Krapp, 39

Thirty-nine is a Krapp age. Michael Laurence's one-man response to Beckett's 'Krapp's Last Tape' is about a depressed actor. In taped conversations with the show's director, George Demas, we hear Laurence plan to record the young Krapp's monologues from Beckett's play. Then, in 30 years' time - at the Royal Court, perhaps? In front of, ahem, King William? - he can play Krapp in tandem with the voice of his younger self.

Award-winning in its native New York, Laurence's show has something of the great Tim Crouch about it, in that it occupies a provoking limbo between performance and truth. It takes time to get used to Laurence's leonine self-absorption - to which his character readily admits. The piece is strongest when most particular.

Like Krapp, Laurence is a frustrated writer; like Krapp, his mother has just died. Live video unspools the paraphernalia of Laurence's life. Will it ever add up to anything? By taping his Krapp soliloquy (subject to the approval of the Beckett estate, with whom we see Laurence correspond), and by committing to its sequel three decades hence, Laurence reassures himself that, aged 69, he'll still be an actor - still be alive, even. In an inversion Beckett would enjoy, a bleak play of old age now offers hope to disappointed youth.