Brighton Fringe 2026
Krapp’s Last Tape
Grist to the Mill
Genre: Mainstream Theatre, One Person Show, Theatre
Venue: The Rotunda Theatre. Regency Square, Brighton BN1 2FG
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
I’d forgotten how short the play actually is. I haven’t seen a production of ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ for well over a decade, and I had the impression of there being a lot more events featuring in Krapp’s birthday tapes – indeed of more tapes played, and of much longer speeches.
I remembered the bananas, of course, and the boxes and boxes of tapes, and the general dissolution of Krapp himself: the minutiae of his movements and gestures, but I’d lost the density of the writing. I’d forgotten how just a few pages of script can give us such a vivid picture of the trajectory, the arc of a person’s life.
So to see a powerful production of Samuel Beckett’s classic by Grist to the Mill was like meeting a long-lost friend.
Review
That’s the point of ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’. Memory. And how the past slips away from us and how difficult it is to hold on to it. And that there’s probably not much point trying to hang on to the past anyway, because it just shows us how futile our lives have been.
The basic structure of the play is simple – it’s Krapp’s sixty-ninth birthday, and he will make a tape, as he does every birthday, recording the events of the past year, along with his feelings and his general observations on his life and health. He has done this since his youth, and they constitute a kind of annual time-capsule.
Before making this year’s tape, Krapp wants to consult an earlier one, which he identifies from an old ledger (he’s pretty autistic, as you’ve probably realised by now), and finally locates it in one of the old biscuit tins – “Box three…spool five” – threads it into an old fashioned reel-to-reel machine, and plays. I’m giving you all this redundant detail because that’s how it feels in Beckett’s play – Ross Ericson’s movements are slow, thoughtful, ponderous, and there’s loads of business fumbling with keys and taking bananas out of the locked drawers in his big old desk – as he shuffles around the stage before finally switching the machine on.
We hear the voice of an obviously much younger Krapp, announcing that he is -“Thirty-nine today. Sound as a bell, apart from my old weakness …”. He starts to sum up his year – “intellectually I have every reason to suspect at the …(hesitates) …crest of a wave – or thereabouts.” But he continues – “Just been listening to an old year, passages at random. I did not check in the book, but it must be at least ten or twelve years ago.” So we have the Krapp of sixty-nine listening to the Krapp of thirty-nine commenting on the life and thoughts of the Krapp of twenty-eight or so.
Krapp at thirty-nine finds it – “Hard to believe I was ever that young whelp. The voice!. Jesus!. And the aspirations!. ” And he laughs briefly at his younger self – a laugh (on tape) in which he’s joined by Krapp (listening in the present) at sixty-nine. It’s an astonishing piece of theatre – three phases of a man’s existence brought to life for the audience in just a very few lines. The simplicity, the economy of structure of the play, is stunning.
The staging was perfect for the situation. Black floor and backdrop in the Rotunda space, with a simple pool of illumination around Krapp’s chair and desk. He stands a lot, moving around the desk clad in a brown dressing gown along with a black muffler and fingerless woollen gloves – there’s obviously not a lot of heat in his room – fiddling with keys, peering short-sightedly at the ledger or a dictionary, peeling one of his bananas and throwing the skin off into the darkness before chewing slowly on the fruit.
He fumbles with the tin boxes of tapes, he chooses a spool of tape – “Spool … Spoool” savouring the word in his mouth. I’ve seen actors turn this into comedy – “Spoooooool”, but Ericson kept it real, and the effect was much more poignant..
So what, finally, is Krapp listening to?, what interests him?.
Sex and death, mostly. Krapp at thirty-nine tells of being outside the nursing home where his mother lay dying – “There I sat, in the biting wind, wishing she were gone.”. But meanwhile looking at – “one dark young beauty I recollect particularly, all white and starch, incomparable bosom”. Finally – “the blind went down, one of those dirty brown roller affairs … I happened to look up and there it was. All over and done with, at last.” He says nothing more about his mother.
Krapp talks a lot about his relationships with women, but he’s presumably also been an aspiring writer … the flat delivery in Ross Ericson’s voice managed to tell us all we need to know about the result of those endeavours – “Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas.”
Krapp finds the recording of a sexual encounter, which presumably had taken place some time before, on the thirty-nine year old’s tape. – “…upper lake, with the punt, bathed off the bank, then pushed out into the stream and drifted” … “I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.”
He keeps rewinding the tape to listen again to that moment from his past. Krapp at thirty-nine ends the tape reflecting that – “Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.”. Thirty years later, Krapp at sixty-nine stares motionless into the distance.
The tape runs on in silence.
Strat Mastoris
