Krapp's Last Tape, and Other Dramatic Pieces

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Summary: Beckett's most human drama.
Review: Although it is probably his most conventional play, this is my favourite Beckett work. It is as bleak as Godot and despairing as End Game. It is also as funny as these tragicomic masterpieces. What is different here is that Krapp is less of a pawn, or fragment of an idea than the other characters, we are given access to his past, to his fundamental ambivalences (the desire for solitude and companionship), his apprehension of beauty. It is remarkable to see on stage a whole series of seperate selves contained in the one entity Krapp. The play is depressingly, inevitable circular, and the sense of repetition (note the extraordinary variations on light and darkness) throughout the stories the younger Krapp tells is not continuity, but an awareness of death, failure, old age. The play is also a comment on the nature of theatre going itself: in listening to his old tapes, Krapp becomes, as well as an actor, an audience, and in interpreting what he hears, a critic. This Shakespearean self-reflexivity only adds to the melancholy of the film's close.

Rating:
Summary: -=-
Review: Krapp's Last Tape is a humorous one act play involving a man named Krapp. Recording his life, he looks back on recorded spools of his life. The recorded spools talk about previous spools years earlier. Always with the same attitude towards just about everything, Krapp does not change as he ages. His life is a circular cycle as opposed to a straight line. He is figuratively constipated. Fun to read and entertaining.