We Are All Krapp: Samuel Beckett Lives On


From U2 to the Wooster Group to the current Met Opera production of Doctor Atomic, performers have tried to integrate media technology into the theatrical experience. Somehow that collision between the immediacy of theater with looming electronic images and sounds never quite pays off. I recently saw a reworking of Samuel Beckett for the digital age, Krapp, 39 and was reminded how the playwright often referred to as the “Last Modernist” (or First Postmodernist) implicitly understood media’s role in our lives and on the stage.

Beckett’s 1958 play, Krapp’s Last Tape, was conceived for one actor, portraying a failed novelist on his sixty-ninth birthday. The character Krapp celebrates his anniversary by listening to recordings that he made on previous birthdays, particularly one created by his thirty-nine-year-old self. The distant voice on the tape speaks of youthful desires and ambition, which were never fulfilled. In fact, the reels of tape embody different possibilities of self that Krapp has grappled with and forgotten over his life. For Beckett, time is not a river, but cartons of tape that keep piling up. On those reels of tape our memories reside. Krapp’s Last Tape is at the intersection of who we are and how we electronically remember.

When Beckett conceived Krapp in the midfifties, the tape recorder was just being merchandized for personal use. Reel-to-reel tape was created in Germany in the midthirties and not developed by the Allies until after World War II. Actually when the play was first produced, it was technically impossible to have a personal audio record of your life thirty years before. Magnetic tape was a recent phenomenon; postwar production allowed for the privatization of media for middle class memory. But we don’t critique Beckett for his electronic expertise.

Beckett was prescient in how our lives are refracted and preserved by our own private media. Over the last few decades several artists, most notably Atom Egoyan, have investigated how media determines and confuses collective and personal memory. Krapp would be a touchstone for his memory meditations, and, in 2000, Egoyan adapted the play for television, with John Hurt as his wizened media Everyman. Here a Hurtful Krapp sardonically comments on his past self. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jV5I9vtouE

Actor Michael Laurence has recast Krapp for the new millennium. First presented at the 2008 New York International Fringe Festival, where it received the award for Outstanding Solo Show, and now running at the Soho Playhouse, his Krapp, 39 looks at how private media overwhelms the struggling self. Krapp is no longer an old man looking back at life, but a youthful thirty-nine-year-old, trying to make sense of his many selves preserved by phone messages, computer screens, and home video. His character, obsessed with Beckett, continually undergoes the painful self-scrutiny that the Irish playwright thought was reserved for old age. Laurence dramatically shows us that the proliferation of new media now engulfs us with all sorts of memory, which is almost paralyzing. New technology has made us all Krapp, scavenging the splinters of our media lives. Here is the Krapp that defines our digital destiny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2-zZK0qX_Y

Cross-posted at The Paley Center for Media.

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February 4th, 2009
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