Krapp's Last Tape
Encyclopedia
Krapp's Last Tape is a one-act play
, written in English, by Samuel Beckett
. Consisting of a cast of one man, it was originally written for Northern Irish
actor Patrick Magee
and first titled "Magee monologue
". It was inspired by Beckett's experience of listening to Magee reading extracts from Molloy
and From an Abandoned Work
on the BBC Third Programme
in December 1957.
The play, which premiered as a curtain raiser to Endgame
(from 28 October 1958 to 29 November 1958) at the Royal Court Theatre
, London
, was directed by Donald McWhinnie and starred Patrick Magee
. It ran for 38 performances.
to offer you."
According to Ackerley and Gontarski, "It was first published in Evergreen Review
2.5 (summer 1958) … then in Krapp’s Last Tape and Embers (Faber, 1959), and Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (Grove, 1960)." Beckett’s own translation of the play into French, La Dernière Bande, was published in Les Lettres Nouvelles on 4 March 1959.
The available printed texts must not be taken as definitive. "By the mid-1950s Beckett was already talking and working like a director … In a letter to Rosset’s
editorial assistant, Judith Schmidt, 11th May 1959, Beckett referred to the staging of Krapp’s Last Tape as its 'creation'," and he made numerous significant changes to the text over the years as he was involved in directing the play.
as Krapp).
The first American performance, on 14 January 1960, was directed by Alan Schneider
and starred Donald Davis
.
In early productions he had a white face with a purple nose but these details were excised from later performances. "Beckett has been extremely wary of over stressing the clownish elements in Krapp’s physique, dress and behaviour. Even in the first production at the Royal Court Theatre, the purple nose of the ‘tippler,’ which is referred to in the printed text, was much toned down and has since been abandoned by Beckett." The "[s]urprising pair of dirty white boots, size ten at least, very narrow and pointed," suggesting an "ex-dandy rather than the former cricketer," survived longer; such little clues may indicate that, like Henry in Embers
(another of Beckett’s failed writers), Krapp is a man of independent means and does not have to depend on his writing to survive.
"When the plays that follow All That Fall begin, the 'action' in traditional terms has already taken place. From Krapp’s Last Tape onwards all that is left in most of the plays is recapitulation, a struggle with voices in the head, and a masochism
that both demands and dreads the assault of memory."
Krapp is sitting at his desk in his den. There is a white light above the desk but the extremities of the stage are in darkness. This black-and-white imagery continues throughout the whole play; in fact, Beckett’s Berlin "notebook lists no less than twenty-seven points in the play at which the alternation of light and dark is stressed." Twice throughout the play he turns and peers into the darkness. Beckett explained to Martin Held at rehearsal in Berlin: "Old Nick’s there. Death is standing behind him and unconsciously he's looking for it."
He checks his pocket watch periodically as if waiting for the exact moment when he was born before he can begin. Before he starts he has time for a banana, a fruit he has a terrible weakness for. He retrieves a large one from a locked drawer, strokes it – the sexual connotation obvious – peels it and nearly slips on the skin he drops on the floor. After finishing the first he locates a second. This time he throws the skin into the pit but he ends up not eating the banana which gets stuck into a pocket of his waistcoat, the end rudely hanging out. He decides on a drink instead and shuffles into the darkness to get one. Done with that he returns with an old ledger.
On his desk are an old reel-to-reel tape-recorder and a number of tins (originally cardboard boxes) containing reels of recorded tape. In some productions the desk is empty at first and he brings out the tapes and recorder after the ledger. He consults the ledger. The tape he is looking to review is the fifth tape in Box 3. He reads aloud from the ledger but it is obvious that words alone are not jogging his memory. He takes childish pleasure in saying the word ‘spool’ – a moment of genuine pleasure.
The tape we get to listen to along with Krapp is the one recorded when he turned thirty-nine. The voice on the tape is strong and rather self-important but it’s clearly him. As he settles himself in his seat Krapp accidentally knocks one of the tins onto the floor. He curses, switches off the playback, and sweeps the remaining tins onto the floor before rewinding the tape to begin again.
The voice on the tape mentions the fact that he’s just celebrated his birthday alone "at the wine house" jotting down notes in preparation for the recording session later. In earlier drafts the place was peopled but Beckett progressively emptied the play of all but the most essential characters. The voice confesses to having consumed three bananas and only just resisted the urge to eat a fourth. His bowel
trouble is still a problem and one obviously exacerbated by eating too many bananas. "The new light above my table is a great improvement," reports the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp, before describing how much he enjoys leaving it, wandering off into the darkness, so that he can return to the zone of light which he identifies with his essential self. He notes how quiet the night is. Even his neighbour, the elderly Mrs. McGlome, who habitually sings in the evenings, is silent.
The voice reports that he has just reviewed an old tape from when he was in his late twenties. It amuses him to comment on his impressions of what he was like in his twenties and even the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp joins in the derisory laughter. The young man he was back then is described as idealistic, even unrealistic in his expectations. The thirty-nine-year-old Krapp looks back on the twenty-odd-year-old Krapp with the same level of contempt as the twenty-odd-year-old Krapp appears to have displayed for the young man he saw himself for in his late teens. Each can see clearly the fool he was but only time will reveal what kind of fool he has become.
The taped voice continues with a review of his last year. This was the year his mother died. He talks about sitting on a bench outside the nursing home
waiting for the news that she had passed away. When the moment comes he is in the process of throwing a rubber ball to a dog. He ends up simply leaving the ball with the creature even though a part of him regrets not hanging onto it as some kind of memento. Krapp at sixty-nine is more interested in his younger self’s use of the rather archaic word "viduity" (Beckett had originally used "widowhood" in early drafts) than in the reaction of the voice on the tape to their mother’s passing. He stops listening to look up the word in a large dictionary.
Done with that he returns to the tape. The voice starts to describe the revelation he experienced at the end of a pier. "The dark that Krapp has always struggled to keep under is, one may guess, in reality his most valuable subject-matter and, in particular, his greatest source of enlightenment." Krapp grows impatient and gets worked up when his younger self starts enthusing about this. He fast-forwards almost to the end of the tape to escape the onslaught of words. Suddenly the mood has changed and he finds himself in the middle of a description of a romantic liaison between himself and a woman in a punt. Krapp lets it play out and then rewinds the tape to hear the complete episode. Throughout it he remains transfixed and visibly relives the moment while it is retold.
Afterwards, Krapp carefully removes this tape, locates a fresh one, loads it, checks the back of an envelope where he has made notes earlier, discards them and starts. He is scathing when it comes to his assessment of his thirty-nine-year-old self and is glad to see the back of him. He finds he has nothing he wants to record for posterity, save the fact he "Revelled in the word spool." But he does mention a trip to the park and attending Vespers
, where he dozed off and fell off the pew. He also mentions his recent literary disappointments: "seventeen copies sold", presumably of his last book, eleven of which have gone not to interested readers but to foreign libraries; "Getting known," he sarcastically summarizes. His sex life has been reduced to periodic visits by an old prostitute recalling the jibes made in Eh Joe
: "That slut that comes on Saturday, you pay her, don't you? ... Penny
a hoist tuppence as long as you like."
Unlike his younger selves, Krapp has nothing good to say about the man he has become and even the idea of making one "last effort" when it comes to his writing upsets him. He retreats into memories from his dim and distant past, gathering holly and walking the dog of a Sunday morning. He then remembers the girl on the punt, wrenches off the tape he has been recording, throws it away and replays the entire section again from the previous tape. It is a scene of masochism reminiscent of Croak in Words and Music, tormenting himself with an image of a woman’s face. This time he allows the tape to play out. It ends with the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp determinately not regretting the choices he has made, certain that what he would produce in the years to come would more than compensate him for any potential loss of happiness.
Krapp makes no response to this but allows the tape to play on until the final curtain. "Krapp’s spool of life is almost wound, and the silent tape is both the time it has left to run and the silence into which he must pass." Whereas the younger Krapp talks about the "fire in me" the tired old man who sits listening is simply "burning to be gone." The title of the play seems obvious, that what we have witnessed is the recording of Krapp’s final tape, "yet there is an ambiguity: 'last' can mean 'most recent' as well as 'ultimate'. The speaker in Browning’s
My Last Duchess
is already planning to marry his next duchess … Still, one hopes for Krapp’s sake that he will be gone before another year is over."
, Beckett uses aspects of Judeo-Christian
ity as the template for his play, in Film
the template is the writings of Bishop Berkeley
, and in Krapp’s Last Tape, according to Anthony Cronin
, he uses Manichaenism as a structural device:
though that his "work does not depend on experience – [it is] not a record of experience. Of course you use it." Beckett takes elements from his own life, his failed love life, his drinking, his – at the time – literary failures and looks where things might have gone. "When, in 1956, Vivian Mercier
saw him in Paris
, he told him that he felt 'all dried up, with nothing left but self-translation.'"
Krapp
Krapp was originally designated simply ‘A’ in the first draft. The first appearance of a title was "a manuscript edition to Typescript 2: Crapp’s Last Tape"; the more familiar Germanic spelling came later. The name Krapp with its excremental connotations had been used before by Beckett however. In his first play, Eleutheria
, dating back to 1947, the protagonist is Victor Krap, a young man who has decided to retreat from life and do nothing. He has been described as a world-weary anti-hero
, a failed writer and seedy solipsist
, a clear prototype for the later Krapp.
Krapp (as a boy)
When the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp is talking about his neighbour’s ritual singing in the evening he tries to remember if he sang as a boy and is unable to do so. He does recall attending Vespers
but it would be unusual for him to attend Evensong
without participating in the singing of the hymn. Interestingly, the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp does sing a few lines from the "Now the Day is Over" in early performances of the play but Beckett excised this as being “too clumsily explicit”.
Although no time frame is given, it is likely that sixty-nine-year-old Krapp’s memories of being "again in the dingle at Christmas Eve
, gathering holly … [or] on Croghan
on a Sunday morning, in the haze, with the bitch" alludes to Beckett's own childhood familial memories.
