FringeReview UK 2026
Krapp’s Last Tape
Peter Marinker with Cockpit Productions
Genre: Theatre
Venue: The Cockpit Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Peter Marinker, known for his extensive work on BBC Radio, his many audiobook recordings, and his long association with Samuel Beckett’s publisher John Calder, performs Krapp’s Last Tape.
At 84 and recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Marinker brings decades of experience performing Beckett’s work as he returns to one of the playwright’s most demanding solo roles – with the function of memory in relation to selfhood at the heart of the production.
This new production uses reel-to reel recordings made by Peter the last time he played Krapp in 1983. Live in-ear prompts, where needed, run alongside the play, highlighting the relationship between memory and remembering, cognition and re-cognition.
Review
In the programme notes, producer and director, Dave Wybrow writes of his mother’s dementia: ‘it was always liveable. So I thought there is a need to demonstrate that life goes on. Memory is never perfect anyway’. That sentiment sits at the heart of this short-run production at the Cockpit Theatre, which has drawn national attention for reasons beyond the play itself: its solo performer, Peter Marinker, 85, best known for his distinctive voice work on BBC radio drama, was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Beckett’s fifty-minute monologue already turns on memory and identity, as Krapp reviews his past and confronts his younger hopes. Here, that gap widens further, bringing an additional dimension from the performer himself. The play was originally written for a man looking back on his 69th birthday to his 39th; this production doesn’t try to replicate that. This Krapp is looking back across nearly half a century, introducing subtle shifts in what the play seems to be saying to us about both past and future.
Using reel-to-reel tapes recorded by Marinker when he last played Krapp in 1983, as well as support from live in-ear prompts that highlight the relationship between memory and remembering, cognition and re-cognition, Wybrow creates a different, gentler, arc through the play.
Marinker’s delivery is quiet, beautifully moderated, if a little slower, and the audience were rapt, so focused you could have heard a pin drop. Live in-ear prompts from stage manager Marta Fossati, visible throughout, guide him, following Beckett’s own stage directions to the letter. The prompts never once reduce him to a mannequin being steered through the piece; his responses are always in character.
Duncan Henderson’s design and lighting work in shades of brown and grey, with a glow through a frosted interior window marking Krapp’s excursions offstage to search for his old recordings. The pace is gentle and reflective, yet frustration is there throughout, and does eventually erupt. There’s real, surprising humour too; moments where this Krapp looks back more in sorrow than in anger, the bitterness somehow morphing into a smile, enhanced by Marinker’s delivery and timing.
Beckett’s Krapp is written as a more energetic, specific figure; this production simplifies some of that, giving us an older man in a dressing gown, looking back from a different place. It blurs, gently, the line between actor and character. The result takes the play somewhere quieter and more reflective than many productions, and celebrates the power of collaboration. It ended, fittingly, in extended applause and a standing ovation.
