krapp's last tape

not a 'krapp' play at all imo!

John Hurt as Krapp

Last week I threatened to write about Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, easily my favourite play and one of the texts which I return to most often, and this week I’m following through. But it’s not much of a threat: this is really and genuinely a beautiful play, and while Beckett has a well-earned reputation for difficulty and impenetrability, in many ways Krapp is extremely straightforward. There’s one character, an old man named Krapp, and he does three things over the course of the play: he records a tape of himself talking about his life, listens to old tapes of his former self doing the same, and tries somehow to amuse himself when he’s not doing the first two. Its essential theme — aging, and regret for past loss — is a relatively common one. But it’s also extraordinarily complex, because in some senses its action is split between two different points in Krapp’s life, or, more precisely, takes place in the interaction between those points. The images Krapp reaches for, either in his past or present incarnations, are frequently or typically opaque, and he does not feel the need to explain himself to us; when he listens back to old recordings, he seems to know what he’s searching for, but we have no idea. Old tapes are listened to only in parts, and are sometimes revisited later. Watching or reading Krapp feels like seeing someone reckoning with the accreted baggage and wreckage of their entire life, in all its complexity and ambiguity.

I guess a good place to start is by saying that the word ‘gooseberries’ always makes me cry. Not because of some currant-based childhood trauma I’m still working through, but because it’s the first word of the last recorded extract we hear in the play, an extract which is one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I know. The tape plays the voice of Krapp thirty years ago, and starts with him recalling a specific scene from his past — referred to in the play as the ‘farewell to love’ — and thus introducing a third chronological layer:

TAPE: —gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes. (Pause.) I asked her to look at me and after a few moments--(pause)--after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low.) Let me in. (Pause.) We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) 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.

There’s a lot going on in this. I should note, to start, that we get the start of the sentence which begins the taped monologue a bit earlier in the play:

TAPE: —upper lake, with the punt, bathed off the bank, then pushed out into the stream and drifted. She lay stretched out on the floorboards with her hands under her head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing down, bit of a breeze, water nice and lively. I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked her how she came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said. ...

It’s a story which has echoed through and across the play for a while, and seemingly through Krapp’s life for much longer than that. The thing which always hits me first is how gorgeous the prose is. It’s easy to pretend with Beckett that his writing is all austerity and nonsense, but he’s a really extraordinarily gifted stylist when he wants to be. There’s a horribly ceaseless rhythm to it like the beat of the water moving underneath the lovers, and it’s so calmly and vividly evocative in a way which I struggle to pin down. And it’s so ambivalent, so oddly tender; clearly it’s a farewell to love, but that love somehow remains in the cracks of it.

This scene may be the emotional core of the play, and of Krapp’s life; the moment which echoes for him throughout everything else, and which, perhaps, he will always regret. We first hear a section of the ‘farewell to love’ while Krapp impatiently skips through spool five of box three of his recordings; when he hits on it, he goes back and listens to it more fully. And then, just after it has ended and his younger self has moved onto other things — ‘Past midnight. Never knew—’ — he turns to recording himself. In between describing how miserable and empty his life now is, he pours scorn both on the person he was as a young man (as his younger self once did on his younger self) and on the idea of returning to all these memories: ‘Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.’ But after he pauses once more, all he says is ‘lie down across her.’ One of the things that I find fascinating in Krapp is how the structure of the play — meandering and confused and always returning to things half-completed — reflects Krapp’s state of mind, and allows us to sometimes, fleetingly and only in brief moments of clarity, see the associations he is making. 

‘Lie down across her’ is simply followed by a long pause and a sudden motion to start the tape playing. We watch him listen, once again, to the story, before finally we discover what it is that he interrupted when he paused it previously:

TAPE: … Pause. Krapp's lips move. No sound.

Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.

Pause.

Here I end this reel. Box--(pause)--three, spool--(pause)--five. (Pause.) Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.

Krapp motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in silence.

above: Patrick Magee in Krapp’s Last Tape; the role was originally written for him.

We never get the full story.  Although there are, scattered throughout the play, allusions to a lover who might be the person Krapp shared the punt with, we don’t know really who she was or why things ended. But we do learn the essential mistake Krapp made, I think. The younger Krapp keeps discussing a moment of revelation, a vision which propelled him, a ‘fire’, an ‘understanding’, a meaning. But it didn’t work. It didn’t change anything. Meaning couldn’t — can’t — come from one vision, from suddenly deciding to matter. Rejecting the idea of a ‘chance of happiness’ meant relying on the cold comfort of the ‘fire’ in him. And although he keeps returning, even as a young man, to that scene, to moments of connection, although he seems to at some point recognise the error he made, he doesn’t admit it. In youth, Krapp never mourns.

In old age, though, he does. There’s a terrible economy to the final image, of ‘Krapp motionless staring before him’ — at the audience, or at nothing, or at his past, or at the inevitability of his death — over the silence of a tape running on and saying nothing. It lays bare his mourning, showing us his reckoning with a profound loss and grief in real time. It seems, too, to somehow recall the water in motion underneath the younger Krapp and his lover as they lay ‘without moving’; the ceaseless movement of time, the change which cannot be controlled. But where before it was somehow comforting, almost recalling a cradle being rocked, here it is crushing. It’s the realisation that time already has beat, ceaselessly, on, and that you’re at the end of it. The play’s title is to an extent opaque, but its sense of finality is devastating as Krapp looks out at us. Beckett here is just masterful in combining these multiple different voices all speaking against each other and somehow as one: the youngest Krapp, rejecting a lover; the younger Krapp, refusing to mourn; and the Krapp of the play, regretting everything. 

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I can, and literally just have, written a lot of words about how clever Krapp’s structure is, how deftly it combines multiple chronological levels, the sophistication of its commentary on time and memory and loss. The bizarre polyphony with only one voice is astonishing in how it comes together and coheres into something beyond the individual. But like Krapp I can never quite move past the farewell. When he reads in his ledger that the tape contains this moment, the phrase is (in a very Beckettian way) broken across a page: ‘Farewell to—(he turns the page)—love’. Hitting love, he looks up for a long heartbreaking moment:

above: Patrick Magee in Krapp’s Last Tape

The end of the play is the experience of watching a heart split in two, or of someone realising their heart was broken long ago; it is Krapp and the audience coming to terms with what a life without love in it might be, or has been, like. I do not mean love in the limited, romantic sense; throughout the play, in its broad temporal sweep, the farewell on the punt is the only moment in which Krapp has meaningful contact and vulnerability with any other human being — apart, I suppose, from the viewer, sharing these moments at what’s probably the end of his life. But for all the tragedy, all the pathos, the play is deeply beautiful, and in its way holds onto what is not quite optimism but certainly not despair, because Krapp could have made different choices, and his best years did not have to pass. He could have valued the joy and comfort of being moved ‘gently, up and down, and from side to side’ with his lover, less vulnerable to time’s progress and pain. This is what I hold onto, and why I keep going back to Krapp and the farewell to love scene in particular: the idea that maybe, amidst ‘all the light and dark and famine and feasting of ... the ages,’ it is possible to hold onto love and comfort, and that doing so is absolutely essential. There’s an ambiguity in one of Krapp’s final lines in the present day of the play. He says to himself that ‘once wasn’t enough for you’ right before recalling and returning to the farewell to love, and it’s easy to take it as a critique of his constant attempts to return to the past; but it’s also true on another level. Once wasn’t enough for him; he needed more care and connection in his life, because everyone needs it; we all need a chance at happiness, and to take it.