Krapp (in his twenties)
His birth-sign in early drafts is given as Aries
, Beckett’s own. All we learn about Krapp at this age comes from the tape. Like a lot of young men he is full of “aspirations” – his work is starting to take shape – and “resolutions” – he is already aware that his drinking needs to be curbed. He is becoming resigned to the fact that he might well have let true love – represented by the image of a “girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway-station platform” – get away from him. He has settled for an on/off relationship with a “Bianca” but even there his future plans do not feature her. We learn that his problem with constipation has been ongoing since at least this time. He disparages his youth and is glad it is over. The thirty-nine year old Krapp estimates that the tape he had been listening to was made some ten or twelve years earlier. If it was twelve then he would have been twenty-seven at the time it was recorded.
Bianca
"In the earlier drafts the woman with whom the young Krapp lived [later named "Bianca"] was first named 'Alba' (a character in Dream of Fair to Middling Women
modelled on Ethna MacCarthy whom he had loved when he was a young man), then 'Celia' (the name of the green-eyed prostitute with whom Murphy cohabits in Murphy
), then 'Furry' (nickname of Anne Rudmose-Brown, the wife of Beckett's French Professor at Trinity
, who was himself satirized as 'the Polar Bear' in Dream of Fair to Middling Women).".
"He settled on "Bianca", who was most likely based on another lecturer, Bianca Esposito, who (along with Walter Starkie
) taught him Italian and cultivated his lifelong passion for Dante
. He took private lessons from Signorina Esposito as well. Those lessons at 21 Ely Place were then caricatured in the short story 'Dante and the Lobster
'. Kedar Street is not a real location but an anagram
of 'darke' or Hebrew
for 'black'. Keeping this in mind, the name may simply have been selected because "bianca" means "white woman" in Italian. Little is recorded about her other than "'a tribute to her eyes. Very warm.'" Vivian Mercier
, who knew Beckett personally, writes: "Although I do not recall his ever using the phrase, Beckett unquestionably regards the eyes as the windows of the soul."
Krapp's father
Krapp’s father, the only other man mentioned in the play, is spoken of only very briefly. The expression "Last illness" suggests he has not been a well man for some time and dies while Krapp is in his twenties. His own father, William Beckett, died of a heart attack
on 26 June 1933, when Beckett was twenty-seven.
The girl in the green coat
Beckett’s first love, his cousin, Peggy Sinclair, had "deep green eyes and [had a] passionate love of green clothing." An allusion to Peggy Sinclair also appears in Dream of Fair to Middling Women in Smeraldina, the "little emerald
". Although the relationship is often cited as being a little one-sided, Beckett does recall: "Oh, Peggy didn’t need any chasing."
Krapp (aged 39)
This character does the majority of the talking throughout the play. His voice is contained on Tape 5 from Box 3. His voice is strong and rather pompous. He has celebrated his birthday alone in an empty wine house before returning home to consume three bananas. As has become his practice on his birthday he makes a tape looking back at who he was, assessing who he is and anticipating what might be to come. His is as disparaging of the young man he was in his twenties as he was then of the youth he had been thinking about when he made that earlier tape. He records the death of his mother, an epiphany at the end of a pier and an idyllic moment in a punt
.
Old Mrs McGlome
This character is based on Miss Beamish, an eccentric novelist from Connacht
whom Beckett had met in Roussillon
, while hiding during World War II
. “Whether the real Miss Beamish did actually sing regularly every evening is … debatable. Beckett did not remember this.”
The dark young beauty
There appears to be no direct correlation between this character and anyone living. The black-and-white imagery is strong here: her white uniform and the "big black hooded perambulator." Krapp also remembers this woman’s eyes as being "[l]ike … chrysolite
!"
Rosemary Pountney observes Beckett changed "moonstone
" to chrysolite, an olive-green coloured mineral
, in Typescript 4.
She observes also that Beckett made "a direct connection ... with Othello
, a play in which dark and light imagery is central," as "in the margin of the text that he used for the 1973 London production," on page 15 "where the word 'chrysolite' occurs ... he writes:
"Like Othello, too," Pountney continues, "Krapp has lost his love through his own folly."
Krapp's mother
Beckett’s mother, May, died on 25 August 1950 in the Merrion Nursing Home which overlooked Dublin’s Grand Canal
. Beckett had made the trip over in the early summer to be with her. By 24 July medical opinion confirmed that she was dying. During that last long month he used "to walk disconsolately alone along the towpath
of the Grand Canal."
Towards the end she was oblivious to his presence. Her death took place while he was sitting on a bench by the canal. "At a certain point he happened to look up. The blinds of his mother’s window, a dirty red-brown affair, was down. She was dead." A drawn blind, an old custom signifying death, also makes an appearance in Rockaby
: "let down the blind and down".
The little white dog
When Krapp’s mother died, he was throwing a ball for a little white dog. He says he will keep it forever: “But I gave it away to the dog.” Significantly the ball is black to contrast with the white of the dog. In All Strange Away a "small grey punctured rubber ball" is the last object contemplated before Fancy dies. The ball had already appeared in All That Fall
: Jerry returns "a kind of ball" to Mr. Rooney. Although not an obvious symbol of death, this ball is a significant motif of childhood grief for Beckett though none of his biographers propose that the presence of the dog is anything more than artistic license.
The girl in the punt
Beckett makes the relationship of this woman to Krapp clear when “[i]n 1975, directing Pierre Chabert in Paris, Beckett said: “I thought of writing a play on the opposite situation, with Mrs Krapp, the girl in the punt, nagging away behind him, in which case his failure and his solitude would be exactly the same.” In her biography of Beckett, Deirdre Bair
deduces that "the girl in the punt" may be Peggy Sinclair because of the references to "Effi" and to "the Baltic
": in July 1929 Beckett vacationed with the Sinclairs "in one of the smaller resort towns along the Baltic Sea
. Summer, traditionally the time for light reading, found Peggy tearfully engrossed in Theodor Fontane
's novel, Effi Briest
. Beckett read it too, but with less detachment than Peggy, who wept and suffered as Effi’s infidelity ended her marriage." Talking to James Knowlson, a few days before his death, Beckett said that he "did not remember the scene this way, however, denying that girl in the boat … had anything at all to do with his cousin, Peggy." Knowlson feels "that there is little doubt the source for the girl with the haunting eyes is Ethna MacCarthy. For, as Dream of Fair to Middling Women had made clear … the 'Alba', who, on Beckett’s own admission, was closely modelled on Ethna, had eyes like dark, deep pools." Beckett left no doubt however when he told Jean Martin, whilst rehearsing the play in 1970, that the girl was modelled on Ethna. On 11 December 1957 Beckett learned that Ethna was terminally ill and regularly wrote uncharacteristically long letters until her death. When he completed the play he wrote her: "I’ve written in English a stage monologue for Pat Magee which I think you will like if no one else."
At one point in the recollection, the young Krapp leans over the young woman to shade her from the sun. "Let me in," he says. This caused the Lord Chamberlain
some concerns when the play was first presented before him to grant a license. He believed that what was being suggested was a desire for sexual penetration and was not convinced that Beckett was simply alluding to her eyes. It was not until a mere three weeks before the play’s opening that the objection was dropped. In 1982 Beckett, in response to a similar suggestion from one of James Knowlson’s postgraduate students
, "said with a chuckle, 'Tell her to read her texts more carefully. She’ll see that Krapp would need to have a penis at an angle of a hundred and eighty degrees to make coitus possible in the position he is in!'"––a position that Rosette Lamont proposes also "suggests that of a suckling babe
."
Krapp (aged 69)
Beckett would not be 69 until 1975 so, from his perspective, with Krapp a proxy for him, the action is set in the future.The first line of the play explicitly sets it 'in the future', although nothing onstage reveals this. When Beckett finished this play he would have been 49 next. As it happens, with Waiting for Godot
, success had found him but, at 39, the future must have seemed a lot bleaker for the writer, the Second World War was ending and all Beckett had had published were a few poems, a collection of short stories and the novel, Murphy. Beckett had this to say about the drained old man we see onstage: "Krapp sees very clearly that he’s through with his work, with love and religion
." He told Rick Cluchey, whom he directed in 1977, that Krapp was "in no way senile [but has] something frozen about him [and is] filled up to his teeth with bitterness." "Habit, the great deadener" has proven more tenacious than inspiration. His "present concerns revolve around the gratification of those very bodily appetites that, earlier, he had resolved should be out of his life. Eating bananas and drinking have become a [daily routine]. Of the physical activities that he once considered excesses only sex has come to play a reduced part in his lonely existence" in the form of periodic visits from an old prostitute.
Although this is a play about memory, the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp himself remembers very little. Virtually all the recollections come from the tape. As evidenced most clearly in the novel Murphy, Beckett had a decent understanding of a variety of mental illnesses including Korsakoff’s Alcoholic Syndrome
––"A hypomania
c teaching slosh to a Korsakow’s syndrome."––which is characterised by powerful amnesic
symptoms accompanied by intestinal obstruction
.
In his focus on chronic alcohol consumption
, Narinder Kapur explains in Memory Disorders in Clinical Practice that it can lead to marked memory loss and generalised cognitive defects, as well as “disorientation for time and also place”. More recent memories are likely to be forgotten than remote memories, for "memory loss shows a temporal gradient with greater sparing of items from earlier years." Krapp's gathering of red-berried holly
in the dingle could be an example of the "relatively intact remote memory" that preceded Krapp's apparent addiction to alcohol.
Krapp is not a textbook case. He is an individual with his own individual symptomology but he is more than a list of symptoms. Bananas contain pectin
, a soluble fibre that can help normalise movement through the digestive tract
and ease constipation. Bananas can also aggravate constipation especially in young children. It depends what the root cause of the problem is. They are also high in Vitamins A
and C
as well as niacin
, riboflavin
and thiamine
and one of the root causes of Korsakoff's Syndrome is thiamine deficiency; eating bananas would be good for him. It is easy to get caught up in this kind of over-analysis to the detriment of the play as a whole. "[A]ttempts to demonstrate that Beckett’s characters conform to specific psychological syndromes so often turn into will-o-the-wisp
pursuits. Certainly, Beckett would not deny that psychologists have offered very useful descriptions of mental activity. But their theories are typically no more than initial steps in an understanding of mental processes, fragmented bits of knowledge which should not be taken for universal principles." It is important to remember that Krapp has not simply forgotten his past but he has consciously and systematically rejected it as one way of reassuring himself that he has made the right decisions in "his yearly word letting."
