27 – 28 April

When one is marched off to a revival, there is always at the back of one’s mind the question, ’Why now’? This is always accompanied – when the play is one of the more obtuse classics – by the sneaking suspicion that one is being asked to judge a vanity project.  When Beckett is in the frame such nagging questions ring louder, but one’s better, less cynical self, reminds that Beckett is not time sensitive, not hung around a particular epoch, but is like Shakespeare, for all and any time. If the human condition is one’s quarry there is no bad or less favourable time. What could be a more opportune time than now? So we give the benefit of any doubt to the director, Stockard Channing, when she cast David Westhead as Krapp.

My only memory of a previous production is of the lugubrious rumblings of Patrick Magee, for whom the play was written. Westhead is an autobiographer of a different stripe. There is no doubt that this Krapp is a man with, on occasion at least, a pleasant past when he finds sensual, even erotic as well as gustatory pleasure from a banana, savouring the feel and the smell; no mere banana, this is a link to the past. This is a man recalling past sensual pleasures.  However, the play is not about Krapp reminiscing his greatest hits, conquests and the like. Rather is it a taking stock, re-evaluating his previous evaluations as he plays back long ago recorded diary entries on his tape machine. His default mode is a kind of open-mouthed, mystified exhaustion as if the task were more arduous than the original living.

We feel that this is a man who has given up on life. Long since has he given up on love. His dress is unkempt with tousled hair, sure signs of having given up with intercourse, his only interlocutor being himself. And so the questions remain as we leave the theatre: should we always have an eye on what our future self will think? Should we never give up and sink into fruitless nostalgia? Or again, should we stop beating ourselves up over a past we have no control of? The audience no doubt had many more. Beckett provides no answers, that’s down to us, but if we come out of the theatre with a question mark in our heads then that’s job done.

★★★☆☆. Graham Wyles, 28 April 2026