Jim McCue's review of Harold Pinter in Krapp's Last Tape was published in the TLS of October 20, 2006.

"I welcome this occasion to bow once again, before I go, deep down, before his heroic work, heroic being", wrote Samuel Beckett of James Joyce in 1982. And now before Beckett in turn, Harold Pinter, too frail last year to receive his Nobel Prize in person, takes his last bow. An actor for fifty-seven years, a writer for nearly fifty and an admirer since 1949, Pinter performs this most retrospective of the plays by his long-time friend forty-eight years after its premiere in this same theatre. Watching only one character on stage, we peer into deep vistas of consciousness, the deeper for its being this man in this play in this place at this time.

A little younger than Pinter, about seventy, Krapp listens to a tape he made thirty years ago, on which he speaks of listening to a tape he had made at least ten or twelve years earlier still. On it, he reports, the "young whelp" (then in his late twenties) "sneers at what he calls his youth and thanks to God that it's over". The whelp would not want youth again; the middle-aged Krapp would not want young adulthood again; the old Krapp would not want middle age again. Beckett wanted none of it, either; Pinter is here to put it all behind him. Yet with each step forward, the resignation is harder, because less remains ahead.

Told that schooldays are the best of their lives, children trust otherwise. A young adult wouldn't want to go back. Yet when middle-aged Krapp hears those taped thanks to God that youth is over, he comments: "False ring there". Not wanting to go back is not quite the same as being glad that it is over. This second Krapp does go back, habitually, to earlier tapes, finding the post-mortems "gruesome" but also "a help before embarking on a new retrospect".

The oxymoron might be comic on the page, but it is tragic in performance. This man feels intellectually "at the crest of the wave – or thereabouts", and has his magnum opus ahead of him. He is not to know that his hearers already know that it has failed. The new work that he was embarking on is already in the can. Old Krapp will do no more embarking.

Neither will the man acting the part before us in a wheelchair.

In middle age, Krapp records waiting for his mother's death, "wishing she were gone", and the moment the brown roller-blind came down, signalling "All over and done with, at last". Evidently it is a mercy, but there are no "thanks to God".

Krapp holds on to the moment, and to the black rubber ball he was just throwing for a little white dog. "I shall feel it, in my hand, until my dying day." Yet we know already that in thirty years' time, the ball will be quite forgotten.

What old Krapp remembers is a romantic afternoon in a punt when a girl opened her eyes and he lay "with my face in her breasts and my hand on her". It is the sort of moment one might remember until one's dying day, and is usually what one remembers about this haunting play – the times when "there was a chance of happiness", though Krapp says again he "wouldn't want them back". Have we the resolve not to, the play keeps asking, or will sentimentality drag us under? And what of the resolve to follow Beckett's instructions? Given his respect for Beckett's stagecraft, Pinter allows himself surprising liberties. The "laborious walk", of course, is out, and with it the banana routine, the clownish appearance, the "enormous" dictionary, the popping corks – almost all the comedy – as well as the watch and the songs. Pinter's huge head just broods gravely over the tape recorder. Twice, though, he is distracted by the ghost of bells perhaps heard. If these interpolations suggest another world, they sentimentalize and diminish what Beckett wrote.

When it comes to recording his last tape, Pinter again avoids the stage business dear to Beckett, by using a second, smaller machine. "Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago", he begins; "hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that's all done with anyway." False ring there too, perhaps? For still he feels the urge to "Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you. (Pause.) Lie down across her". Usually this is a play about a glimpse of happiness that might have made a life worth living, about the delusive hope of lasting things. With Pinter in the part, now, it is about last things, and having the courage to leave "this old muckball" as un-grudgingly as one would throw a ball to a dog. With a show of strength, he rises to his last legs and walks to the exit.

Samuel Beckett
KRAPP'S LAST TAPE
Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs

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