Theatre

There’s a huge fascination in watching emotions play across an individual’s face when they’re not talking –  at times it can feel as if one’s become a spy on their soul. Especially at a point in their life when past and future collide, and all the petty frustrations, threadbare hopes, and passionately felt losses create a jagged portrait not only of what they are, but also of what they might have been.

This is the point at which we meet the 69-year-old protagonist of ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ –  and it’s important that the actor allows his features to bear more of the weight of the story than the carefully selected words. Harold Pinter, who appears as Krapp in an electric wheelchair for ten performances only, potently lets the pain, regret, and occasional sensual memory animate his eyes, mouth, and body so that they become a stirring physical testament to his character’s fractured past and dust-darkened future.

Famously Samuel Beckett’s play portrays a man on his birthday playing old recordings that he has made about his life in past decades. Unlike the similarly structured ‘Eh Joe’ –  where the central character does not speak at all, but responds to an offstage monologue –  Krapp interacts with the voice of  his younger self, commenting laughingly at a youthful stupidity and falling silent at the recollection of a sexual encounter.

In Ian Rickson’s beautifully measured production, Ian Dickinson’s subtle wind-whistling sound design and Hildegard Bechtler’s artfully shabby set underscore Krapp’s existential solitude. Pinter, no stranger to infirmity, demonstrates the explosive anger that comes as age imposes physical restrictions, balancing out the pained movements with which he hunts down his tapes and plays them.

It was going to be extraordinary, anyway, watching one literary giant interpreting another. Pinter’s professionalism elevates it further into a devastatingly witty and haunting elegy for lost youth.