Effi Briest
In the past year Krapp has been re-reading Fontane’s Effi Briest, "a page a day, with tears again," he says, "Could have been happy with her, up there on the Baltic…." Existing only on the printed page this fantasy woman is perhaps the most black-and-white of all Krapp’s women. Like the girl in the punt and the nursemaid
mentioned earlier, perhaps to contrast with his inner fire, "Once again Beckett situates Krapp’s memory on some side near the water."
Fanny
Just as Krapp’s name is a vulgar
pun
, so is the name Beckett gave to the woman who visits him from time to time, whom he describes as a "bony old ghost of a whore." As Fanny is an "old ghost," all Krapp’s women are figuratively "ghosts, really, dependent for their existence on Krapp’s bitter-sweet recording of them," according to Katherine Worth.
"Fanny" is a slang British expression for the female genitals – woman reduced to a function. "Fanny" is also a commonly used diminutive of Frances, and Beckett occasionally referred to his aunt, Frances "Cissie" Sinclair, as "Fanny."
Krapp refers to her visits as "better than a kick in the crutch." In the 1985 television version, Beckett changed this phrase to "better than the finger and the thumb," an unambiguous reference to masturbation that would never have escaped the British Lord Chamberlain
in the fifties.
Krapp’s "vision at last", on the pier at Dún Laoghaire
In an earlier draft of the play Beckett "uses 'beacon' and 'anemometer
' rather than 'lighthouse' and 'wind-gauge'. The anemometer on the East Pier of Dún Laoghaire was one of the world's first. [It is] widely regarded as a mirror reflection of Beckett’s own revelation. Yet it is different both in circumstance and kind."
"Beckett wrote to Richard Ellmann
: 'All the jetty and howling wind are imaginary. It happened to me, summer 1945, in my mother’s little house, named New Place, across the road from Cooldrinagh.'"
He summarised what this experience signified for him:
The tape recorder
Beckett has applied character to non-human elements in his plays before, e.g. the light in Play, the music in Words and Music
. “Beckett instructed the actor Pierre Chabert in his 1975 Paris production of the play ‘to become as much as possible one body with the machine … The spool is his whole life.’” Krapp no longer owns the memories on the tapes. His mind is no longer capable of holding onto them. The recorder also serves as proxy. When John Hurt, as Krapp, is transfixed by the retelling of the events in the punt he literally cradles the machine as if it were the woman recalling Magee’s original performance; Beckett took pains to point this out to Alan Schneider
, who was at the time preparing his own version of the play, in a letter dated 21 November 1958, and incorporated the gesture in future productions in which he was involved.
Later, on 4 January 1960, Beckett wrote a more detailed letter describing another unexpected revelation of that earlier performance, "the beautiful and quite accidental effect in London of the luminous eye burning up as the machine runs on in silence and the light goes down."
, the original Krapp, that his "voice was the one which he heard inside his mind. Thus it seems likely that the return to English was a matter of expediency because of the English-speaking actor."
performed Krapp on a number of occasions, including London’s Greenwich Theatre (1975 - directed by Patrick Magee
) and Riverside Studios (1986).
performed the role of Krapp for the version directed by Atom Egoyan
for the project Beckett on Film
, which was broadcast on television in 2001 and available on DVD
in the box set or individually.
, in October 2006, directed by Ian Rickson, English playwright Harold Pinter
performed the role of Krapp in a sold-out limited run of nine performances to great critical acclaim.
performed the role of Krapp for BBC Radio 3
in 2006 a few months after he had sufffered a major heart attack. The production was rebroadcast on BBC Radio 3 on May 16, 2010 as part of a double bill with a 2006 production of Embers.
performed the roll of Krapp during the 2008 Stratford Shakespeare Festival and again in 2010 at the Goodman Theatre
of Chicago
, both times directed by Jennifer Tarver. The Beckett one-act was paired at both venues with Eugene O'Neill
's Hughie
(directed by Robert Falls
), also a one-act, and also performed by Dennehy, in the lead role of Erie Smith. The show ran at the Goodman Theatre
from January 16 through February 28, 2010. A Broadway
run is also planned.
continued his relationship with both Beckett and the Gate Theatre
when he returned to the Dublin stage as Krapp for a limited run which was followed by a transfer to London's West End.
ing (New York: Spoken Arts #788, 1960), based on the original American production, was distributed by Argo
(RG 220), and by HEAR, Home Educational Records, London (1964)," and "It was often adapted for television with his encouragement. The first BBC
version was produced by Peter Luke, featuring Cyril Cusack
(13th November 1963). Approached by Westdeutscher Rundfunk
, Cologne
, to permit a television version of his 1969 Schiller-Theatre Das letzte Band [the German
title of the play], Beckett wrote a set of 'Suggestions for TV Krapp'", which "was broadcast [on] 28th October 1969."
The play has subsequently been broadcast on radio
, turned into an opera
(see below) and filmed as part of the Beckett on Film
project and for the DVD
of Pinter's Royal Court performance, both of which have been shown on television.
Krapp, ou, La dernière bande by composer
Marcel Mihalovici
. American composer Earl Kim
alludes to the work within his Gooseberries, she said (1967), part of the four-part cycle Exercises en Route. The Hungarian composer Gyula Csapó has created the work Krapp's Last Tape –after Samuel Beckett] (1975) loosely inspired by Beckett's play. This theatrical work is for a "violin
ist-actor," a tape recorder, four spotlights and a sine wave
generator. In 1999, the English experimental composer, Michael Parsons, adapted Krapp's Last Tape for piano, two pre-recorded pianos, and voice on tape. The piece, specifically written for John Tilbury
, was called Krapp Music.
in the television sketch comedy
The Fast Show
, in which - as a reference to Max Wall - fictional music hall
comedian Arthur Atkinson played a comically-more stoic version of Krapp. It is also the title of a track on Fredrik Thordendal's solo album Sol Niger Within
.
A prefiguring of the play, titled, "Krapp, 39" written and performed by Michael Laurence and directed by George Demas, premiered at the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival and begins its commercial run Off Broadway at The Soho Playhouse in New York City on January 13, 2009. The piece follows an actor's obsession with the character Krapp.
Play (theatre)
A play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of scripted dialogue between characters, intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. There are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference whether their plays were performed...
, written in English, by Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
. Consisting of a cast of one man, it was originally written for Northern Irish
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
actor Patrick Magee
Patrick Magee (actor)
Patrick Magee was a Northern Irish actor best known for his collaborations with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as well as his appearances in horror films and in Stanley Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.-Early life:He was born Patrick McGee in Armagh, County Armagh, Northern...
and first titled "Magee monologue
Monologue
In theatre, a monologue is a speech presented by a single character, most often to express their thoughts aloud, though sometimes also to directly address another character or the audience. Monologues are common across the range of dramatic media...
". It was inspired by Beckett's experience of listening to Magee reading extracts from Molloy
Molloy (novel)
Molloy is a novel by Samuel Beckett. The English translation is by Beckett and Patrick Bowles.-Plot introduction:On first appearance the book concerns two different characters, both of whom have interior monologues in the book. As the story moves along the two characters are distinguished by name...
and From an Abandoned Work
From an Abandoned Work
From An Abandoned Work, a “meditation for radio” by Samuel Beckett, was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Third Programme on Saturday 14 December 1957 along with a selection from Molloy...
on the BBC Third Programme
BBC Third Programme
The BBC Third Programme was a national radio network broadcast by the BBC. The network first went on air on 29 September 1946 and became one of the leading cultural and intellectual forces in Britain, playing a crucial role in disseminating the arts...
in December 1957.
The play, which premiered as a curtain raiser to Endgame
Endgame (play)
Endgame, by Samuel Beckett, is a one-act play with four characters, written in a style associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. It was originally written in French ; as was his custom, Beckett himself translated it into English. The play was first performed in a French-language production at the...
(from 28 October 1958 to 29 November 1958) at the Royal Court Theatre
Royal Court Theatre
The Royal Court Theatre is a non-commercial theatre on Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is noted for its contributions to modern theatre...
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, was directed by Donald McWhinnie and starred Patrick Magee
Patrick Magee (actor)
Patrick Magee was a Northern Irish actor best known for his collaborations with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as well as his appearances in horror films and in Stanley Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.-Early life:He was born Patrick McGee in Armagh, County Armagh, Northern...
. It ran for 38 performances.
First publication
In a letter to a London bookseller Jake Schwartz on 15 March 1958, Beckett wrote that he had "'four states, in typescript, with copious notes and dirty corrections, of a short stage monologue I have just written (in English) for Pat Magee. This was composed on the machine from a tangle of old notes, so I have not the MSManuscript
A manuscript or handwrite is written information that has been manually created by someone or some people, such as a hand-written letter, as opposed to being printed or reproduced some other way...
to offer you."
According to Ackerley and Gontarski, "It was first published in Evergreen Review
Evergreen Review
Evergreen Review is a U.S.-based literary magazine founded by Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press. It existed in print from 1957 through 1973, and was re-launched online in 1998...
2.5 (summer 1958) … then in Krapp’s Last Tape and Embers (Faber, 1959), and Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (Grove, 1960)." Beckett’s own translation of the play into French, La Dernière Bande, was published in Les Lettres Nouvelles on 4 March 1959.
The available printed texts must not be taken as definitive. "By the mid-1950s Beckett was already talking and working like a director … In a letter to Rosset’s
Barney Rosset
Barnet Lee Rosset, Jr. is the former owner of the publishing house Grove Press, and publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Evergreen Review. He led a successful legal battle to publish the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and later was the American...
editorial assistant, Judith Schmidt, 11th May 1959, Beckett referred to the staging of Krapp’s Last Tape as its 'creation'," and he made numerous significant changes to the text over the years as he was involved in directing the play.
Others
The first German performance, on 28 September 1959, was directed by Walter Henn at Berlin's Schillertheater, where 10 years later, on 5 October 1969, Samuel Beckett himself staged his text in a most successful performance (with Martin HeldMartin Held
-Selected filmography:* Canaris Master Spy * Spy for Germany * The Last Witness * Terror After Midnight * Main Thing Holidays * Le serpent -External links:...
as Krapp).
The first American performance, on 14 January 1960, was directed by Alan Schneider
Alan Schneider
Alan Schneider was an American theatre director and mentor responsible for more than 100 theatre productions. In 1984 he was honored with a Drama Desk Special Award for serving a wide range of playwrights...
and starred Donald Davis
Donald George Davis
Donald George Davis was a Canadian actor.He was born in Newmarket, Ontario, where his father owned the Davis Leather Company. He attended St. Andrew's College from 1941-1946, graduating with the Class of 1946, and studied theatre at the University of Toronto. He performed at the Woodstock...
