Krapp’s Last Tape, Samuel Beckett’s 1958 one-act play, has had something of a resurgence recently with Vicky Featherstone directing Stephen Rea in the role, and Gary Oldman directing himself.
In this production, heading to the Edinburgh Fringe next month, Stockard Channing directs David Westhead in an intimate, small-scale adaptation. Close enough to see the cogs turning.
We are in the tiny theatre at the back of the Calder Bookshop, opposite the Young Vic. It’s hot, but the play remains an absorbing meditation on the passing of time and the realisation of what has been lost in life.
This Krapp takes his time shuffling off stage right to have a quick alcoholic drink, find a dictionary, mutter snatches of a long-forgotten song. He selects a tape from his past recordings and loops it up. A word he hears makes him pause and find a dictionary.
He finds his old self pretentious. But then a memory stirs. Westhead reacts beautifully – and much of this play is reacting to his younger self on tape. He finds the humour in the piece, sitting under his lamp, surrounded by coils of tape piled up on desk and floor.
Krapp’s Last Tape is not a play of great movement. It is a reflection of who this person is, then and now. Pushing seventy, pushing forty. It asks the question “would you want to go back”, and in that devastating last moment, leaves the answer unspoken.
Channing and Westhead draw on their long friendship to create this production, offering a rounded portrait of the older Krapp, slightly pickled and full of potassium from his bananas, and the younger self who waxes philosophical and longs for physical and emotional connection.
It is a potent play where nothing happens on the surface, but everything happens within. Waiting for Godot may gain more acclaim, but Krapp is perhaps his greatest achievement. A desk, a lamp, a tape recorder, some boxes, some bananas.
Every actor brings something different to the role in a play that runs less than an hour. Each performer finds their own connection with it, whether through lived experience, physical frailty, or sheer skill. Patrick Magee, who originated the role, was only in his 30s. Stephen Rea was approaching his 80s. Harold Pinter was weakened by terminal illness.
For David Westhead, a few years younger than Krapp, it was seeing a production at the end of a labyrinth of rooms in Lithuania that inspired him to do it, prompting Channing to direct it, initially from her own kitchen table. The profits from these productions go back to Westhead’s own charity, Wembley to Soweto Foundation, which teaches photography to disadvantaged young people.
Krapp’s Last Tape is absurd, cathartic, abstract, commonplace, emotional and enigmatic. In this production, with around 30 other people, we are welcomed into this glimpse of the world of one man and his memories. We leave considering our own past and “what if”.
5 stars.
Krapp’s Last Tape was at Calder Bookshop Theatre to 25 Jul. It then heads to the Edinburgh Fringe – Upstairs at Assembly Roxy, 5-31 Aug.
You may also wish to read my interviews [Jan 2026] with David Westhead and Stockard Channing.