lighting Design by: Paul Keogan
Sound Design by: Kevin Gleeson
Audio Direction by: Stephen Wright

Krapp’s Last Tape runs at the Barbican Theatre until Saturday 3 May.