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Krapp's Last Tape
by Samuel Beckett
Directed by Matt Aston
Lakeside Arts Centre (co-produced with York Theatre Royal 2009)
February 2003 / Spring 2006 / Autumn 2009

On the occasion of his birthday Krapp reviews his life and listens to tape recordings he made decades earlier,
when he was young and in his prime.

He listens to the promises he made and the fruition to which they came …

As he listens to his past, to these days gone by, all categorised and coded by spool, he begins to face the
realisation that he has wasted his life a life that now approaches its end.

Krapp’s realisation becomes increasingly poignant as he begins to record his last tape ...

Award-winning actor Kenneth Alan Taylor brings Samuel Beckett’s acclaimed and classic monodrama to life.

'Krapp's Last Tape' (Lakeside Arts Centre / York Theatre Royal)

The York Press (2009)

Samuel Beckett’s soul-searching Krapp’s Last Tape is billed as a dark comedy. Well, it is definitely dark.

Krapp’s desk is painted black, and so is his bin, his books, his tape boxes, his chair, his lonesome overhead
lampshade. His clothing, from Steptoe waistcoat to scuffed, unpolished shoes, is black too, likewise his
humour, and beneath his blancmange of grey hair he looks in blacker mood still.

You have plenty of time to study such details in Mark Walters’ deathly design. Kenneth Alan Taylor’s Krapp
is going about his daily grind in a cocoon of gloom, so enervated that he probably couldn’t be bothered to
look up the meaning of ennui.

Everything is a drag, whether pulling one leg across the floor to keep up with the other or methodically
shuffling his way around his desk as Krapp scrapes his keys along the perimeter. Unlocking a drawer,
he takes out a banana – an act of medical defiance we learn later – and consumes it with rare glee, only
to slip subsequently on the discarded skin.

It has been that kind of day: a day to match his name. To this point, Krapp has said nothing but Taylor’s
lugubrious looks have said everything, as silently expressive as a mime artist.

The first voice you will hear is that of Krapp, recorded 30 years earlier on his now cumbersome,
old-fashioned tape machine. Listening again to his past disappointments in love, writing and his
younger self, Krapp is pooling his thoughts for his last tape, but the words won’t come. “Nothing to say,”
he curses into the microphone, disturbed anew by the inadequacy of a wasted life.

He is 69, an old, drink-decayed 69, but younger than Taylor by two years. The Nottingham Playhouse
panto dame first played him six years ago, then again in 2006, and this latest revival under the direction
of Matt Aston will be Krapp’s last hour for him. You sense it matters all the more to this esteemed theatre
veteran.

The prospect of performing in York was the deal clincher, returning Taylor to The Studio where he had
excelled last year as fading, bitchy pantomime dame Harold Thropp in Twinkle Little Star.

The ravaged Krapp is another lonely grump but, unlike Thropp, he will not rage against the dying of the
light, and Taylor already has the look of a ghost by the close of play.

So, is it a comedy? Certainly Krapp’s tale of woe is not a tragedy, but Taylor’s bravura performance finds
comic gold in silence and beauty in Beckett’s bleak poetry, while eking out the last rites of humour from
the dingiest corners of Krapp’s self-loathing.

[Charles Hutchinson]

Halifax Evening Courier (2009)

This one act monologue is a severe challenge to its sole actor and director Matt Aston. On stage with
only a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a few boxes and a couple of bananas (devoured with quiet ceremony)
Kenneth Taylor has to take the audience with him. He has the shimmering lure of Samuel Beckett's precise,
compact script. Taylor speaks it with controlled feeling in a flawless performance.

Krapp has passed his sixty-ninth birthday alone and spends the evening playing an old tape of himself aged
thirty-nine, before making another and final tape. Memory and desire mingle freely with self-loathing. The
blackness of the confined set lit brutally from above creates oppressive gloom. Krapp is nearly terminally
crocked and fills his time with trivial tasks punctuated by the tapes. They do not light up his benighted life.
The effort to walk or connect a plug or open a drawer is eloquently expressed by a hunched and joyless Krapp.
Life looks like more pain than it's worth. Krapp does not want back the years that are gone.

This is a bleak account of a declining life. It is an ordinary life but Beckett makes us wonder if it could be a
bare and sometimes comical account of our own struggles to take meaning from the day-to-day. For all its
pessimism the performance extracts drama from the most unpromising material. Its unflinching presentation
of a man at the end of hope and life is gripping and moving.

[Peter Rawlings]

Nottingham Evening Post (2009)

KENNETH Alan Taylor is back with Krapp's Last Tape - same production, same director (Matt Aston) - and it's
better than ever.

Krapp is an old man, a failed writer. In his all-black study - desk, chair, waste basket and an over-hanging
light -he listens to snatches of recorded monologue he made in earlier years. Then he does his last
reel-to-reel tape.

The combination of Samuel Beckett and Taylor makes it intensely moving.

Beckett's over-arching theme is, as ever, the absurdity of existence. But Taylor brings out the bitter-sweetness
of ageing and memory - and wasted opportunity. Krapp has forgotten where he's locked two bananas yet recalls
in detail an evening spent on the river with a woman way back

Krapp is beautifully observed by Taylor: the way he drags himself around the stage, the animal glee with
which he eats his bananas, the lonely old man's uncouthness.

Lighting is an outstanding feature: when Krapp is at his desk it emphasises the death-mask quality of his face;
and when he's off-stage to take a swig from a bottle you see his shadow on the opposite wall.

No wonder this in-house production is back at the Lakeside: it deserves to be.

[Alan Geary]

The Stage

Kenneth Alan Taylor makes an exquisite job of this Samuel Beckett masterpiece at the Lakeside Arts Centre.
It is one of those occasions when the audience scarcely seems to breathe at all, not letting out a collective
sigh until the very last beam of light burns out his figure of Krapp cradling his tape-recorder.

Taylor's face has a lived-in look beneath the shock of silver hair and there is a doggedness and resilience in
every dragging step he takes. Every moment is hypnotic whether he is slowly unpeeling a banana or silently
contemplating whether he can bend down far enough to connect a trailing plug with its socket. His thought
processes are so transparent that the audience is continuously anticipating the next obstacle he has to
overcome.

This is old age cruelly exposed - the acute physical discomfort, the cracked voice that collapses in a cough,
the fumbling required to start and rewind the tape. As Krapp's memory fast forwards over bad bits to dwell
on the good, Taylor's face betrays every subtle emotion. It is a sublime, even impish performance at times,
in which he brings out the acknowledged absurdity of Krapp's stage of life.

Even when he is offstage his presence remains, his shadow cast large upon the blinds. This one-man show
is a triumph for Taylor, proving beyond doubt his power to hold an audience with the serious as well as the
comical.

[Pat Ashworth]

Nottingham Evening Post

Beckett is an acquired taste ... and I think I'm acquiring it - with a little help from Lakeside.

Last year they gave us 'Waiting for Godot'. Now we have this famous one-man, one-act, in-house offering.

Kenneth Alan Taylor is well known to Nottingham, both as a former Playhouse director and for his long
association with their pantos. But this is light years from Widow Twankey.

Krapp is an old man, a failed writer. He sits listening to snatches of recorded monologue he made in his
youth and middle years. Then he makes his last tape.

The combination of Beckett and Taylor makes it all intensely moving.

Beckett's theme is the tragic absurdity of our existence. But Taylor helps to bring out the bitter-sweetness
of ageing and memory. Krapp has forgotten where he secreted two bananas (his favourite treat) yet recalls
in exquisite detail an evening spent on the river with a woman. Everything about Krapp is beautifully
observed by Taylor.

[Alan Geary]