Krapp's Last Tape is a 1958 one-act play, in English, by Samuel Beckett. With a cast of one man, it was written for an Irish actor Patrick Magee and first titled "Magee monologue". It was inspired by Beckett's experience of listening to Magee reading extracts from Molloy and From an Abandoned Work on the BBC Third Programme in December 1957.University of Reading Library MS 1227/7/7/1, as cited in James Knowlson, "Krapp's Last Tape: the evolution of a play" , Journal of Beckett Studies 1.1. : "The first known holograph is contained in the Été 56 notebook in Reading University Library. It is headed Magee monologue and is dated 20 February 1958."
It is considered to be among Beckett’s major dramas.
History
First publication In a letter to a London bookseller Jake Schwartz on 15 March 1958, Beckett wrote that he had "'four states, in typescript, with copious notes and dirty corrections, of a short stage monologue I have just written (in English) for Pat Magee. This was composed on the machine from a tangle of old notes, so I have not the MS to offer you."Letter to Jake Schwartz, a bookseller in London, as qtd. in Rosemary Pountney, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama: 1956–1976 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988) 136; the quoted letter is held at the Beckett Collection, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, along with the typescript to which it refers.
According to Ackerley and Gontarski, "It was first published in Evergreen Review 2.5 (summer 1958), then in Krapp's Last Tape and Embers (Faber, 1959), and Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (Grove, 1960)."C. J. Ackerley, and S. E. Gontarski, eds., The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 2006) 302. Beckett’s own translation of the play into French, La Dernière Bande, was published in Les Lettres Nouvelles on 4 March 1959.
The available printed texts must not be taken as definitive. "By the mid-1950s Beckett was already talking and working like a director. In a letter to Rosset's editorial assistant, Judith Schmidt, on 11 May 1959, Beckett referred to the staging of Krapp's Last Tape as its 'creation'," and he made numerous significant changes to the text over the years as he was involved in directing the play.Stanley E. Gontarski, "Beckett in Performance" 200, in Lois Oppenheim, ed., Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies (London: Palgrave, 2004).
Others The first German performance, on 28 September 1959, was directed by Walter Henn at Berlin's Schillertheater, where 10 years later, on 5 October 1969, Samuel Beckett himself staged his text in a most successful performance (with Martin Held as Krapp).
The first American performance, on 14 January 1960, was directed by Alan Schneider and starred Donald Davis.
Synopsis
The curtain rises on a "late evening in the future."Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984) 55. Krapp, an old man, is sitting in his den in the dark, lit by a light above his desk. On his desk are a tape recorder and a number of tins containing reels of recorded tape. He reads aloud from a ledger to find a certain tape, but the words alone are not jogging his memory. He takes childish pleasure in saying the word ‘spool’.
The tape dates from the day he turned 39. His recorded voice says that he has just celebrated the occasion alone "at the wine house," jotting down notes in preparation for the later recording session. "The new light above my table is a great improvement,"Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984) 57 states the recorded Krapp, before describing how much he enjoys leaving it to wander off into the darkness so that he may return to the zone of light, identifying it with his essential self.
The voice reports that he has just reviewed an old tape from when he was in his late twenties. It amuses him to comment on his impressions of what he was like in his twenties, and the 69-year-old Krapp joins in the derisory laughter. The young man he was back then is described as idealistic and unrealistic in his expectations.
The voice reviews his last year, talking about sitting on a bench outside the nursing home and waiting for the news that his mother had died. Krapp in the current day is more interested in his younger self's use of the rather archaic word "viduity" (the state of being a widow) than the reaction of the voice on the tape to their mother's death. He stops listening to look up the word in a large dictionary. He returns to the tape; at the moment he learns of his mother's death, his younger self is in the process of throwing a rubber ball to a dog. He ends up simply leaving the ball with the dog.
The voice starts to describe the revelation he experienced at the end of a pier.Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett (London: Souvenir Press, 1990) 6. Krapp grows impatient when his younger self starts enthusing about this. He fast-forwards to near the end of the tape to escape the onslaught of words, where suddenly the mood has changed and he finds himself in the middle of a description of a romantic liaison between himself and a woman in a punt. Krapp lets it play out and then rewinds the tape to hear the complete episode.
Afterwards, Krapp loads a fresh tape and begins to recount his year. He is scathing when it comes to his assessment of his thirty-nine-year-old self. He finds he has nothing he wants to record for posterity, save the fact he "revelled in the word spool."Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984) 62. He mentions a trip to the park and attending Vespers, where he dozed off and fell off the pew. He also mentions his recent literary disappointments: "seventeen copies sold", presumably of his last book, eleven of which have gone not to interested readers but to foreign libraries. His sex life has been reduced to periodic visits by an old prostitute. Unlike his younger selves, Krapp has nothing good to say about the man he has become and even the idea of making a "last effort"Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber and Faber, 1984) 63. when it comes to his writing upsets him.