.
Synopsis
The curtain rises on "[a] late evening in the future." It is Krapp’s sixty-ninth birthday and, as has become his custom, he hauls out his old tape recorder, reviews one of the earlier years – in this case the recording he made when he was thirty-nine – and makes a new recording commenting on the events of the previous twelve months. He is described in the text as a "wearish old man." "I saw Krapp small and wizened," he wrote later; "Krapp has nothing to talk to but his dying self and nothing to talk to him but his dead one."In early productions he had a white face with a purple nose but these details were excised from later performances. "Beckett has been extremely wary of over stressing the clownish elements in Krapp’s physique, dress and behaviour. Even in the first production at the Royal Court Theatre, the purple nose of the ‘tippler,’ which is referred to in the printed text, was much toned down and has since been abandoned by Beckett." The "[s]urprising pair of dirty white boots, size ten at least, very narrow and pointed," suggesting an "ex-dandy rather than the former cricketer," survived longer; such little clues may indicate that, like Henry in Embers
Embers
Embers is a radio play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in English in 1957 and first broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 24 June 1959. Donald McWhinnie directed Jack MacGowran – for whom the play was specially written – as “Henry”, Kathleen Michael as “Ada” and Patrick Magee as “Riding Master”...
(another of Beckett’s failed writers), Krapp is a man of independent means and does not have to depend on his writing to survive.
"When the plays that follow All That Fall begin, the 'action' in traditional terms has already taken place. From Krapp’s Last Tape onwards all that is left in most of the plays is recapitulation, a struggle with voices in the head, and a masochism
Sadism and masochism
Sadomasochism broadly refers to the receiving of pleasure—often sexual—from acts involving the infliction or reception of pain or humiliation. The name originates from two authors on the subject, Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch...
that both demands and dreads the assault of memory."
Krapp is sitting at his desk in his den. There is a white light above the desk but the extremities of the stage are in darkness. This black-and-white imagery continues throughout the whole play; in fact, Beckett’s Berlin "notebook lists no less than twenty-seven points in the play at which the alternation of light and dark is stressed." Twice throughout the play he turns and peers into the darkness. Beckett explained to Martin Held at rehearsal in Berlin: "Old Nick’s there. Death is standing behind him and unconsciously he's looking for it."
He checks his pocket watch periodically as if waiting for the exact moment when he was born before he can begin. Before he starts he has time for a banana, a fruit he has a terrible weakness for. He retrieves a large one from a locked drawer, strokes it – the sexual connotation obvious – peels it and nearly slips on the skin he drops on the floor. After finishing the first he locates a second. This time he throws the skin into the pit but he ends up not eating the banana which gets stuck into a pocket of his waistcoat, the end rudely hanging out. He decides on a drink instead and shuffles into the darkness to get one. Done with that he returns with an old ledger.
On his desk are an old reel-to-reel tape-recorder and a number of tins (originally cardboard boxes) containing reels of recorded tape. In some productions the desk is empty at first and he brings out the tapes and recorder after the ledger. He consults the ledger. The tape he is looking to review is the fifth tape in Box 3. He reads aloud from the ledger but it is obvious that words alone are not jogging his memory. He takes childish pleasure in saying the word ‘spool’ – a moment of genuine pleasure.
The tape we get to listen to along with Krapp is the one recorded when he turned thirty-nine. The voice on the tape is strong and rather self-important but it’s clearly him. As he settles himself in his seat Krapp accidentally knocks one of the tins onto the floor. He curses, switches off the playback, and sweeps the remaining tins onto the floor before rewinding the tape to begin again.
The voice on the tape mentions the fact that he’s just celebrated his birthday alone "at the wine house" jotting down notes in preparation for the recording session later. In earlier drafts the place was peopled but Beckett progressively emptied the play of all but the most essential characters. The voice confesses to having consumed three bananas and only just resisted the urge to eat a fourth. His bowel
Intestine
In human anatomy, the intestine is the segment of the alimentary canal extending from the pyloric sphincter of the stomach to the anus and, in humans and other mammals, consists of two segments, the small intestine and the large intestine...
trouble is still a problem and one obviously exacerbated by eating too many bananas. "The new light above my table is a great improvement," reports the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp, before describing how much he enjoys leaving it, wandering off into the darkness, so that he can return to the zone of light which he identifies with his essential self. He notes how quiet the night is. Even his neighbour, the elderly Mrs. McGlome, who habitually sings in the evenings, is silent.
The voice reports that he has just reviewed an old tape from when he was in his late twenties. It amuses him to comment on his impressions of what he was like in his twenties and even the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp joins in the derisory laughter. The young man he was back then is described as idealistic, even unrealistic in his expectations. The thirty-nine-year-old Krapp looks back on the twenty-odd-year-old Krapp with the same level of contempt as the twenty-odd-year-old Krapp appears to have displayed for the young man he saw himself for in his late teens. Each can see clearly the fool he was but only time will reveal what kind of fool he has become.
The taped voice continues with a review of his last year. This was the year his mother died. He talks about sitting on a bench outside the nursing home
Nursing home
A nursing home, convalescent home, skilled nursing unit , care home, rest home, or old people's home provides a type of care of residents: it is a place of residence for people who require constant nursing care and have significant deficiencies with activities of daily living...
waiting for the news that she had passed away. When the moment comes he is in the process of throwing a rubber ball to a dog. He ends up simply leaving the ball with the creature even though a part of him regrets not hanging onto it as some kind of memento. Krapp at sixty-nine is more interested in his younger self’s use of the rather archaic word "viduity" (Beckett had originally used "widowhood" in early drafts) than in the reaction of the voice on the tape to their mother’s passing. He stops listening to look up the word in a large dictionary.
Done with that he returns to the tape. The voice starts to describe the revelation he experienced at the end of a pier. "The dark that Krapp has always struggled to keep under is, one may guess, in reality his most valuable subject-matter and, in particular, his greatest source of enlightenment." Krapp grows impatient and gets worked up when his younger self starts enthusing about this. He fast-forwards almost to the end of the tape to escape the onslaught of words. Suddenly the mood has changed and he finds himself in the middle of a description of a romantic liaison between himself and a woman in a punt. Krapp lets it play out and then rewinds the tape to hear the complete episode. Throughout it he remains transfixed and visibly relives the moment while it is retold.
Afterwards, Krapp carefully removes this tape, locates a fresh one, loads it, checks the back of an envelope where he has made notes earlier, discards them and starts. He is scathing when it comes to his assessment of his thirty-nine-year-old self and is glad to see the back of him. He finds he has nothing he wants to record for posterity, save the fact he "Revelled in the word spool." But he does mention a trip to the park and attending Vespers
Vespers
Vespers is the evening prayer service in the Western Catholic, Eastern Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran liturgies of the canonical hours...
, where he dozed off and fell off the pew. He also mentions his recent literary disappointments: "seventeen copies sold", presumably of his last book, eleven of which have gone not to interested readers but to foreign libraries; "Getting known," he sarcastically summarizes. His sex life has been reduced to periodic visits by an old prostitute recalling the jibes made in Eh Joe
Eh Joe
Eh Joe is a piece for television, written in English by Samuel Beckett, his first work for the medium. It was begun on the author’s fifty-ninth birthday, 13 April 1965, and completed by 1 May...
: "That slut that comes on Saturday, you pay her, don't you? ... Penny
History of the British penny (1901-1970)
The penny of King Edward VII is of the same technical standards as the late Victorian issues. The head on the obverse is by George William de Saulles , facing right, with the inscription EDWARDVS VII DEI GRA BRITT OMN REX FID DEF IND IMP...
a hoist tuppence as long as you like."
Unlike his younger selves, Krapp has nothing good to say about the man he has become and even the idea of making one "last effort" when it comes to his writing upsets him. He retreats into memories from his dim and distant past, gathering holly and walking the dog of a Sunday morning. He then remembers the girl on the punt, wrenches off the tape he has been recording, throws it away and replays the entire section again from the previous tape. It is a scene of masochism reminiscent of Croak in Words and Music, tormenting himself with an image of a woman’s face. This time he allows the tape to play out. It ends with the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp determinately not regretting the choices he has made, certain that what he would produce in the years to come would more than compensate him for any potential loss of happiness.
Krapp makes no response to this but allows the tape to play on until the final curtain. "Krapp’s spool of life is almost wound, and the silent tape is both the time it has left to run and the silence into which he must pass." Whereas the younger Krapp talks about the "fire in me" the tired old man who sits listening is simply "burning to be gone." The title of the play seems obvious, that what we have witnessed is the recording of Krapp’s final tape, "yet there is an ambiguity: 'last' can mean 'most recent' as well as 'ultimate'. The speaker in Browning’s
Robert Browning
Robert Browning was an English poet and playwright whose mastery of dramatic verse, especially dramatic monologues, made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.-Early years:...
My Last Duchess
My Last Duchess
"My Last Duchess" is a poem by Robert Browning, frequently anthologized as an example of the dramatic monologue. It first appeared in 1842 in Browning's Dramatic Lyrics.-Poem structure and historical background:...
is already planning to marry his next duchess … Still, one hopes for Krapp’s sake that he will be gone before another year is over."
Structure
In Waiting for GodotWaiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's...
, Beckett uses aspects of Judeo-Christian
Judeo-Christian
Judeo-Christian is a term used in the United States since the 1940s to refer to standards of ethics said to be held in common by Judaism and Christianity, for example the Ten Commandments...
ity as the template for his play, in Film
Film (film)
Film is a film written by Samuel Beckett, his only screenplay. It was commissioned by Barney Rosset of Grove Press. Writing began on 5 April 1963 with a first draft completed within four days. A second draft was produced by 22 May and a forty-leaf shooting script followed thereafter...
the template is the writings of Bishop Berkeley
George Berkeley
George Berkeley , also known as Bishop Berkeley , was an Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism"...
, and in Krapp’s Last Tape, according to Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin is an Irish poet. He received the Marten Toonder Award for his contribution to Irish literature....
