Krapp, 39

Synopsis

A character looking thirty years into the past... An actor looking thirty years into the future... meet in Krapp, 39, a voyeuristic prefiguring of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, and a deeply personal window on one man's last moment of youth. Reeling on his 39th birthday, an actor's obsessive identification with Beckett's famous character compels him to examine his own quixotic life: His fears, his failures, and his search for (and forfeiture of) love, all in preparation to record a version of the 39-year-old Krapp's soliloquy to be used in an imagined production of Krapp's Last Tape in the year 2038. His hilarious and heart-breaking self-scrutiny plays out through intimate audio tapes, archival video, raw journal entries, haunted letters, racy confessions, and recorded conversations with the living and the lost.

Our Review:

29 November 2010

No crude adaptation of Beckett’s monologue Krapp’s Last Tape, this one-man show brought to British soil by American actor Matthew Laurence after winning accolades on the New York Fringe rather uses the classic text as a compass, to navigate and interpret Laurence’s adult life up to the age of 39. Saturated with autobiography, Krapp, 39 has its share of beautiful, creepy imagery evoked by Laurence's reminiscences, like the blinking neon light of a peep show as he has his shoes shined.

The framework of the show nods to Beckett, with switches between live-streamed footage of the pepper-bearded actor as he has his back to the audience and direct delivery to us, serving to remind us that this is self-reflexive material, and that an actor’s perpetual performance never lets up. At times he picks up a video camera that feeds into an onstage screen, roving its gaze over a collection of artefacts from his past: a theatre programme, a ph...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

No reviews yet

Click here to add your review