✭✭✭✭✭ / ✭✭✭✭✭ 

by Samuel Beckett, directed by William Scoular / Graham Cozzubbo

du Maurier World Stage, York Quay Studio Theatre, Toronto

April 14-18, 2000

“Confrontations with the Past”

The Samuel Beckett double bill of “Footfalls” (1976) and “Krapp’s Last Tape” (1958), playing here as part of the du Maurier World Stage Festival, provides an excellent opportunity to see two of the finest actors working in Canada in challenging roles.  Elizabeth Shepherd plays May in “Footfalls” (with Jennifer Phipps as the off-stage Voice).  John Neville plays the title character in the second play.  Beckett is not a playwright one associates with these actors, but they inhabit their characters so fully one might think the plays had been written for them.

The well-conceived double bill takes up only 90 minutes including an intermission, but provides a rich evening of theatre because of the various parallels and contrasts between the two works.  Most obvious is that the first play is for two female voices, one on stage and one off, and the second for two male voices, Krapp on stage and his younger self on tape.  “Footfalls” is from Beckett’s last period when the theme of despair was no longer leavened with the humour of “Waiting for Godot” (1952) or “Endgame” (1957).  “Krapp’s Last Tape”, written the year after “Endgame”, early on establishes its genre when Krapp slips on a banana peel.  The contrast is further heightened in this production since the two plays have different directors and are directed in very different styles.  William Scoular emphasizes what is emblematic and abstract in “Footfalls”, while Graham Cozzubbo emphasizes the naturalistic in “Krapp’s Last Tape”.  Intellectually, it would have been more logical to present the two plays in chronological order.  That way we could see how Beckett takes the relatively straightforward situation in “Krapp” to compress it and make it more abstract in “Footfalls”.  Emotionally, however, it was a relief to move from the unmitigated gloom of “Footfalls” to Krapp’s world where gloom has not yet, but is just about to set in. 

“Footfalls” itself is a miniature play in four acts, each “act” announced by the chiming of the bell of a clock.  The work is played in semi-darkness, moving a shade darker in each “act”.  Much credit is due to the lighting designer, Robert Thomson, for making these gradations so precise in a play that is really about degrees of darkness, both inner and outer.  What we see, once our eyes adjust, is the figure of a woman seemingly bundled in rags wearily taking nine loud steps back and forth in a narrow rectangle of light a degree brighter than the surrounding murk.  On closer inspection we notice that the floor in the rectangle of light is bare while the rest of the stage is carpeted.  We also note that the woman is not wearing rags but a kind of full-length shawl.  Set and costume designer Janice Lindsay’s brilliant idea is to have the shawl seem to be made of the same material as the carpet.  The woman says she needs the bare floor to “hear the feet, however faint they fall”.  But the physical need for this bareness is matched by her mental plight of being wrapped up in persistent thoughts.  Just as her feet take her nine steps, “wheel” and walk back, so her thoughts continually “revolve”.  “Will you never have done . . . revolving it all?” the voice of her mother asks throughout the play. 

We never exactly find out what “it all” is.  Through her disjointed speeches, in which her thoughts seem painfully to emerge into sound, we learn that May has been caring for her bed-ridden mother and that guilt lies behind the insomnia that drives her to pace at night.  As most Beckett characters do, May is composing an autobiographical story, this one about a girl named Amy who seems to have left mass before the final amen, thus provoking her mother’s disappointment.  More we never know except that from that time things changed for both of them, compelling Amy (May) to stay in the house she was born in.  She (and we) still hear her mother’s voice (or imagined voice) reproving her and asking, in effect, when she will forgive herself so that her pacing will stop.  Elizabeth Shepherd, attractive and robust in real life, makes May look haggard and expressionless except for the searching eyes of someone in the profoundest despair.  She still addresses herself to her mother, but every word seems painful to make.  Still within that tortured voice, Shepherd is able to distinguish the voices of mother and daughter in the story she tells. 

