be again
by Douglas Messerli
Samuel Beckett Krapp's Last Tape / production of the Gate Theatre Dublin at the
Kirk Douglas Theatre, Los Angeles on November 4, 2012
Actor John Hurt's portrayal of Krapp
in Beckett's 1958 play is absolutely brilliant, except for, perhaps, the near
interminable pause before the actor begins speaking. The stark setting of the
play, with a single spots of bright white light, gives a grand theatricality to
Krapp's world, a world in which, under the light, he feels safe while being
surrounded by darkness wherein, as Beckett himself described it, "Old
Nick" or death awaits, a fact Hurt reiterates once or twice by daring,
with some humor, to enter, momentarily, the surrounding darkness.
On his sixty-ninth birthday Krapp, yet again, forces himself to interact
with a younger incarnation. It is clear that Krapp has a fixation with his
former selves. For years he has recorded tapes describing his life's events,
most of them quite meaningless, but some of them of great poetry and
sensibility. The tape Krapp chooses on this particular, rainy night, is
"Box 3, Spool 5," the day Krapp turned 39.
Yet director Michael Colgan reveals that what leads up to his playing
the tape is as important in some senses as what is actually on the tape itself.
The ritualistic acts, Krapp's continual checking of the time, his strange way
of eating a banana—he puts the entire banana into his mouth holding it there
for a while before biting it off, clearly a bow to the fruit's sexual
suggestions—and several of his other actions, including his nearly falling on
the banana peel he has tossed into the dark, reveal him as a kind of eccentric
fool—in short, the typical Beckett figure. As his name suggests, he is
"full of shit."
Hurt presents Krapp with a kind of valor despite his obvious distancing
of himself from the human race. Clearly Krapp's mother has been a monster,
living for years in a world of "vidiuity"—the condition of being or
remaining a widow. The small things he describes are both comical and
life-affirming: playing ball with a dog as his mother dies, awarding the ball
to the dog as he hears of his mother's death; attending a vesper service as a
child, falling off the pew.
Krapp is an everyday man with romantic aspirations, or at least he was,
it is apparent, at age 39, the time when we are all have arrived in the prime
of life. Krapp at 39 is both a smug bore,
Spiritually a year of profound gloom
and indulgence until that
memorable night in March at the end
of the jetty, in the
howling wind, never to be forgotten,
when suddenly I saw the
whole thing. The vision, at last.
This fancy is what I have chiefly
to record this evening, against the
day when my work will be done
and perhaps no place left in my
memory, warm or cold, for the
miracle that . . . (hesitates) . . .
for the fire that set it alight.
What I suddenly saw then was this,
that the belief I had been going
on all my life, namely—(Krapp
switches off impatiently, winds tape
forward, switches on again)—
a man who will not regret any
decision of his life, and is a man amazingly come alive through the love of a
woman whom he describes lovingly in a scene where the two lay in a small punt
as it floats into shore through the reeds.
The older Krapp, who realizes that his younger self could not imagine
the loneliness and emptiness of the life ahead, has no patience at times with
his past. His new tape, which he begins after impatiently winding the older
tape ahead to escape his previous self's blindness, is filled with bitterness
and anger for a failed life:
Nothing to say, not a squeak. What's
a year now? The sour cud and
the iron stool. (Pause.) Reveled in
the word spool. (With relish.)
Spooool! Happiest moment of the past
half million. (Pause.) Seventeen
copies sold, of which eleven at
trade price to free circulating libraries
beyond the seas. Getting known.
(Pause.)
He has failed, obviously, even in his writing career. Unlike
his younger self, so unregretful of his past, the old Krapp is filled with the
detritus of his life, all those materials left over from his disintegration. If
the younger Krapp declares himself as only moving forward, the elder would
"Be again!"
Be again in the dingle on a
Christmas Eve, gathering holly, the
red-berried. (Pause.) Be again on
Croghan on a Sunday morning,
in the haze, with the bitch, stop
and listen to the bells. (Pause.)
And so on. (Pause.) Be again, be
again. (Pause.) All that old
misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough
for you. (Pause.)
Lie down across her.
He gives up this, his last tape (or
perhaps simply his latest) to listen again to his former self describing his
sexual moment with the woman in the punt.
Hurt so painfully suffers and loves his former self—at one moment even
embracing the machine through his young speeches—that one can almost hear his
heart crack.
Los Angeles, November 6, 2012
A slightly different version of this
piece about the filmed version with Hurt was published in My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).
