Krapp's Last Tape (review)

In his first solo stage appearance since HAMLET a monologue ten years earlier, director Robert Wilson essayed the title role in Krapp's Last Tape at the Fifth Theatre Olympics in Seoul, Korea. The lone character in Samuel Beckett's play, Krapp is considered to be based on Beckett's own life, but Wilson, who is currently the same age as Krapp, completely recreated the character in his own likeness, externalizing Beckett's emphasis on Krapp's paradoxical state of mind by means of his own idiosyncratic physicality and his choice of theatrical environment. Although Wilson followed the original script line by line, he imprinted his own unique image on the play by using nonverbal communication: sound, lighting, and physical gestures. His performance established a symbiotic relationship between Beckett's words and his own visual and aural signs. To emphasize image, Wilson has often preferred to deconstruct classic texts, diminishing the original lines. In this instance, however, through a series of conflicting images that mirrored Krapp's emotional undulations, the visually oriented Wilson succeeded in finding his own coexistence within Krapp's long monologue.

At the beginning of his directing career, Wilson observed the systematic aural signals of autistic people like the poet Christopher Knowles and applied their method of communication to many of his productions, such as A Letter for Queen Victoria and Einstein on the Beach. Similarly, in Krapp's Last Tape, Wilson converted Krapp's accumulated mixture of emotions into the sound of rain in an attempt to communicate with the audience prior to Krapp's first line. The sound of a rain storm, created in Krapp's mind, symbolically expressed his subtle emotions prior to his tape-recording for his sixty-ninth birthday. Echoing Krapp's sentimental stream of consciousness about his old love, lost passions, present loneliness, and fear for the future, the varying intensity and frequency of the rain created an unusual harmony with Krapp's movement. For the first fifteen minutes of the hour-long production, Krapp silently strolled about the stage, accompanied by the continuously changing sound of a thunder

Robert Wilson (Krapp) in Krapp's Last Tape. (Photo: Lesley Leslie-Spinks.)

Robert Wilson (Krapp) in Krapp's Last Tape. (Photo: Lesley Leslie-Spinks.)

storm that was followed by soft rain, heavy rain, and then soft rain again. Following the audience's extended exposure to an overwhelmingly active and loud soundscape, Krapp made a gesture and the stage went completely silent. It was a strikingly ironic moment, communicating the idea that although Krapp appeared to fear the rain, he had control over it, as he did over his own emotions.

Krapp's cracked voice and unnatural way of speaking served as another aural sign once the rain had ceased. In contrast to his mechanical speech onstage, Krapp's recorded voice sounded clear and normal. When he listened to the memory of his past lover, Krapp's warm and caressing voice from the recorded tape complemented his present cold and metallic voice onstage. These two different ways of speaking signified not only the irreversible change between the present Krapp and the past Krapp, but also the metaphorical reunion between Wilson onstage and Beckett in the text. The past and the present, the recorded speech and the live voice, the naturalness and the artificiality, and ultimately Beckett's writing and Wilson's staging coexisted side by side to explain this unapproachably isolated though fragilely human Krapp to the audience.

The lighting, used by Wilson to transmute Krapp's ego into the visible spectrum, was the most important visual element of this production. Unlike his other works, in which he has used colorful, rhythmical, and dramatic lighting effects, Krapp's Last Tape used just one blue light to emphasize light and shadow. Wilson spent two hours prior to performance applying white makeup to his face in order to blend with the...