Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” In The Digital World Of Zoom Theatre

On screen an image of worlds within worlds opens this Zoom version of Samuel Beckett’s stage play Krapp’s Last Tape. With the lights down low my laptop screen fills with a close-up image of the leading-edge of a desk and what I later learn to be a Grundig TK23 reel-to-reel tape recorder poised on the very edge of the desk, waiting, watching, listening, preparing to tell me all. This taut moment of suspense is lit by an angle-poise lamp leaning-in at an acute angle interrogating the scene and dispassionately piercing the darkness as it watches the developing scene. Inserted into the top right-hand corner of the screen, another film, another world and another view on the same scene is seen as a small square stamped onto most of the proceeding scenes. With barely a hint of its comings and goings this small stamp shows other destinations, other worlds past, present and future, other stories shadowing, ghosting and always expanding our POV (point of view) of Krapp. On screen there are two plays occurring simultaneously and exuberantly playing with the viewers spatiotemporal perceptions. Whispering and joyfully giggling to each other these two worlds simultaneously show me a Krapp here in the present, there in the future, and sometimes over there in the past. Two worlds always offering alternative visions and other possible lives of Krapp. Whilst cutting, chopping and changing the viewers POV of space, time and causality (cause and effect) this version of Krapp asks what humanity has become in the digital age. This is theatre for our digitally mediated world:

in which all reality is an incomprehensible series of impressions, fleeting moments, instants that may give us some brief flashes of where and who we are, even as we are lost among the multiple spatial and temporal contexts enmeshed in our web of online connections. (Balaam, 2024: 1-5)

Philip Robinson’s online version explores a multitude of spatial and temporal geographies, offering endless versions of Krapp’s Last Tape. This online version stems from a live theatrical project entitled Krapp in Your Living Room. In which Robinson, in the character of Krapp stages the play in the intimate setting of an audience members real living room and kitchen. This new laptop or Smartphone theatrical version recreates the same intimate and immersive experience.

This zoom production made with The Waiting Times Project is a ‘staged filming and recorded performance’ of Krapp’s Last Tape that was specially produced and filmed for the online environment of the 8^th International Conference of the Samuel Beckett Society: Beckett’s Environments, 1-2 December 2023. The new film premiered at the online conference 1 December 2023 and was then available for viewing for the rest of the conference. Philip Robinson in Conversation was an opportunity for conference participants to speak to Philip Robinson on a zoom that took place on the second day of the conference. Robinson’s version of Krapp’s Last Tape is currently available for viewing on YouTube. For this production of Krapp’s Last Tape Philip Robinson is the performer, Polly Whitfield is the play director, Michael Flexer the video director and editor, and many thanks go to the Samuel Beckett Society, Edward Beckett and Crediton Arts Centre for this film. Music was Franz Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger (D957) performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore.

The omnipresent tick and tock of an old-fashioned circular alarm clock is the first ‘stamp’ or inserted scene married to the opening scene. Determining Krapp’s journey around space and time the sight and sound of the clock ghosts and echoes throughout the whole film. Imperceptibly moving through the planes of the digital screen the sound of the clock does not just become louder, it becomes more present with me in my room. In a binaural effect that permeates the whole play and is replicated in the visual image, the sound travels from the back to the fore ground of the digital screen. This spatialized sound effect not only creates a three-dimensional soundscape, but it seems to have the ability to expand beyond the boundaries of the screen. Slowly creeping into my room, the sound seeps through the screen, dissolving it, making it a permeable elastic membrane able to stretch out and capture and contain me within Krapp’s world. Creating an immediate sense of presence this three-dimensional soundscape is applied to every sound in the play; conjuring-up curiously dead sepulchral echoes in Krapp’s voice.

It is hypnotic. I wait, and feel time move. But a close-up of the clock shows that it has no second-hand with which to mark-out the tick and tock of time. There is an uncanny, eerie and uncomfortable sense of suspended animation. Waiting for the sound of Krapp’s feet to fall on the scene and obliterate time, the tension and suspense becomes almost unbearable as I wait, and wait, and wait, for an interminably long time to meet Krapp. Finally at around 20-seconds I hear his feet in a sandpaper shuffle slowly approach the scene. In anticipation I hold my breath as I constantly and impatiently search the screen(s) for my first sight of Krapp – for another 20-seconds. Finally, he appears and the physical sense of relief (I breathe again) is palpable. As a pile of crumpled, creased and grubby clothes on the verge of collapsing into a heap drags itself into the scenes. Slack jawed, with a thousand-mile stare and weighted down by the weight of the world on his back Krapp is collapsing and sinking downwards, he has little energy, life or time left.

