Krapp’s Last Tape – Barbican Theatre, London

Writer: Samuel Beckett

Director: Vicky Featherstone

A few dates – Krapp is 69 years old, listening to a recording he made when he was 39. Stephen Rea is 79, listening to a recording he made when he was 67. And a small sidebar on the technology in Krapp’s Last Tape – the play had its premiere in 1958, so the young Krapp made his recording in 1928, when there was no such thing as a reel-to-reel tape recorder. So Krapp’s Last Tape is sort of science fiction.

And now the performance at the Barbican. A silent man in a gloomy room, bare table, kitchen chair. Slowly, the lights come up; there’s a passage to an unseen back room, there’s a drawer that contains bananas, there’s nothing else. The man goes into the back room, we hear him guzzling something, he returns with a tottering pile of reels of tape and a ledger. He decides to play, on this his 69th birthday, the recording he made on his 39th birthday. He goes out and guzzles, he returns with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, he plays the recording, he interacts with the recording, he mocks the person who made the recording, and he returns, over and over, despite himself, to a description of a tender, erotic moment with a woman he decided to leave behind, to the moment when he dedicated his life to the solitary pursuit of his ‘magnum opus’ and give up human company. He makes a recording, for his birthday, reflecting on his successes and his choices and his dreams. It is his last tape.

Beckett’s play is short (50 minutes), bitterly funny, and shot through with exquisite passages of prose, with hokey old music-hall routines, with surprising prop gags, and with a relentless focus on the sole actor and his voice. The collective concentration of a full house in the Barbican’s thousand-seat theatre is palpable, and it exalts the face and figure of Stephen Rea. Rea was always somewhat craggy, even when he played Clov in Beckett’s Endgame at the Royal Court as a youngish 30 year old, his previous encounter with Beckett’s work.

Now, under the subtle, savage top light, his face has crannies a mile deep, his naturally musical voice is made grating and hoarse; he is, to all appearances, coming to the end of things. It is a riveting performance, aided by Paul Keogan’s beautiful stark lighting and a sound design that makes a lot of the multiple jokes, and gives a weird overtone to simple moves – his shoes squeak with a great deal of reverb, which is funny and also disorientating. Kevin Gleeson is the sound designer. Vicky Featherstone and set designer Jamie Vartan provide Rea with a sympathetic, distraction-free context, and then allow Rea to make the show work its magic.

Runs until 3 May 2025