, he uses Manichaenism as a structural device:
The dichotomyDichotomyA dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts, meaning it is a procedure in which a whole is divided into two parts...
of light and dark … is central to Manichaean doctrine … Its adherents believed that the world was ruled by evil powers, against which the god of the whole of creation struggled as yet in vain … Krapp is in violation of the three seals or prohibitions of Manichaenism for the elect: the seal of the hands, forbidding engagement in a profession, the seal of the breast against sexual desire, and the seal of the mouth, which forbids the drinking of wine … Beckett [however] seems to have known no more about Manichaenism than is contained in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaThe Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
, which he possessed.
Characters
Although there is only one person onstage, there are a number of 'characters' mentioned throughout. The play is considered to be Beckett at his most autobiographical, and it does draw heavily on biographical detail. He once told the actor Laurence HarveyLaurence Harvey
Laurence Harvey was a Lithuanian-born actor who achieved fame in British and American films.- Early life :Harvey maintained throughout his life that his birth name was Laruschka Mischa Skikne. However, his legal name was Zvi Mosheh Skikne. He was the youngest of three boys born to Ber "Boris" and...
though that his "work does not depend on experience – [it is] not a record of experience. Of course you use it." Beckett takes elements from his own life, his failed love life, his drinking, his – at the time – literary failures and looks where things might have gone. "When, in 1956, Vivian Mercier
Vivian Mercier
Vivian Mercier was an Irish literary critic. He was born in Clara, County Offaly, Ireland and educated first at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, and then at Trinity College, Dublin. He became a Scholar of the College and edited the student magazine T.C.D...
saw him in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, he told him that he felt 'all dried up, with nothing left but self-translation.'"
Krapp
Krapp was originally designated simply ‘A’ in the first draft. The first appearance of a title was "a manuscript edition to Typescript 2: Crapp’s Last Tape"; the more familiar Germanic spelling came later. The name Krapp with its excremental connotations had been used before by Beckett however. In his first play, Eleutheria
Eleutheria
Eleutheria is an ancient and modern Greek term for, and personification of, liberty. Eleutheria personified had a brief career on coins of Alexandria.I.F...
, dating back to 1947, the protagonist is Victor Krap, a young man who has decided to retreat from life and do nothing. He has been described as a world-weary anti-hero
Anti-hero
In fiction, an antihero is generally considered to be a protagonist whose character is at least in some regards conspicuously contrary to that of the archetypal hero, and is in some instances its antithesis in which the character is generally useless at being a hero or heroine when they're...
, a failed writer and seedy solipsist
Solipsism
Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. The term comes from Latin solus and ipse . Solipsism as an epistemological position holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure. The external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not...
, a clear prototype for the later Krapp.
Krapp (as a boy)
When the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp is talking about his neighbour’s ritual singing in the evening he tries to remember if he sang as a boy and is unable to do so. He does recall attending Vespers
Vespers
Vespers is the evening prayer service in the Western Catholic, Eastern Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran liturgies of the canonical hours...
but it would be unusual for him to attend Evensong
Evening Prayer (Anglican)
Evening Prayer is a liturgy in use in the Anglican Communion and celebrated in the late afternoon or evening...
without participating in the singing of the hymn. Interestingly, the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp does sing a few lines from the "Now the Day is Over" in early performances of the play but Beckett excised this as being “too clumsily explicit”.
Although no time frame is given, it is likely that sixty-nine-year-old Krapp’s memories of being "again in the dingle at Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve refers to the evening or entire day preceding Christmas Day, a widely celebrated festival commemorating the birth of Jesus of Nazareth that takes place on December 25...
, gathering holly … [or] on Croghan
Croghan
Croghan may refer to:In Ireland:* Croghan , County Offaly, Ireland* Croghan, County Roscommon, Ireland* Croghan Hill, County Offaly, Ireland* Croghan Mountain, Wicklow Mountains, IrelandIn the United States:...
on a Sunday morning, in the haze, with the bitch" alludes to Beckett's own childhood familial memories.
Krapp (in his twenties)
His birth-sign in early drafts is given as Aries
Aries (astrology)
Aries is the first astrological sign in the Zodiac, which spans the zodiac between the zero degree and the 29th degree of celestial longitude. The Sun enters Aries when it reaches the northern vernal equinox, which is usually on March 21 each year, and remains in this sign until around April 20...
, Beckett’s own. All we learn about Krapp at this age comes from the tape. Like a lot of young men he is full of “aspirations” – his work is starting to take shape – and “resolutions” – he is already aware that his drinking needs to be curbed. He is becoming resigned to the fact that he might well have let true love – represented by the image of a “girl in a shabby green coat, on a railway-station platform” – get away from him. He has settled for an on/off relationship with a “Bianca” but even there his future plans do not feature her. We learn that his problem with constipation has been ongoing since at least this time. He disparages his youth and is glad it is over. The thirty-nine year old Krapp estimates that the tape he had been listening to was made some ten or twelve years earlier. If it was twelve then he would have been twenty-seven at the time it was recorded.
Bianca
"In the earlier drafts the woman with whom the young Krapp lived [later named "Bianca"] was first named 'Alba' (a character in Dream of Fair to Middling Women
Dream of Fair to Middling Women
Dream of Fair to Middling Women is Samuel Beckett’s first novel. Written in English "in a matter of weeks" in 1932 when Beckett was only 26 and living in Paris, the clearly autobiographical novel was rejected by publishers and shelved by the author. It was eventually published in 1992, three years...
modelled on Ethna MacCarthy whom he had loved when he was a young man), then 'Celia' (the name of the green-eyed prostitute with whom Murphy cohabits in Murphy
Murphy (novel)
Murphy, first published in 1938, is a novel as well as the third work of prose fiction by the Irish author and dramatist Samuel Beckett. The book was Beckett's second published prose work after the short-story collection More Pricks than Kicks and his unpublished first novel Dream of Fair to...
), then 'Furry' (nickname of Anne Rudmose-Brown, the wife of Beckett's French Professor at Trinity
Trinity College, Dublin
Trinity College, Dublin , formally known as the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, was founded in 1592 by letters patent from Queen Elizabeth I as the "mother of a university", Extracts from Letters Patent of Elizabeth I, 1592: "...we...found and...
, who was himself satirized as 'the Polar Bear' in Dream of Fair to Middling Women).".
"He settled on "Bianca", who was most likely based on another lecturer, Bianca Esposito, who (along with Walter Starkie
Walter Starkie
Walter Fitzwilliam Starkie CMG, CBE, Litt.D was an Irish scholar, Hispanist, author and musician.Born in Killiney, County Dublin, he was the eldest son of the noted Greek scholar and translator of Aristophanes, William Joseph Myles Starkie and May Caroline Walsh. Starkie grew up surrounded by...
) taught him Italian and cultivated his lifelong passion for Dante
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
. He took private lessons from Signorina Esposito as well. Those lessons at 21 Ely Place were then caricatured in the short story 'Dante and the Lobster
More Pricks Than Kicks
More Pricks Than Kicks is a collection of short prose by Samuel Beckett, first published in 1934. It contains extracts from his earlier novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women , as well as other short stories....
'. Kedar Street is not a real location but an anagram
Anagram
An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once; e.g., orchestra = carthorse, A decimal point = I'm a dot in place, Tom Marvolo Riddle = I am Lord Voldemort. Someone who...
of 'darke' or Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
for 'black'. Keeping this in mind, the name may simply have been selected because "bianca" means "white woman" in Italian. Little is recorded about her other than "'a tribute to her eyes. Very warm.'" Vivian Mercier
Vivian Mercier
Vivian Mercier was an Irish literary critic. He was born in Clara, County Offaly, Ireland and educated first at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, and then at Trinity College, Dublin. He became a Scholar of the College and edited the student magazine T.C.D...
, who knew Beckett personally, writes: "Although I do not recall his ever using the phrase, Beckett unquestionably regards the eyes as the windows of the soul."
Krapp's father
Krapp’s father, the only other man mentioned in the play, is spoken of only very briefly. The expression "Last illness" suggests he has not been a well man for some time and dies while Krapp is in his twenties. His own father, William Beckett, died of a heart attack
Myocardial infarction
Myocardial infarction or acute myocardial infarction , commonly known as a heart attack, results from the interruption of blood supply to a part of the heart, causing heart cells to die...
on 26 June 1933, when Beckett was twenty-seven.
The girl in the green coat
Beckett’s first love, his cousin, Peggy Sinclair, had "deep green eyes and [had a] passionate love of green clothing." An allusion to Peggy Sinclair also appears in Dream of Fair to Middling Women in Smeraldina, the "little emerald
Emerald
Emerald is a variety of the mineral beryl colored green by trace amounts of chromium and sometimes vanadium. Beryl has a hardness of 7.5–8 on the 10 point Mohs scale of mineral hardness...
". Although the relationship is often cited as being a little one-sided, Beckett does recall: "Oh, Peggy didn’t need any chasing."
Krapp (aged 39)
This character does the majority of the talking throughout the play. His voice is contained on Tape 5 from Box 3. His voice is strong and rather pompous. He has celebrated his birthday alone in an empty wine house before returning home to consume three bananas. As has become his practice on his birthday he makes a tape looking back at who he was, assessing who he is and anticipating what might be to come. His is as disparaging of the young man he was in his twenties as he was then of the youth he had been thinking about when he made that earlier tape. He records the death of his mother, an epiphany at the end of a pier and an idyllic moment in a punt
Punt (boat)
A punt is a flat-bottomed boat with a square-cut bow, designed for use in small rivers or other shallow water. Punting refers to boating in a punt. The punter generally propels the punt by pushing against the river bed with a pole...
.
Old Mrs McGlome
This character is based on Miss Beamish, an eccentric novelist from Connacht
Connacht
Connacht , formerly anglicised as Connaught, is one of the Provinces of Ireland situated in the west of Ireland. In Ancient Ireland, it was one of the fifths ruled by a "king of over-kings" . Following the Norman invasion of Ireland, the ancient kingdoms were shired into a number of counties for...
whom Beckett had met in Roussillon
Roussillon
Roussillon is one of the historical counties of the former Principality of Catalonia, corresponding roughly to the present-day southern French département of Pyrénées-Orientales...
, while hiding during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. “Whether the real Miss Beamish did actually sing regularly every evening is … debatable. Beckett did not remember this.”