Tucked-up and barricaded against the world behind his desk Krapp once more slumps exhausted into his chair. Slowly rotating his head, he looks over his shoulder to stare into the darkness behind him in a desperate attempt to pinpoint where the sound of his own feet with their ‘sandpaper shuffle’ comes from as they continue to sound and approach the scene. Haunted by the soundtrack of the habits of a lifetime Krapp still has not spoken at 1 minute, 14-seconds. The deep and long inhalation and exhalation of breath that he now takes reaches beyond Beckett’s ‘great sigh’ (Beckett, 2009b: 3), to capture and contain in the mind’s-eye Beckett’s stage play Breath; but this is not the breath of life, but of death.

Time stops. The tick and tock stops. To be replaced by a deep and still silence that resounds so loudly its echoes are heard until the bitter end. An absolute silence that pours over Krapp, drowning, stooping and bowing him down as he peels his first banana. Then in a sudden moment of discontinuous confusion I hear no sound as I see the banana peel hit the floor. A discontinuity of sound and vision prevalent here and in Beckett’s work, as we hear ‘HENRY’s boots on shingle’ (Ibid. 2009a: 35) throughout his radio play Embers, but ADA has ‘[No sound as she sits.]’ (Ibid. 39) on the shingle. Time is out of joint. It is unnerving to see and feel space and time disjointed, fractured and broken. As unnerving as waiting for Krapp to bite-down on the banana held in his mouth for an interminable 25-seconds. And as unnerving as seeing the Beckettian (almost Selfie) dismembering of Krapp’s body in close-up. Close-ups that continually fill my screen with images of a broken body; the trunk of a body, the lower half of his face, his foot or his hand all in gritty detail.

Abruptly cutting to an empty peacock blue half-panelled corridor the realities start multiplying. The ‘stamp’ comes and goes, continually swapping space and time with the main frame world, but with the introduction of the corridor additional worlds past and present join the party. With his trunk passing close to camera, we imagine Krapp’s passage between two worlds – shuffling between the present ‘den’ (Ibid. 2009b: 3) that is a world of memory and imagination overflowing with the past preserved in dairies and reel-to-reel tapes, and the present kitchen, an off-camera dark world of forgetfulness drowning in the sound of the chink of ‘Bottle against glass’ (Ibid. 10) – the pathos is painful.

Staring at a now empty corridor with only the echoes of shuffling feet for company I patiently wait, again, for Krapp. Suddenly, I am subjected to a shocking and unexpected theatrical moment. At 8-minutes in Krapp suddenly smashes and disintegrates the fourth wall. Reaching through my laptop screen Krapp becomes present in the room with me. Leaning his trunk into the main frame image of the empty corridor, bent in at an acute angle out of the off-camera darkness Philip/Krapp(?) abruptly looks through the screen directly at me, instantly I think: “Oh, Krapp, he can see me!” Heart missing a beat I am instantly jolted out of my complacent viewing, shocked and electrified I leap six-feet out of my seat. Then guilt, embarrassment and a tiny bit of fear swirls around in my mind, mixing, merging and mingling time like the pool of frothy, foaming coca cola that dripped off the edge of my school desk after soaking and irredeemably staining a lifetimes doddles dancing among the O-Level mathematical formulars never to be understood. Sprinting back to the here-and-now I feel caught-out and trapped in Philip’s/Krapp’s(?) look of askance.

This is not the only instance in this production producing this Brechtian/Beckettian alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt), but it is certainly the most shocking. The consequences of producing this distance-provoking formalism results in a metatheatrical hyper-reflexivity, that draws the attention of the viewer to the mechanisms of the medium creating that reality. Caught in Philip’s/Krapp’s frozen stare he suspends the suspension of my disbelief and reaches out beyond the camera lens through the digital screen and directly looking into my eyes Philip/Krapp reminds me that this is a film of a play and not reality. As CLOV in Beckett’s Endgame reminds the audience they are in a theatre: ‘… [He gets down, picks up the telescope, turns it on auditorium.] I see … a multitude … in transports … of joy’ (Ibid. 2009c: 20).

This metatheatrical hyper-reflexivity throwing me out of the illusionary world of the play is an effect that is conjured-up every time Krapp passes through the blue corridor. Primarily due to my uncertainty concerning if the jittering, jumping and flickering of the image as Krapp passes through the corridor is a special effect or the result of a technical failure. An uncertainty that is again unceremoniously throwing me back into the real world to wonder if the wobbly image here, and in the extreme close-ups, are meant to imitate the imprecision of an analogue screen in a digital world. A decidedly low-definition image experience that forces the viewers imagination and metaphor onto the stage – the corridor is not a real place, it is a representation of time, literally the passage of time.