He retreats into memories from his dim and distant past, gathering holly and walking the dog of a Sunday morning. He then remembers the girl on the punt and wrenches off the tape he has been recording, swapping back to the prior tape and replaying the entire section again. This time he allows the tape to play to the very end, with the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp determinedly not regretting the choices he has made, certain that what he would produce in the years to come would more than compensate him for any potential loss of happiness.
Krapp makes no response to this but allows the tape to play on, silent, until the final curtain.
Structure In Waiting for Godot, Beckett uses a circular, symmetrical structure as the template for his play, in Film the template is the writings of Bishop Berkeley, and in Krapp's Last Tape, according to Anthony Cronin, he uses Manichaeism as a structural device: The dichotomy of light and dark ... is central to Manichaean doctrine ... Its adherents believed that the world was ruled by evil powers, against which the god of the whole of creation struggled as yet in vain ... Krapp is in violation of the three seals or prohibitions of Manichaeism for the elect: the seal of the hands, forbidding engagement in a profession, the seal of the breast against sexual desire, and the seal of the mouth, which forbids the drinking of wine ... Beckett [however] seems to have known no more about Manichaeism than is contained in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which he possessed.Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997) 485, 486.
Analysis "Krapp’s spool of life is almost wound, and the silent tape is both the time it has left to run and the silence into which he must pass."Rosemary Pountney, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama: 1956–1976 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988) 171. Whereas the younger Krapp talks about the "fire in me" the tired old man who sits listening is simply "burning to be gone." The title of the play seems obvious, that what we have witnessed is the recording of Krapp’s final tape, "yet there is an ambiguity: 'last' can mean 'most recent' as well as 'ultimate'. The speaker in Browning's My Last Duchess is already planning to marry his next duchess ... Still, one hopes for Krapp's sake that he will be gone before another year is over."Vivian Mercier, Beckett/Beckett (London: Souvenir Press, 1990) 184.
Black-and-white imagery features heavily throughout the play.Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997) 486."Martin Held talks to Ronald Hayman", in The Times, Saturday Review, 25 April 1970, as qtd. in James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull (London: John Calder, 1979) 82.
Characters Although there is only one person onstage, there are a number of 'characters' mentioned throughout. The play is considered to be Beckett at his most autobiographical, and it does draw heavily on biographical detail. He once told the scholar Lawrence Harvey, though, that his "work does not depend on experience – [it is] not a record of experience. Of course you use it."Undated interview with Lawrence Harvey, qtd. in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996) 371, 372. Beckett takes elements from his own life, his failed love life, his drinking, his – at the time – literary failures and looks where things might have gone. "When, in 1956, Vivian Mercier saw him in Paris, he told him that he felt 'all dried up, with nothing left but self-translation.'"Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: Flamingo, 1997) 472
Krapp Krapp was originally designated simply ‘A’ in the first draft. The first appearance of a title was "a manuscript edition to Typescript 2: Crapp’s Last Tape";Rosemary Pountney, Theatre of Shadows: Samuel Beckett’s Drama: 1956–1976 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988) 138. the more familiar Germanic spelling came later. The name Krapp with its excremental connotations had been used before by Beckett however. In his first play, Eleutheria (unstaged and unpublished during his life), dating back to 1947, the protagonist is Victor Krap, a young man who has decided to retreat from life and do nothing. He has been described as a world-weary anti-hero, a failed writer and seedy solipsist, a clear prototype for the later Krapp.Marius Buning (President, Dutch Samuel Beckett Society), Eleutheria Revisited, public lecture delivered at Teatro Quijano, Ciudad Real, Spain, 2 December 1997.
Krapp (as a boy) When the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp is talking about his neighbour's ritual singing in the evening he tries to remember if he sang as a boy and is unable to do so. He does recall attending Vespers but it would be unusual for him to attend Evensong without participating in the singing of the hymn. The sixty-nine-year-old Krapp sings a few lines from the "Now the Day is Over" in early performances of the play but Beckett excised this as being "too clumsily explicit".James Knowlson, "Krapp's Last Tape: The Evolution of a play, 1958–75" , Journal of Beckett Studies 1 (Winter 1976): 54.
The 39-year-old Krapp looks back on the 20-odd-year-old Krapp with the same level of contempt as the 20-odd-year-old Krapp appears to have displayed for the young man he saw himself for in his late teens. Each can see clearly the fool he was but only time will reveal what kind of fool he has become.