A Krapp Chronology

I begin my chronology with the creation of Krapp's Last Tape. In 1958 , Beckett's translation of Fin de partie was scheduled to premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in London, but, some seventy-five minutes long, it was considered too short to play alone. The theatre's artistic director, George Devine, wished to couple it with A Resounding Tinkle by N.F. Simpson. Beckett, however, preferred to try to compose something himself. At about that time - December, 1957 - Beckett heard Patrick Magee reading from Molloy on the radio, and the musical writer was enchanted by the soft, whispering voice of the Irish actor. In January 1958, Beckett went to the BBC office in Paris to hear Magee more clearly on tape, and in February, he began to write what he at first called the Magee Monologue. Six drafts and three weeks later Beckett sent Krapp's Last Tape to George Devine in London.¹

George Devine directed Endgame and also played Hamm. Donald McWhinnie directed Krapp's Last Tape, with Pat Magee playing Krapp. Each of the Beckett plays aroused the censor, and a licence was withheld until three weeks before their premiere. Beckett was present during the short rehearsal period, and the double bill opened on 28 October 1958. My Grove Press paperback edition of Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces dates from 1960, which is when I must first have read it. I was disappointed. After happening on the first Godot in Paris in 1953 and being even more impressed with Fin de partie and Endgame, I thought Krapp's Last Tape was a Beckett step backward, and I dismissed it summarily. The plot seemed to me boringly realistic: an ambitious writer has made the wrong choice of a career rather than love. In reading, I was insensitive to the musicality of repetitions, as well as to the play-long opposition of light and dark, of sound and silence. I was unfamiliar with tape recorders, and the dramatic ingenuity of the device was lost upon me. My failure to respond to Krapp blemished my doctoral dissertation, which became my first book on Beckett. (What I dislike most about my writing is its veneer of authority, which is lamentable for Beckett, the perennial perhapser.)²

About a decade after composing Krapp's Last Tape, Beckett accepted an invitation to direct in the Schiller Theatre Werkstatt in Berlin. In 1967 , he directed Endspiel there, without accompaniment, but Das letzte Band was coupled with Ionesco's Der Neue Mieter (The New Tenant.) As in the case of Endspiel, Beckett prepared a director's notebook, but the two are quite different. That of Endspiel occupies some thirty-five pages and is written in English, with quotations from the German translation of the play. It consists largely of sixteen rehearsal scenes. In contrast, his director's notebook for Das letzte Band occupies eighty-one pages and is written preponderantly in French, again with quotations from the German translation of the play. Moreover, the later notebook displays Beckett's directorial mind at work: he asks himself questions, makes diagrams, hazards calculations as to the duration of an activity, and he guesses that the whole play will last thirty-five minutes. Presumably after brooding about problems that troubled him, Beckett drew up a list of twenty-six items. This is followed by item 27, "Endgu¨ltig Werkstatt," which consists of fifteen pages in English that may describe the actual performance; for example, "Hold dream, then feverish change of spools. Winding back of old tape interrupted by Hain 3." The only date in the notebook is 5-10-69, which is when the production premiered, and I don't know how long before that Beckett composed his director's notebook. Reviews timed the play variously at forty or forty-five minutes. Das letzte Band played in repertory at the Schiller Werkstatt for at least a year. Although Jim Knowlson has scrupulously edited Beckett's director's notebook for The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, his discussion tends to slide the notebook into the actual performance, and I should like to keep them separate...