Then, at nearly 10 minutes into the film this incrediable mime becomes a Talkie and I hear Krapp speak ‘Ah!’ (Ibid. 2009b: 4). Mirroring the background silence that arises from the trenches of the impenetrable deep and permeates every moment seen, Krapp’s vocal pauses are so long and his body’s motion so frozen in the silence that I once more suspect the ‘frozen screen’ of technical failure. Robinson’s ability to stop any physical motion instantly is beyond the speed of sight. The sharpness and instantaneousness of stopping and starting his motion causes me to physically recoil. This ‘stop-motion-man’ animated by his memories becomes a marionette, a puppet that asks me to question who and what Krapp is. Breaking the fourth wall again – after the brief moments here and there for its imperfect repair – Krapp’s extended physical and vocal frozen pauses work in concert, forcing me to question; if Krapp is real, is Krapp acting the part of Krapp, Krapp is an actor performing the life of Krapp, as Philip the actor acting the part of Krapp is acting out Krapp’s life. Realities multiply. This palimpsest laying of multiple realities mirrors the action of the soundscape by creating multiple dimensional planes within the digital screen. Again, seeming to stretch and make the screen elastic and permeable as once more Krapp captures and draws me into the screen.

From the existential heartland this stop-motion-man produces one unforgettable image, a picture that never leaves the screen and will forever haunt me. Throughout his dalliance with death, deep and long shadows etch dark cervices and clefts across a face with a mouth permanently stretched and frozen open in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The shadows dance into his mouth, across and over his face, the desk, his tapes, reaching-out and giving shape and substance to his mother, the dark nurse, old Miss McGlome, Biannca and Effie, forever here. I cannot work out why the image of this primal scream never seems to leave the screen. But gently it creeps up on me – ‘alone in the dark, isolated, lost, untethered, drifting alone in the vastness of space’ and time, there is no one to see him (Balaam, 2024: 4). With no-one to talk to his jaw becomes frozen, heavy, weighted down, exhausted like the newly dead. But suddenly a spark of fire and passion will animate Krapp and he will briskly and firmly massage and rub the life back into his jaw unlocking his frozen means of communication to gaily sing ‘Spooool!’ (Beckett, 2009b: 4) – pronouncing, annunciating and declaring all of his words deliberately Krapp re-learns how to speak.

It is an extraordinary production that ends with showing the ‘truth’ behind the reality seen on the screen. In the final metatheatrical moment a black and white moving image takes the viewer around the room where the filming took place. A room empty of people but full of the detritus needed for creating other worlds: cameras, microphones, scripts, water bottles, carrier bags and fire extinguishers – this is the real world.

As real as Philip Robinson’s extraordinary portrayal of Krapp. Robinson truly makes the character of Krapp his own. In a unique, powerful, alive and visceral performance Robinson brings Beckett’s text alive – making the invisible visible. In a visually driven mediatized culture, every movement and every word Philip/Krapp says concretizes, solidifies, shapes and forms and ultimately visualizes Beckett’s words. Words that show me how the unconscious mind works, with all its fractured, chaotic, unconnected and disassociated thoughts making random, obscure connections and associations into a life.

This Zoom version of Krapp’s Last Tape is ultimately an ensemble production, a collaboration that aims to explore how the digital technology of Zoom speaks to the analogue technology in Krapp’s Last Tape, to try and reveal what that conversation between technologies does to the human experience.

My thanks go to Philip Robinson for kindly sharing not only his notes from the enlightening in Conversation session from the second day of the conference, but also for generously giving his time and thoughts around Samuel Beckett and Krapp during a very enjoyable extended Beckett lunch.

Cited

Balaam, Annette. ‘A Live Journey into the Heart of Digital Reality from UNBOX ME! A Performance Review’, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, 6:1 (2024) Spring 24: 1-5.

Balaam, Annette. ‘STUMPED. By Shomit Dutta. Directed by Guy Unsworth. Original Theatre Online. Live streamed from Lord’s Cricket Ground, St. Johns Wood, London, October 2, 2022’, Theatre Journal, 75, (2023): 358-360.

Balaam, Annette. ‘STUMPED: Live Theatre in the Age of Hybrid Realities: By Shomit Dutta, Theatre Royal Bath, 27 May 2023’, The Theatre Times, 3 September 2023, (2023).

Beckett, Samuel. All That Fall and Other Plays for Radio and Screen. ed. Everett Frost. London: Faber and Faber, 2009a.

Beckett, Samuel. Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Shorter Plays. ed. S. E. Gontarski. London: Faber and Faber, 2009b.

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. ed. Rónán McDonald. London: Faber and Faber, 2009c.

 

Link to Philip Robinson’s Krapp in Your Living Room project version of Krapp’s Last Tape on YouTube.

 

Annette Balaam holds a PhD in modern and contemporary theatre and performance, and Digital and Virtual reality from the University of Bristol. She has a particular interest in the work of Samuel Beckett and how his work prefigures our experience in the digital world. She regularly presents her work at international conferences online and in-person. She has written widely on Beckett’s work and is published in journals, such as: the Theatre Journal, PARtake, The Theatre Times, The Beckett Circle, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and LONGITŪDINĒS. She regularly writes reviews for these publications.