IN Samuel Beckett's ''Krapp's Last Tape,'' a disintegrating 69-year-old
man sits in a dark cell of a room, randomly reviewing taped journals of
his life at age 39. As Krapp's life unwinds, we survey the detritus of a
painfully familiar existence - the death of parents, the loss of love,
the defeat of noble aspirations and resolutions, the eternally losing
battle against the allure of drink and the unruliness of the bowels. How
small and pointless the life of the 39-year-old Krapp looks, both to us
and to the utterly defeated Krapp of 30 years later. ''The earth might
be uninhabited,'' says Krapp - and so it might, even with him inhabiting
it.
The poetry is in the details of Krapp's remembered life. Whether we're
hearing of ''a girl in a shabby green coat on a railway-station
platform'' or even of a ''small, old, black, hard, solid rubber ball''
once surrendered to a dog, the specificity of the imagery always grounds
Krapp as a character; he never becomes simply a symbolic vessel for the
conveyance of abstract ideas. The play's drama exists not only in the
gradual piecing together of the sad little stories of Krapp's
autobiography but also in the contrapuntal psychological tension between
the dying man at 69 and the still arrogant striver of 39. The humor is
in Beckett's typical insistence on giving his lonely protagonist the
costume, props and deeds of a clown: There's a banana peel handy for a
near-pratfall, not to mention a verbal vaudeville gag featuring the
unlikely consultation of a dictionary. Terror, of course, arrives in the
gnawing threat of extinction; the gaping silence of death envelops the
isolated Krapp and his room at every instant. And yet ''Krapp's Last
Tape'' is not a wholly depressing play. In Krapp's pathetic attempts to
rearrange, catalogue, evaluate, savor and combat existence with his
tapes and their accompanying ledger, he is, in his way, making the one
thing out of hopelessness that even Beckett concedes can be made out of
it - art.
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