The dark young beauty
There appears to be no direct correlation between this character and anyone living. The black-and-white imagery is strong here: her white uniform and the "big black hooded perambulator." Krapp also remembers this woman’s eyes as being "[l]ike … chrysolite
Olivine
The mineral olivine is a magnesium iron silicate with the formula 2SiO4. It is a common mineral in the Earth's subsurface but weathers quickly on the surface....
!"
Rosemary Pountney observes Beckett changed "moonstone
Moonstone (gemstone)
Moonstone is a sodium potassium aluminium silicate, with the chemical formula AlSi3O8.-Etymology:Its name is derived from a visual effect, or sheen, caused by light reflecting internally in the moonstone from layer inclusion of different feldspars....
" to chrysolite, an olive-green coloured mineral
Mineral
A mineral is a naturally occurring solid chemical substance formed through biogeochemical processes, having characteristic chemical composition, highly ordered atomic structure, and specific physical properties. By comparison, a rock is an aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids and does not...
, in Typescript 4.
She observes also that Beckett made "a direct connection ... with Othello
Othello
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1603, and based on the Italian short story "Un Capitano Moro" by Cinthio, a disciple of Boccaccio, first published in 1565...
, a play in which dark and light imagery is central," as "in the margin of the text that he used for the 1973 London production," on page 15 "where the word 'chrysolite' occurs ... he writes:
If heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite
I’d not have sold her for it
Othello V2.
"Like Othello, too," Pountney continues, "Krapp has lost his love through his own folly."
Krapp's mother
Beckett’s mother, May, died on 25 August 1950 in the Merrion Nursing Home which overlooked Dublin’s Grand Canal
Grand Canal of Ireland
The Grand Canal is the southernmost of a pair of canals that connect Dublin, in the east of Ireland, with the River Shannon in the west,via Tullamore and a number of other villages and towns, the two canals nearly encircling Dublin's inner city. Its sister canal on the Northside of Dublin is the...
. Beckett had made the trip over in the early summer to be with her. By 24 July medical opinion confirmed that she was dying. During that last long month he used "to walk disconsolately alone along the towpath
Towpath
A towpath is a road or trail on the bank of a river, canal, or other inland waterway. The purpose of a towpath is to allow a land vehicle, beasts of burden, or a team of human pullers to tow a boat, often a barge...
of the Grand Canal."
Towards the end she was oblivious to his presence. Her death took place while he was sitting on a bench by the canal. "At a certain point he happened to look up. The blinds of his mother’s window, a dirty red-brown affair, was down. She was dead." A drawn blind, an old custom signifying death, also makes an appearance in Rockaby
Rockaby
Rockaby is a short one-woman play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in English in 1980, at the request of Daniel Labeille, who produced it on behalf of Programs in the Arts, State University of New York, for a festival and symposium in commemoration of Beckett's 75th birthday...
: "let down the blind and down".
The little white dog
When Krapp’s mother died, he was throwing a ball for a little white dog. He says he will keep it forever: “But I gave it away to the dog.” Significantly the ball is black to contrast with the white of the dog. In All Strange Away a "small grey punctured rubber ball" is the last object contemplated before Fancy dies. The ball had already appeared in All That Fall
All That Fall
All That Fall is a one-act radio play by Samuel Beckett produced following a request from the BBC. It was written in English and completed in September 1956. The autograph copy is titled Lovely Day for the Races...
: Jerry returns "a kind of ball" to Mr. Rooney. Although not an obvious symbol of death, this ball is a significant motif of childhood grief for Beckett though none of his biographers propose that the presence of the dog is anything more than artistic license.
The girl in the punt
Beckett makes the relationship of this woman to Krapp clear when “[i]n 1975, directing Pierre Chabert in Paris, Beckett said: “I thought of writing a play on the opposite situation, with Mrs Krapp, the girl in the punt, nagging away behind him, in which case his failure and his solitude would be exactly the same.” In her biography of Beckett, Deirdre Bair
Deirdre Bair
Deirdre Bair is the critically acclaimed author of five works of nonfiction. She received the National Book Award for Samuel Beckett: A Biography. Her biographies of Simone de Beauvoir and C. G. Jung were finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize...
deduces that "the girl in the punt" may be Peggy Sinclair because of the references to "Effi" and to "the Baltic
Baltic states
The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...
": in July 1929 Beckett vacationed with the Sinclairs "in one of the smaller resort towns along the Baltic Sea
Baltic Sea
The Baltic Sea is a brackish mediterranean sea located in Northern Europe, from 53°N to 66°N latitude and from 20°E to 26°E longitude. It is bounded by the Scandinavian Peninsula, the mainland of Europe, and the Danish islands. It drains into the Kattegat by way of the Øresund, the Great Belt and...
. Summer, traditionally the time for light reading, found Peggy tearfully engrossed in Theodor Fontane
Theodor Fontane
Theodor Fontane was a German novelist and poet, regarded by many as the most important 19th-century German-language realist writer.-Youth:Fontane was born in Neuruppin into a Huguenot family. At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary, his father's profession. He became an...
's novel, Effi Briest
Effi Briest
Effi Briest is widely considered to be Theodor Fontane’s masterpiece and one of the most famous German realist novels of all time. Thomas Mann once said that if one had to reduce one’s library to six novels, Effi Briest would have to be one of them...
. Beckett read it too, but with less detachment than Peggy, who wept and suffered as Effi’s infidelity ended her marriage." Talking to James Knowlson, a few days before his death, Beckett said that he "did not remember the scene this way, however, denying that girl in the boat … had anything at all to do with his cousin, Peggy." Knowlson feels "that there is little doubt the source for the girl with the haunting eyes is Ethna MacCarthy. For, as Dream of Fair to Middling Women had made clear … the 'Alba', who, on Beckett’s own admission, was closely modelled on Ethna, had eyes like dark, deep pools." Beckett left no doubt however when he told Jean Martin, whilst rehearsing the play in 1970, that the girl was modelled on Ethna. On 11 December 1957 Beckett learned that Ethna was terminally ill and regularly wrote uncharacteristically long letters until her death. When he completed the play he wrote her: "I’ve written in English a stage monologue for Pat Magee which I think you will like if no one else."
At one point in the recollection, the young Krapp leans over the young woman to shade her from the sun. "Let me in," he says. This caused the Lord Chamberlain
Lord Chamberlain
The Lord Chamberlain or Lord Chamberlain of the Household is one of the chief officers of the Royal Household in the United Kingdom and is to be distinguished from the Lord Great Chamberlain, one of the Great Officers of State....
some concerns when the play was first presented before him to grant a license. He believed that what was being suggested was a desire for sexual penetration and was not convinced that Beckett was simply alluding to her eyes. It was not until a mere three weeks before the play’s opening that the objection was dropped. In 1982 Beckett, in response to a similar suggestion from one of James Knowlson’s postgraduate students
Graduate school
A graduate school is a school that awards advanced academic degrees with the general requirement that students must have earned a previous undergraduate degree...
, "said with a chuckle, 'Tell her to read her texts more carefully. She’ll see that Krapp would need to have a penis at an angle of a hundred and eighty degrees to make coitus possible in the position he is in!'"––a position that Rosette Lamont proposes also "suggests that of a suckling babe
Breastfeeding
Breastfeeding is the feeding of an infant or young child with breast milk directly from female human breasts rather than from a baby bottle or other container. Babies have a sucking reflex that enables them to suck and swallow milk. It is recommended that mothers breastfeed for six months or...
."
Krapp (aged 69)
Beckett would not be 69 until 1975 so, from his perspective, with Krapp a proxy for him, the action is set in the future.The first line of the play explicitly sets it 'in the future', although nothing onstage reveals this. When Beckett finished this play he would have been 49 next. As it happens, with Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for someone named Godot to arrive. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's...
, success had found him but, at 39, the future must have seemed a lot bleaker for the writer, the Second World War was ending and all Beckett had had published were a few poems, a collection of short stories and the novel, Murphy. Beckett had this to say about the drained old man we see onstage: "Krapp sees very clearly that he’s through with his work, with love and religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
." He told Rick Cluchey, whom he directed in 1977, that Krapp was "in no way senile [but has] something frozen about him [and is] filled up to his teeth with bitterness." "Habit, the great deadener" has proven more tenacious than inspiration. His "present concerns revolve around the gratification of those very bodily appetites that, earlier, he had resolved should be out of his life. Eating bananas and drinking have become a [daily routine]. Of the physical activities that he once considered excesses only sex has come to play a reduced part in his lonely existence" in the form of periodic visits from an old prostitute.
Although this is a play about memory, the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp himself remembers very little. Virtually all the recollections come from the tape. As evidenced most clearly in the novel Murphy, Beckett had a decent understanding of a variety of mental illnesses including Korsakoff’s Alcoholic Syndrome
Korsakoff's syndrome
Korsakoff's syndrome is a neurological disorder caused by the lack of thiamine in the brain. Its onset is linked to chronic alcohol abuse and/or severe malnutrition...
––"A hypomania
Hypomania
Hypomania is a mood state characterized by persistent and pervasive elevated or irritable mood, as well as thoughts and behaviors that are consistent with such a mood state...
c teaching slosh to a Korsakow’s syndrome."––which is characterised by powerful amnesic
Amnesia
Amnesia is a condition in which one's memory is lost. The causes of amnesia have traditionally been divided into categories. Memory appears to be stored in several parts of the limbic system of the brain, and any condition that interferes with the function of this system can cause amnesia...
symptoms accompanied by intestinal obstruction
Bowel obstruction
Bowel obstruction is a mechanical or functional obstruction of the intestines, preventing the normal transit of the products of digestion. It can occur at any level distal to the duodenum of the small intestine and is a medical emergency...
.
In his focus on chronic alcohol consumption
Alcoholism
Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...
, Narinder Kapur explains in Memory Disorders in Clinical Practice that it can lead to marked memory loss and generalised cognitive defects, as well as “disorientation for time and also place”. More recent memories are likely to be forgotten than remote memories, for "memory loss shows a temporal gradient with greater sparing of items from earlier years." Krapp's gathering of red-berried holly
Holly
Ilex) is a genus of 400 to 600 species of flowering plants in the family Aquifoliaceae, and the only living genus in that family. The species are evergreen and deciduous trees, shrubs, and climbers from tropics to temperate zones world wide....
in the dingle could be an example of the "relatively intact remote memory" that preceded Krapp's apparent addiction to alcohol.
