Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Krapps last tape

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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