Word: krapp
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...original version of Krapp's Last Tape, one of those Beckett masterpieces which do not number accessibility among their many virtues, the audience did essentially that--sat in the dark--while the 69-year-old Krapp listened to his own voice on a tape. The audience listened to him listen to himself, replay himself, and tape his reactions to the replays. Mercifully, by skillful use of some impressive high-tech equipment, director Adam Cherson has somewhat embellished the purity of this experience. In this new version, Krapp (David Gullette) sits facing a hidden video monitor, and his reproduced image faces...
Cherson and company have done a good job of mechanical wizardry, enough to eliminate any reminder that this is an amateur production. Though the videotape and monitor comprise the central metaphor for the action, the machinery focuses observations on Krapp rather than drawing attention to itself. Through it, the themes of the piece gradually and firmly emerge...
...Krapp, stumbling through meaningless and totally self-referential rituals with his tapes, exemplifies life at an absolute standstill, paralyzed further by the authoritative presence of technology. His endless recycling of a few sparse impressions via his tapes serves only to lock him into the same room, situation, round of thought at the only new material comes in bizarre introspective snatches, such as his sensual enjoyment of the word "spool" (happened on by accident in the tape-playing instructions), or his momentary impulse to look up in a dictionary a word he once knew...
...PERPETUAL and steadily more disturbing self-absorption, the older Krapp apes the taped actions and words of his younger self, fantasizing each time Krapp the younger reminisces about a woman, and occasionally rousing himself to sing a song or swig from a wine bottle at the younger one's cue. In a device of mixed effectiveness, Cherson has chosen to splice actual slides of women into the fantasy sequence, which lends immediacy but punctures the script's hypnotic solipsism...
DIED. Patrick Magee, 58, Irish actor who gave broguish voice to Samuel Beckett's muse (Krapp 's Last Tape and several other Beckett plays were written with him in mind) and a 1966 Tony winner for his Marquis de Sade in the Royal Shakespeare Company's New York City production of Marat/Sade; of a heart attack; in London. Magee supported his stage art by playing film heavies, most recently a Colonel Blimpish Olympic Committee member in 1981's Chariots of Fire...