Krapp is not a textbook case. He is an individual with his own individual symptomology but he is more than a list of symptoms. Bananas contain pectin
Pectin
Pectin is a structural heteropolysaccharide contained in the primary cell walls of terrestrial plants. It was first isolated and described in 1825 by Henri Braconnot...
, a soluble fibre that can help normalise movement through the digestive tract
Gastrointestinal tract
The human gastrointestinal tract refers to the stomach and intestine, and sometimes to all the structures from the mouth to the anus. ....
and ease constipation. Bananas can also aggravate constipation especially in young children. It depends what the root cause of the problem is. They are also high in Vitamins A
Vitamin A
Vitamin A is a vitamin that is needed by the retina of the eye in the form of a specific metabolite, the light-absorbing molecule retinal, that is necessary for both low-light and color vision...
and C
Vitamin C
Vitamin C or L-ascorbic acid or L-ascorbate is an essential nutrient for humans and certain other animal species. In living organisms ascorbate acts as an antioxidant by protecting the body against oxidative stress...
as well as niacin
Niacin
"Niacin" redirects here. For the neo-fusion band, see Niacin .Niacin is an organic compound with the formula and, depending on the definition used, one of the forty to eighty essential human nutrients.Niacin is one of five vitamins associated with a pandemic deficiency disease: niacin deficiency...
, riboflavin
Riboflavin
Riboflavin, also known as vitamin B2 or additive E101, is an easily absorbed micronutrient with a key role in maintaining health in humans and animals. It is the central component of the cofactors FAD and FMN, and is therefore required by all flavoproteins. As such, vitamin B2 is required for a...
and thiamine
Thiamine
Thiamine or thiamin or vitamin B1 , named as the "thio-vitamine" is a water-soluble vitamin of the B complex. First named aneurin for the detrimental neurological effects if not present in the diet, it was eventually assigned the generic descriptor name vitamin B1. Its phosphate derivatives are...
and one of the root causes of Korsakoff's Syndrome is thiamine deficiency; eating bananas would be good for him. It is easy to get caught up in this kind of over-analysis to the detriment of the play as a whole. "[A]ttempts to demonstrate that Beckett’s characters conform to specific psychological syndromes so often turn into will-o-the-wisp
Will-o'-the-wisp
A will-o'-the-wisp or ignis fatuus , also called a "will-o'-wisp", "jack-o'-lantern" , "hinkypunk", "corpse candle", "ghost-light", "spook-light", "fairy light", "friar's lantern", "hobby lantern", "ghost orb", or simply "wisp", is a ghostly light or lights sometimes seen at night or twilight over...
pursuits. Certainly, Beckett would not deny that psychologists have offered very useful descriptions of mental activity. But their theories are typically no more than initial steps in an understanding of mental processes, fragmented bits of knowledge which should not be taken for universal principles." It is important to remember that Krapp has not simply forgotten his past but he has consciously and systematically rejected it as one way of reassuring himself that he has made the right decisions in "his yearly word letting."
Effi Briest
In the past year Krapp has been re-reading Fontane’s Effi Briest, "a page a day, with tears again," he says, "Could have been happy with her, up there on the Baltic…." Existing only on the printed page this fantasy woman is perhaps the most black-and-white of all Krapp’s women. Like the girl in the punt and the nursemaid
Nursemaid
A nursemaid or nursery maid, is mostly a historical term of employment for a female servant in an elite household. In the 21st century, the position is largely defunct, owing to the relatively small number of households who maintain large staffs with the traditional hierarchy.The nursery maid...
mentioned earlier, perhaps to contrast with his inner fire, "Once again Beckett situates Krapp’s memory on some side near the water."
Fanny
Just as Krapp’s name is a vulgar
Vulgarism
A vulgarism , also called scurrility, is a colloquialism of an unpleasant action or unrefined character, which substitutes a coarse, indecorous word where the context might lead the reader to expect a more refined expression.-See also:*Euphemism*Grotesque body*Ribaldry, scatology, toilet...
pun
Pun
The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...
, so is the name Beckett gave to the woman who visits him from time to time, whom he describes as a "bony old ghost of a whore." As Fanny is an "old ghost," all Krapp’s women are figuratively "ghosts, really, dependent for their existence on Krapp’s bitter-sweet recording of them," according to Katherine Worth.
"Fanny" is a slang British expression for the female genitals – woman reduced to a function. "Fanny" is also a commonly used diminutive of Frances, and Beckett occasionally referred to his aunt, Frances "Cissie" Sinclair, as "Fanny."
Krapp refers to her visits as "better than a kick in the crutch." In the 1985 television version, Beckett changed this phrase to "better than the finger and the thumb," an unambiguous reference to masturbation that would never have escaped the British Lord Chamberlain
Lord Chamberlain
The Lord Chamberlain or Lord Chamberlain of the Household is one of the chief officers of the Royal Household in the United Kingdom and is to be distinguished from the Lord Great Chamberlain, one of the Great Officers of State....
in the fifties.
Krapp’s "vision at last", on the pier at Dún Laoghaire
Dún Laoghaire
Dún Laoghaire or Dún Laoire , sometimes anglicised as "Dunleary" , is a suburban seaside town in County Dublin, Ireland, about twelve kilometres south of Dublin city centre. It is the county town of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County and a major port of entry from Great Britain...
In an earlier draft of the play Beckett "uses 'beacon' and 'anemometer
Anemometer
An anemometer is a device for measuring wind speed, and is a common weather station instrument. The term is derived from the Greek word anemos, meaning wind, and is used to describe any airspeed measurement instrument used in meteorology or aerodynamics...
' rather than 'lighthouse' and 'wind-gauge'. The anemometer on the East Pier of Dún Laoghaire was one of the world's first. [It is] widely regarded as a mirror reflection of Beckett’s own revelation. Yet it is different both in circumstance and kind."
"Beckett wrote to Richard Ellmann
Richard Ellmann
Richard David Ellmann was a prominent American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats...
: 'All the jetty and howling wind are imaginary. It happened to me, summer 1945, in my mother’s little house, named New Place, across the road from Cooldrinagh.'"
He summarised what this experience signified for him:
I realised that JoyceJames JoyceJames Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.
The tape recorder
Beckett has applied character to non-human elements in his plays before, e.g. the light in Play, the music in Words and Music
Words and Music (play)
Samuel Beckett wrote the radio play, Words and Music between November and December 1961. It was recorded and broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on 13 November 1962. Patrick Magee played Words and Felix Felton, Croak. Music was composed especially by John Beckett. The play first appeared in print...
. “Beckett instructed the actor Pierre Chabert in his 1975 Paris production of the play ‘to become as much as possible one body with the machine … The spool is his whole life.’” Krapp no longer owns the memories on the tapes. His mind is no longer capable of holding onto them. The recorder also serves as proxy. When John Hurt, as Krapp, is transfixed by the retelling of the events in the punt he literally cradles the machine as if it were the woman recalling Magee’s original performance; Beckett took pains to point this out to Alan Schneider
Alan Schneider
Alan Schneider was an American theatre director and mentor responsible for more than 100 theatre productions. In 1984 he was honored with a Drama Desk Special Award for serving a wide range of playwrights...
, who was at the time preparing his own version of the play, in a letter dated 21 November 1958, and incorporated the gesture in future productions in which he was involved.
Later, on 4 January 1960, Beckett wrote a more detailed letter describing another unexpected revelation of that earlier performance, "the beautiful and quite accidental effect in London of the luminous eye burning up as the machine runs on in silence and the light goes down."
Patrick Magee
Beckett told Patrick MageePatrick Magee (actor)
Patrick Magee was a Northern Irish actor best known for his collaborations with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as well as his appearances in horror films and in Stanley Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.-Early life:He was born Patrick McGee in Armagh, County Armagh, Northern...
, the original Krapp, that his "voice was the one which he heard inside his mind. Thus it seems likely that the return to English was a matter of expediency because of the English-speaking actor."
Magee had a harsh, gravely voice which had little superficial charmSuperficial charmSuperficial charm is "the tendency to be smooth, engaging, charming, slick, and verbally facile."The phrase often appears in lists of attributes of psychopathic personalities, such as in Hervey Cleckley's The Mask of Sanity and Robert Hare's Hare Psychopathy Checklist.Associated expressions are...
but had a hypnoticHypnosisHypnosis is "a trance state characterized by extreme suggestibility, relaxation and heightened imagination."It is a mental state or imaginative role-enactment . It is usually induced by a procedure known as a hypnotic induction, which is commonly composed of a long series of preliminary...
effect on the listener … He was grey-haired but ageless and could combine debility with menace, as Beckett characters with their suppressed violence often do … [H]e had developed a rather strange accentAccent (linguistics)In linguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation.An accent may identify the locality in which its speakers reside , the socio-economic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, their first language In...
with only faint Irish overtones and prolonged vowelVowelIn phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
sounds, The general effect was strangely déclassé but still indubitably Irish and thus ideally fitted for the performance of Beckett … As an actor he had the good sense to see that one played Beckett for the weight and mood of the words and the situation without bothering about the ultimate philosophical import.
Rick Cluchey
Co-Founder of the San Quentin Drama Workshop was directed by Beckett in 1977, Berlin.Max Wall
Max WallMax Wall
Max Wall , was an English comedian and actor, whose performing career covered music hall, theatre, films and television.-Early years:...
performed Krapp on a number of occasions, including London’s Greenwich Theatre (1975 - directed by Patrick Magee
Patrick Magee (actor)
Patrick Magee was a Northern Irish actor best known for his collaborations with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as well as his appearances in horror films and in Stanley Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.-Early life:He was born Patrick McGee in Armagh, County Armagh, Northern...
) and Riverside Studios (1986).
John Hurt
John HurtJohn Hurt
John Vincent Hurt, CBE is an English actor, known for his leading roles as John Merrick in The Elephant Man, Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mr. Braddock in The Hit, Stephen Ward in Scandal, Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant and An Englishman in New York...
performed the role of Krapp for the version directed by Atom Egoyan
Atom Egoyan
Atom Egoyan, OC is a critically acclaimed Armenian-Canadian stage director and film director. Egoyan made his career breakthrough with Exotica...
for the project Beckett on Film
Beckett on Film
Beckett on Film was a project aimed at making film versions of all nineteen of Samuel Beckett's stage plays, with the exception of the early and unperformed Eleutheria. This endeavour was successfully completed, with the first films being shown in 2001.The project was conceived by Michael Colgan,...
