Reviews

Krapp, 39

| Off-West End |

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 photograph, a T.S. Eliot volume; and ones that intrude into his present: a bottle of vodka, a pack of cigarettes.

Laurence is a compelling performer, directed with nouse and sensitivity to the challenge of such conscious use of technology in performance by George Demas. This is not the wildly self-indulgent piece it had the potential to be, but an intriguing and often sardonic, self-deprecatory exploration of man’s attempt to deal with isolation and rejection.

– Vicky Ellis