Krapp’s Last Tape

Lovely to see Michael Gambon, of course, but this Krapp’s Last Tape, which comes from the Gate Theatre in Dublin, seems both too long and too short, padded out with extra business to last an underwhelming fifty minutes; insufficient bang for your £30 buck.

Evening performances start at 7pm and 8.15pm. But as, on opening night, the late-starting 7pm show came out at 8.15pm, this looks like a planning disaster. How can two audiences come and go, and the stage be re-set, in 20 minutes at most; and it’s a very cramped theatre. And the programme contains a detailed analysis and assessment of the “plot”!

Before speaking, Gambon adds a play and a half beyond the stage directions: slumped at his desk, he reluctantly unbends, then corkscrews round in slow motion to look up into the single light. He jumps at an imagined noise. He steps in and out of the stage light, playfully, as if pretending he knows he’s in a theatre. On peeling the second banana, he throws it away and holds the skin (good gag). Retrieving the banana, he holds it in front of him like a dummy penis (bad gag).

None of this Beckett wrote. When the words come, haltingly, Gambon strays in and out of an Irish accent, uncomfortably. But that great sagging jowly face does the work of painful reminiscence like no-one else, staring stricken and aghast at the sound of his own voice, 30 years ago, as he spools through lost love, lost mother, lost youth, on the dilapidated old Grundig.

His explosions of violent rage are truly frightening, and the repetition of the beautiful passage of “my face in her breasts” worth half the entrance fee. But the lighting’s all wrong, and the pace of Michael Colgan’s direction indulgent and uncontrolled.

It pains me to say this, as I revere Gambon, Colgan and the Gate. But this ain’t good enough, and certainly no challenge to the greatest Krapps I’ve seen: those of Max Wall, John Hurt and, of course, Harold Pinter, the latter a smart swipe of valedictory wrapping up, with life literally ebbing away as we watched.

- by Michael Coveney