The Irish playwright Samuel Beckett is not for the fainthearted. Works from his later period where he dispenses with realism and plot can be particularly challenging for both theatre makers and audience members. Indeed, his most popular play, Waiting For Godot, is a play in which nothing happens.
Two By Beckett, performed by the Elysium Theatre Company and directed by Jake Murray as part of Durham Festival of the Arts, is a double bill of Footfalls (1976) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). Both are minimalist one-act plays from Beckett’s late and middle period respectively; together they are poetic meditations on love, loss, longing and memory.
Footfalls is in four acts, each separated by a single bell. The play features May (Felicity Dean), wrapped in tatters, pacing back and forth like a metronome, on a strip of bare landing while engaging in conversation with the disembodied voice of her dying – or dead? – mother (Karren Winchester). May paces ever more slowly as the play progresses, and the light dims so that by the fourth and final scene there is no trace of her.
Beckett was exacting about how he wanted his plays performed and his detailed stage directions, with attention to pauses, silences, slowness and lighting, are as important as the actual words. The text is minimal and stark, and just like the text, the set also conveys this starkness – a strip of board at the front of the stage lit from each end.
Beckett’s text is extremely precise and performing his work well requires an accomplished actor with technical mastery. Felicity Dean delivers this excellently, maintaining the precise physical beat of the scene with her feet, and producing detailed vocal changes. No matter what you think of the actual play, she is completely mesmerising.
Krapp’s Last Tape could be described as self-reflection by tape recorder. Each year on his birthday Krapp, a writer, listens to recordings he made years ago and reflects on his past life before starting a new recording about his present self. His younger self is idealistic and hopeful, if a little arrogant, whereas the older man is more cynical and critical of his youth.
Krapp sits at an old wooden desk surrounded by cardboard boxes full of tapes, lit by naked light bulbs; a drinks trolley lurks in darkness at the rear of the stage. There’s a little comedy with a couple of bananas at the start of the show but the mood soon turns reflective.
There’s not a lot for the present Krapp to say in this play and the characterisation is in how the actor chooses to portray Krapp’s responses and gestures. Krapp was played by Edmund Dehn who revealed a bitter and belligerent old man, angry about the pomposity of his youth and the choices he made. Along with angry regret, he successfully caught Krapp’s gentler side particularly when listening to his younger self describe a romantic day with a woman in a punt, visibly reliving the memory.
Krapp’s Last Tape is the more accessible of these two plays, coming at the start of Beckett’s minimal period, however it was perhaps less engaging than the more abstract and mesmerising Footfalls.
Ultimately this is a thought provoking evening offering the theatregoer much for discussion. It’s certainly a welcome change from some of the more mainstream theatre that can dominate the region.
