Spoonface Steinberg & Krapp’s Last Tape (Hull)

It’s difficult to assess Hull Truck’s latest production, a bold and imaginative pairing of one-act one-person plays, two good performances (one of them excellent), yet somehow a misconceived evening in the theatre. In theory Lee Hall’s Spoonface Steinberg and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape should work well together, with their similarities (reviewing a life near the end of it) and contrasts (youthful innocence and optimism versus the frustrations of age), but the whole ends up less than the sum of its parts.

Spoonface Steinberg is a teenage girl, a sufferer from autism and now diagnosed with terminal cancer. She reviews her life, movingly and occasionally amusingly, with her ingenuous interpretations of adult behaviour and touching faith in the goodness of life. Pippa Duffy, all radiant personality, earnestness and quaintly precise vowels, delivers the text beautifully.

Alan Williams’ Krapp is rather more vigorous than some of the aged interpretations I have seen, less eccentric, more balanced, as he, too, reviews his life with the assistance of tapes made on previous birthdays. He always convinces, but the opening minutes hint at an originality he doesn’t really deliver.

Jonathan Humphreys’ direction seems willing to take both plays as pretty much plays for voices; in particular, Spoonface simply speaks into a microphone for 55 minutes, pausing every so often for a blast of Bellini or Puccini from one of the operatic heroines whose ability to die well she envies, while she assumes another layer of finery towards her own divadom. She is touching and appealing, but this must be one of the most static theatre performances ever.

Surely these are plays and productions better suited to the Studio Theatre: Duffy and Williams cut lonely figures on an empty stage (he has a desk) and the studio setting would better fit the audience numbers. Ironically, Fabrice Serafino’s design involves a craggy block poised above the action and the theatre is cleared in the interval while its angle is adjusted for the second play – at least that’s the only major change I observed. On Press Night the audience was confined to the foyer for 35 minutes and the entire interval lasted longer than Krapp’s Last Tape which followed.

A strange evening, then, full of good intentions and near-misses, but worth watching for Pippa Duffy’s luminous performance.