Beckett is a master of metatheatre. His plays are as much about the concept of theater itself – and the subversive act of watching them – as anything else. So he would approve, I think, of the artistic choices the Royal Court has chosen to revive the one-act play Krapp’s last tapewhich first graced its stage in 1958 as the curtain raiser to the English-language performance of The end of the game. Raising the curtains this time is a new short venture in Waiting for Godot universe by Leo Simple-Asante, winner of the Royal Court Young Theater Award, which invites us to imagine what was holding up Beckett’s elusive eponym. Sharp and knowing, brilliantly performed by Shakeel Hakim as Godot and Flora Ashton as a disembodied voice, it’s a fitting reminder of the blurring of reality we’re here to experience.
Star stalwart Gary Oldman, who was born the same year the show debuted, himself returns to the Royal Court after almost 40 years, just as the character he plays returns to his past self over the decades through old reel-to-reel tape recordings. And those reels are played on the same machine, sharing the stage with Oldman as a seductive, gently clicking co-star, as used by John Hurt and Michael Gambon when they played the part. The tape recorder, like Oldman, has been here before.
Because the past, in the world of Krapp’s last tapeit’s never too far away. It continues, in crackling recordings, our nearly seventy-year-old protagonist grasping as his only real legacy: an old man, listening to a younger man, who has just listened to an even younger man, all three reflecting on missed opportunities and lessons not fully learned. Oldman holds the stage—among a set he designed himself, hopelessly strewn with mind-stirring attic debris, lit by a lone flickering lamp—with insistent intensity. For the first long minutes, he does nothing but squirm, shuffle, and purposefully eat bananas. His fingers tap on the buttons of the recorder and gently wind the reels of the tapes (a word whose spondaic rhythms bring childlike delight to the proclamation) with mesmerizing determination. Years of emotion rise and fall in his expression as his younger self brings long buried memories to the surface. The words he once knew. A dog he once admired. A girl who once hugged him.
This isn’t a show about nostalgia, though you’d be forgiven for thinking it might be. It’s not a tragedy either, not entirely, even though the tears flow. It is about endurance, regret, endurance and the relentless march of time. Over the course of 55 minutes, we see a not-quite-realized life unpacked in carefully labeled reels cataloged across the decades. We see the folly of youth, then of middle age, relived, which from the eyes and ears of a man never learned better, but who may still have more time than he realizes. Quietly heartbreaking, poignant, this treatise on aging and our persistence and reliance on technology as the guardian of our memories doesn’t feel 68 years old. But then, what 68-year-old does?
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(Further reading: Turandot, the last canonical opera)
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