Spooool!
I just returned from seeing a production of Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape”, in English, in Ankara. It was…not very good. But having lived in Turkey for almost a year and a half now, I wasn’t prepared to miss seeing plays as much as I apparently do.
I’ve always been too suspicious about plays. I can’t even write or say the word “theater” without feeling like I should adjust an ascot or smoke a pipe. I’ve always been horrified by Americans who spell the word with the last two letters transposed, as if the British spelling somehow doubles the fanciness.
I’ve seen plays too full of gratuitous look-ma-I’ve-been-to-college cultural references, too coy by half, or far too earnest in the non Wildean sense. But there have been precious stones in the rough. Among them was Krapp’s Last Tape, performed by Dublin’s Gate Theatre (sorry…their spelling) over eleven years ago in Berkeley. The Irish actor David Kelly (he starred in “Waking Ned Devine”) played Krapp. My whole walk and BART ride back to San Francisco was dazed and productively confused.
If you haven’t seen the play, here is how it goes. A 69-year-old man listens to tape recordings of himself when he was 39. On these tapes he is commenting—in the throes of full midlife cynicism—on the romantic skewing of his early twenty-something self. In a sense, the elderly Krapp is getting his past in stereo, and the resulting emotional dissonance inspires the expected but precisely rendered evasions and outbursts. Like many of Beckett’s works, there are moments of great “low” comedy. But god, the thwack to the gut you get in other moments…you can’t help evading your own self when sitting in the dark of the playhouse.
It just so happens—in the most expected way of all—that today I’m about the same age as the midlife Krapp to whom his elderly doppelganger listens with such disgust. Or, more precisely: the midlife Krapp whose scoffing disgust the elderly Krapp listens with exasperated contempt. Did seeing the play in my late twenties serve as a preemptive strike against middle-aged self-excoriating reflections on my own past? I like to think so, but who doesn’t hide their revulsion toward their former selves with either a patronizing smile or a metastasizing numbness?
The ending was played for high drama, Krapp throwing his tapes and boxes around and across the stage. In a moment I’m still struggling not to treat as a metaphor, I was hit by one of the spools. (Pictured above.)
