Krapp’s Last Tape
I directed KRAPP’S LAST TAPE by Samuel Beckett, as part of Haven Chicago’s DIRECTOR’S HAVEN 7 cohort. the festival ran March 27-April 10 at the Den Theatre.
a dying writer revisits a tape he recorded at age 39 and finds a vast chasm between the man he is and the man he was. Beckett’s critically acclaimed Krapp’s Last Tape is a meditation on loneliness, failure, and the technology of memory.
director’s note
on the first day of rehearsal for Krapp’s Last Tape, I read aloud an article by John Wallace called “The Last Days of Samuel Beckett”, which recounts the unglamorous end of his life in Paris. Beckett’s final days were spent in state-run nursing home “in the 14th arrondissement—a humble part of the French capital.” his room had blue walls and a small brown fridge. an oxygen tank, a television for Ireland vs France rugby matches, a bookshelf with a biography of Oscar Wilde and of Nora Joyce. a non-slip mat. a tiny courtyard with a tree where he fed pigeons. a daily walk through the Left Bank puffing on a cigarette, buying his friends coffee. a bottle of whiskey. those closest to Beckett were outraged to see the prolific writer in a such a dismal place, but Beckett insisted he was comfortable and stayed until his quiet passing on December 22, 1989. what to make of Beckett’s buoyancy while slowly drowning, this acclaimed man’s contentment amongst the discarded?
in Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett situates the character’s central epiphany around the spring Equinox, a day when the Sun shines directly on Earth's equator, resulting in nearly equal amounts of daylight and darkness. in rehearsal, this way of balancing became an ambition of ours, always asking: how much complexity can we hold at once? how do we love so we can lose?
here it is dark. here there is a light above a table. here the summers have gone cold. here birds are a memory. touch is a memory. what remains has been difficult to kill. nothing really matters and it is makes me futile. nothing really matters and it makes me feel free.
nihilism is an Equinox, a delicate shifting point between the crushing weight of regret and the lightness of being that emerges when there’s nothing left to struggle against. somehow, we’re laughing.
I find a lot of hope amongst the rubble of this play. it’s not a naïve or saccharine hope nor is it a redemptive one, not capable of saving. it is a story of a person who has found a way to survive his own mind.
in 2024, this play resonates with me anew as a story of intense social isolation and what is lost when we forfeit a life of doing/being/touching for a life of thinking/watching/capturing. the play now seems to rattle with climate doom we are only coming to understand more intimately. it also resonates with me as a story about someone who is trying to capture their experiences and store them in a technological memory, not dissimilar to the impulse behind Instagram, behind my writing this now. thankfully, none of this needs to be overlaid—Beckett has written something so charged with the essential terrors (and comforts!) of the human condition that I imagine it will prove itself relevant for ages to come. I hope you catch a glimpse of yourself in it.