Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✭✩
by Samuel Beckett, directed by Mac Fyfe
Singing Swan & VideoCabaret, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto
October 4-21, 2018
Krapp at 39: “We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us”
Earlier this year Mac Fyfe’s revival of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape enjoyed a sold-out run and two sold-out extensions. Now it is back and if you missed it before, as I did, be sure to see it now. And if you did see the production, see it again if only to to marvel at the wonderful performance of Bob Nasmith as the title character.
Written as a curtain-raiser for the London-premiere of Beckett’s Endgame in 1958, Krapp’s Last Tape is one of Beckett’s most accessible plays. It concerns the title character who makes a reel-to-reel tape recording on every birthday documenting his accomplishments of the past year. We meet him in his den at his tape recorder on his 69th birthday. After a period of staring into space Krapp checks his watch, fumbles with his keys, opens one of his desk drawers, takes out a banana (a treat normally forbidden him because of an unspecified digestive problem) and lingers over eating it.
Director Mac Fyfe has Nasmith simply put the banana in his mouth and leave it there a minute as if relishing the pure sensual pleasure of it an as object. Fyfe’s direction also makes Krapp look foolish and like a little child, both of which add to the comedy and underscore the view of old age as a second childhood. Unfortunately, before Krapp has finished the banana, he slips on the discarded peel. Beckett thus relates his character to his beloved clowns by consciously using the timeworn cliché.
Before Krapp begins with his recording for this year, he especially wants to listen to a recording made when he was 39 (“box 3, spool 5” according to a note he has made). It turns out that that year was when his mother died after a long “viduity”, a word whose meaning he has now forgotten and has to look up in a dictionary. He listens with disgust to the boasting of his younger self about riding on the “crest of a wave” ready for his life’s magnum opus. Hilariously, just when his younger self is on the verge of explaining the great insight into life he has gained, the older Krapp fast-forwards, knowing that all that insight turned out to be nonsense. The one passage the older Krapp keeps returning to is when his younger self describes being in a boat with the woman he has just broken up with: “I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side”.
Once Krapp has deemed himself ready to record a tape for his present birthday, he finds he has nothing to say. One of the highlights of the year seems to have been when he revelled in saying the word “spool” – something we experienced just near the start of the play. Sometimes Krapp is so caught up in reverie, he forgets that the tape is recording nothing. Fyfe, Nasmith and lighting designer Chris Clifford highlight these moments and make them into chilling metaphors for Krapp’s entire enterprise. More than in previous productions I noticed how the tape running from a full reel to an empty one is so like an hourglass turned upside down. In these silences we see before us Krapp’s time literally running out with nothing to show for it.
It’s no wonder then that Krapp decides to abandon his present birthday recording and listen again to spool 5 from box 3 and his description of his time on the boat with the woman. The huge irony is that his younger self concludes: “Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back”. Nasmith stares out into the audience at this remark full of melancholy and resignation.
The play may consist in large part of an older man listening to his younger self on tape, but what grips us throughout sometimes with humour, sometimes with pity, is the range of reactions the older Krapp has while listening. Nasmith’s laughs, snorts, exclamations and subtle facial expressions are priceless as he mocks the pompous young man he used to be. Nasmith’s Krapp is still spry but clearly winding down in energy. This is, after all, as the title tells us his “last tape”.
The one thing one wishes Nasmith would show after Krapp’s frequent visits to a back room for, presumably from the sound of it, a swig or two of liquor, is how Krapp becomes progressively more intoxicated. Nevertheless, compared to John Neville’s Krapp for World Stage in 2000, who seemed rather an elderly actor than an unremarkable older man, or to Brian Denehy’s Krapp for Stratford in 2008, who missed out so much of the play’s humour, Nasmith’s embodiment of the character comes nearest to the ideal of utter ordinariness and self-mockery.
Mac Fyfe’s direction of the play is lovingly detailed. Only in two decisions does he add a metatheatrical layer to the play. First, is the slow drawing back of a creaking frayed curtain that covers the stage opening that emphasizes that we are seeing a play rather than peering in on a life through a fourth wall. This is similar to the technique Daniel Brooks used for his production of Endgame for Soulpepper in 2012. A more amusing addition of Fyfe’s is to have Krapp pick up the banana peel he had just slipped on and drop it into the audience. “Who of you will make clowns of themselves when they leave?” Fyfe seems to be asking.
In terms of costume design Angela Thomas follows Beckett’s description in his stage directions very closely, but somehow, especially because of Krapp’s tawdry clothing and unlaced boots, I felt for the first time how closely Krapp, though urban and not homeless, is related to Beckett’s other clowns. Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot (1953) have their fond memories of working in the Macon country that was somehow the shared peak of their lives. Nagg and Nell in Endgame (1957) remember with delight their time at Lake Como, a memory that sustains them through their present debility. Thus it is with the most complex mixture of emotions that play across his expressive face that Nasmith shows how Krapp regards what was the peak experience of his life that his younger self did not recognize as such at the time.
At less than an hour long, this is the perfect show for those who have never seen Beckett to get a taste of the great author. For those familiar with Beckett it is the chance to enjoy Bob Nasmith in a role that he brings so vibrantly to life.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Bob Nasmith as Krapp. ©2018 Graham Isador.
For tickets, visit www.passemuraille.ca/wp
2018-10-07
Krapp's Last Tape