With each further degree of darkness, her steps, already difficult, become a corresponding degree more laboured until she is left standing in the middle of her rectangle.  In an amazing moment on stage, she seems to age ten or more years as we watch her.  Jennifer Phipps as the Voice amplified from off stage had its usual richness and strength, here used to contrast with attenuated voice Shepherd uses as May.  Both were directed to speak with extreme slowness, thus elongating their vowels into a kind of moan.  This distortion of speech and gait and the figure of this ghost of a woman clad in her enormous shawl can all be found in the Noh plays of Japan, making me wonder if they were the model for Scoular’s style.  The answer to when May will stop “revolving it all” comes in the last “act” when the lights go up to find no one on stage and then go down again.

Compared with “Footfalls”, “Krapp’s Last Tape” is one of Beckett’s most accessible works.  There are no questions of when or where the action is occurring or what it is really about.  It is Krapp’s 69th birthday and he is in his den preparing to made his annual taped review of the past year.  Unlike the semi-darkness of the first play, Krapp at his table is in a pool of bright light.  This is not a play where we are to contemplate the image of a human being enslaved by despair, but rather one where we witness its onset.  The play begins with a cliché of comedy when Krapp slips on the peel of banana, a forbidden enjoyment given his digestive problems.  To prepare himself, Krapp listens to what is clearly his favourite tape, “box three, spool five”.  Much of the humour of the first part of the play comes from the 69-year-old Krapp’s varied reactions, from interest to disgust, to this tape of himself made when he was 39.  The younger Krapp is also Neville, masterfully capturing the young man’s vigour and pomposity.   He boasts he’s on “the crest of a wave”, ready to write his magnum opus, and although alone claims he’s glad to have said farewell to love.  The younger Krapp thinks the most important thing he has to record is a major revelation he had about the meaning of everything.  We get the build-up to it but never hear the revelation because the older Krapp fast-forwards through it knowing it’s all tosh.  The passage he tries to find and then plays is about an encounter with a woman in a boat on the river. 

When the older Krapp fumblingly tries to make his new tape for the year, he realizes he has nothing to say.  He prime event was revelling in saying the word “spool”, something we witnessed just minutes before.  Eventually, he decides to postpone finishing his own tape and listens instead to his favourite part of “spool five”.  He is so entranced with this memory of the woman in the boat that he unwittingly lets the tape play beyond that passage to his younger self’s conclusion that “Perhaps my best years are gone.  When there was a chance of happiness.  But I wouldn’t want them back.”  At this Krapp lets the tape play on as he stares into space.  In Neville’s face the corners of the mouth turned down so far that it chillingly became exactly like the traditional mask of Tragedy.

In these short 45 minutes we have moved from the farce at the beginning to this realization that this last “chance of happiness” is now 30 years ago.  Krapp knows he does want the years back whose record he keeps listening to, but now the hopelessness of this has dawned on him.  The tape tonight is his last tape.  Since the actor playing Krapp is silent for much of the play, the focus is on Krapp’s face as he listens.  Neville’s expressive face carried us through Krapp’s brief moments of pleasure at the start to befuddlement, disgust, rapture, mixtures of all these, to final despair.  A number of times the two Krapps react simultaneously, the hearty laugh of the younger Krapp contrasting with the feeble laugh of the older.  The naturalism of Cozzubbo’s direction and the absorption of Neville into his character were so strong I had to remind myself I was watching a play.

As Krapp stares outwards, we realize that life is like the tape being played out as it turns, just as May’s life runs out before our eyes as she “wheels” in her pacing and revolves in her mind.  May is already enveloped by a past memory she can’t let go of; we see Krapp coming to this horrible revelation.  In both cases, what Beckett seems to demand from the audience is compassion for his characters and, by extension, for human beings in general.  This double bill demonstrates how Beckett, two directors and the two main actors can elicit that compassion in two different but complementary ways.

©Christopher Hoile

Photo: John Neville in a still from Spider by David Cronenberg. ©2003 Sony Pictures.