, which was broadcast on television in 2001 and available on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
in the box set or individually.
Harold Pinter
As part of the 50th anniversary season of the Royal Court TheatreRoyal Court Theatre
The Royal Court Theatre is a non-commercial theatre on Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is noted for its contributions to modern theatre...
, in October 2006, directed by Ian Rickson, English playwright Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
performed the role of Krapp in a sold-out limited run of nine performances to great critical acclaim.
Corin Redgrave
Corin RedgraveCorin Redgrave
Corin William Redgrave was an English actor and political activist.-Early life:Redgrave was born in Marylebone, London, the only son and middle child of actors Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson...
performed the role of Krapp for BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3 is a national radio station operated by the BBC within the United Kingdom. Its output centres on classical music and opera, but jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also feature. The station is the world’s most significant commissioner of new music, and its New Generation...
in 2006 a few months after he had sufffered a major heart attack. The production was rebroadcast on BBC Radio 3 on May 16, 2010 as part of a double bill with a 2006 production of Embers.
Brian Dennehy
Brian DennehyBrian Dennehy
Brian Mannion Dennehy is an American actor of film, stage and screen.-Early years:Dennehy was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the son of Hannah and Edward Dennehy, who was a wire service editor for the Associated Press; he has two brothers, Michael and Edward. Dennehy is of Irish ancestry and was...
performed the roll of Krapp during the 2008 Stratford Shakespeare Festival and again in 2010 at the Goodman Theatre
Goodman Theatre
The Goodman Theatre is a professional theater company located in Chicago's Loop. A major part of Chicago theatre, it is the city's oldest currently active nonprofit theater organization...
of Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
, both times directed by Jennifer Tarver. The Beckett one-act was paired at both venues with Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...
's Hughie
Hughie
Hughie is a short two-character play by Eugene O’Neill set in the lobby of a small hotel on a West Side street in midtown New York during the summer of 1928. The play is essentially a long monologue delivered by a small time hustler named Erie Smith to the hotel’s new night clerk Charlie Hughes,...
(directed by Robert Falls
Robert Falls
Robert Falls is an American theater director and the current Artistic Director of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.-Early years:Falls was born in Ashland, Illinois to Arthur Joseph Falls and Nancy Stribling...
), also a one-act, and also performed by Dennehy, in the lead role of Erie Smith. The show ran at the Goodman Theatre
Goodman Theatre
The Goodman Theatre is a professional theater company located in Chicago's Loop. A major part of Chicago theatre, it is the city's oldest currently active nonprofit theater organization...
from January 16 through February 28, 2010. A Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
run is also planned.
Michael Gambon
In April 2010 Irish actor Michael GambonMichael Gambon
Sir Michael John Gambon, CBE is an Irish actor who has worked in theatre, television and film. A highly respected theatre actor, Gambon is recognised for his roles as Philip Marlowe in the BBC television serial The Singing Detective, as Jules Maigret in the 1990s ITV serial Maigret, and as...
continued his relationship with both Beckett and the Gate Theatre
Gate Theatre
The Gate Theatre, in Dublin, was founded in 1928 by Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir, initially using the Abbey Theatre's Peacock studio theatre space to stage important works by European and American dramatists...
when he returned to the Dublin stage as Krapp for a limited run which was followed by a transfer to London's West End.
Media recordings
Beckett opposed vehemently the transfer of some of his works from one medium to another, but he did not oppose such recordings of Krapp's Last Tape as much as he did others. For example, "A gramophone recordGramophone record
A gramophone record, commonly known as a phonograph record , vinyl record , or colloquially, a record, is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove...
ing (New York: Spoken Arts #788, 1960), based on the original American production, was distributed by Argo
Argo Records (UK)
Argo Records was a record label founded in 1951 by Harley Usill , and musicologist Cyril Clarke with £500 capital, initially as a company specialising in "British music played by British artists" , but it quickly became a company primarily specialising in spoken-word recordings and other esoteric ...
(RG 220), and by HEAR, Home Educational Records, London (1964)," and "It was often adapted for television with his encouragement. The first BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
version was produced by Peter Luke, featuring Cyril Cusack
Cyril Cusack
Cyril James Cusack was an Irish actor, who appeared in more than 90 films.-Early life:Cusack was born in Durban, Natal, South Africa, the son of Alice Violet , an actress, and James Walter Cusack, a sergeant in the Natal mounted police. His parents separated when he was young and his mother took...
(13th November 1963). Approached by Westdeutscher Rundfunk
Westdeutscher Rundfunk
Westdeutscher Rundfunk is a German public-broadcasting institution based in the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia with its main office in Cologne. WDR is a constituent member of the consortium of German public-broadcasting institutions, ARD...
, Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
, to permit a television version of his 1969 Schiller-Theatre Das letzte Band [the German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
title of the play], Beckett wrote a set of 'Suggestions for TV Krapp'", which "was broadcast [on] 28th October 1969."
The play has subsequently been broadcast on radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
, turned into an opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
(see below) and filmed as part of the Beckett on Film
Beckett on Film
Beckett on Film was a project aimed at making film versions of all nineteen of Samuel Beckett's stage plays, with the exception of the early and unperformed Eleutheria. This endeavour was successfully completed, with the first films being shown in 2001.The project was conceived by Michael Colgan,...
project and for the DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
of Pinter's Royal Court performance, both of which have been shown on television.
Musical adaptations
There have been several musical adaptations of Krapp's Last Tape, most notably the operaOpera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
Krapp, ou, La dernière bande by composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
Marcel Mihalovici
Marcel Mihalovici
Marcel Mihalovici was a French composer born in Romania. He was discovered by George Enescu in Bucharest. He moved to Paris in 1919 to study under Vincent d'Indy...
. American composer Earl Kim
Earl Kim
Earl Kim was a Korean-American composer.Kim was born in Dinuba, California, to immigrant Korean parents. He began piano studies at age ten and soon developed an interest in composition, studying in Los Angeles and Berkeley with, among others, Arnold Schoenberg, Ernest Bloch, and Roger Sessions...
alludes to the work within his Gooseberries, she said (1967), part of the four-part cycle Exercises en Route. The Hungarian composer Gyula Csapó has created the work Krapp's Last Tape –after Samuel Beckett] (1975) loosely inspired by Beckett's play. This theatrical work is for a "violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
ist-actor," a tape recorder, four spotlights and a sine wave
Sine wave
The sine wave or sinusoid is a mathematical function that describes a smooth repetitive oscillation. It occurs often in pure mathematics, as well as physics, signal processing, electrical engineering and many other fields...
generator. In 1999, the English experimental composer, Michael Parsons, adapted Krapp's Last Tape for piano, two pre-recorded pianos, and voice on tape. The piece, specifically written for John Tilbury
John Tilbury
John Tilbury is a British pianist. He is considered one of the foremost interpreters of Morton Feldman's music, and since 1980 has been a member of the free improvisation group AMM.- Early life and education :...
, was called Krapp Music.
Allusions in popular culture
The play was memorably parodiedParody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
in the television sketch comedy
Sketch comedy
A sketch comedy consists of a series of short comedy scenes or vignettes, called "sketches," commonly between one and ten minutes long. Such sketches are performed by a group of comic actors or comedians, either on stage or through an audio and/or visual medium such as broadcasting...
The Fast Show
The Fast Show
The Fast Show, known as Brilliant in the US, was a BBC comedy sketch show programme that ran for three series from 1994 to 1997 with a special Last Fast Show Ever in 2000. The show's central performers were Paul Whitehouse, Charlie Higson, Simon Day, Mark Williams, John Thomson, Arabella Weir and...
, in which - as a reference to Max Wall - fictional music hall
Music hall
Music Hall is a type of British theatrical entertainment which was popular between 1850 and 1960. The term can refer to:# A particular form of variety entertainment involving a mixture of popular song, comedy and speciality acts...
comedian Arthur Atkinson played a comically-more stoic version of Krapp. It is also the title of a track on Fredrik Thordendal's solo album Sol Niger Within
Sol Niger Within
-Credits:*Mats Öberg - church organ, synthesizer *Jonas Knutsson - saxophone *Jerry Ericsson - bass guitar *Kantor Magnus Larsson - church organ *Victor Alneng - yidaki *Morgan Ågren - drums...
.
A prefiguring of the play, titled, "Krapp, 39" written and performed by Michael Laurence and directed by George Demas, premiered at the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival and begins its commercial run Off Broadway at The Soho Playhouse in New York City on January 13, 2009. The piece follows an actor's obsession with the character Krapp.
External links
- Krapp's Last Tape, dir. Atom EgoyanAtom EgoyanAtom Egoyan, OC is a critically acclaimed Armenian-Canadian stage director and film director. Egoyan made his career breakthrough with Exotica...
, perf. John HurtJohn HurtJohn Vincent Hurt, CBE is an English actor, known for his leading roles as John Merrick in The Elephant Man, Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mr. Braddock in The Hit, Stephen Ward in Scandal, Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant and An Englishman in New York...
, Beckett on FilmBeckett on FilmBeckett on Film was a project aimed at making film versions of all nineteen of Samuel Beckett's stage plays, with the exception of the early and unperformed Eleutheria. This endeavour was successfully completed, with the first films being shown in 2001.The project was conceived by Michael Colgan,...
, 2000. (Contains "Synopsis" and other information and features about the DVDDVDA DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
.) - Krapp's Last Tape, dir. Ian RicksonIan RicksonIan Rickson is a British theatre and film director. He was the Artistic Director at the Royal Court Theatre in London from 1998 to 2006, and currently works freelance....
, perf. Harold PinterHarold PinterHarold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
, at the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court TheatreRoyal Court TheatreThe Royal Court Theatre is a non-commercial theatre on Sloane Square, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is noted for its contributions to modern theatre...
12–24 Oct. 2006. - 2007 (TV version), dir. Ian Rickson, perf. Harold Pinter, filmed at the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, Royal Court Theatre, Oct. 2007., dir. Tom Skipp, perf. Peter Shreve, 2007. - The San Quentin Drama Workshop: Beckett Directs Beckett (QuicktimeQuickTimeQuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...
audio-visual clip). - Goodman Theatre 2009 production