Writer: Samuel Beckett
Director: Kevin Short
In this era of adaptations and lame reimaginings, it’s great to find a straightforward production of a rarely performed classic. Samuel Beckett may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but his work has always made sense to me, with its poetic bleakness, ruminations on existence and tiny explosions of unforced humour. His writing appears spare and easy to compose, but it has a lived-in depth to it, a gravitas that can’t quite take itself seriously.
In this piece, the ageing Krapp (Kevin Short) has a routine he struggles to keep, frequently consulting his pocket watch and reacting accordingly. He has a complicated index system for the recordings he’s made over the years, but manages to find the passage he was looking for.
Along with us, he listens intently to his voice on tape, as it delivers scraps of remembrance of key scenes from his life. It’s not too hard to join the dots and get a fuller picture of the experiences he alludes to: precious moments with a lost lover; a dying mother who takes forever to slip away. The lines have musicality and economy.
The way Krapp interacts with his younger self is intentionally, unintentionally hilarious. This is clever stuff. As in Waiting for Godot, the journey to nowhere has been a long one. Between listening to an old tape, reflecting on it and recording a new one, there are three competing versions of the truth as the old man sees it.
Kevin Short, with his long wild white hair, holds our attention throughout. He copes admirably with tricky bits of stage business, not least fiddling with a reel-to-reel tape recorder. His delivery is so good, capturing the cadences and rhythms of Beckett’s language so precisely, the script could have been written for him. If you want to see something really special, acting and production of the highest calibre, you’ll need to grab a ticket quickly. There are only a handful of performances left in this short run.
Runs until: 9 August 2025
