Having consumed a second banana and, this time, safely hurled the skin into the wings, Krapp produces a reel-to-reel tape recorder and multiple tins containing old tapes. Their contents – reminiscences made by his younger self each birthday – are inventoried in a dusty ledger. Today is his sixty-ninth birthday. The tape he elects to listen to, spool five of tin three, was recorded thirty years earlier.

As the younger man speaks, recalling encounters with women of ‘incomparable’ eyes and bosoms, the older Krapp alternately rages, wilts, and grows fond, ‘tenderness and frustration for the feminine beings’, as Beckett himself put it, running through it all. Krapp frequently shuts off the recorder, pulled up by an unendurable memory, before plunging on. He begins, also, to record a new tape, until that too grows past bearing.

As its title suggests, this is an excremental play. Krapp, who relishes the word ‘spool’ with its similarity to ‘stool’, is constipated – obstructed, costive, unable to achieve relief – in every sense of the word. His penchant for the fibrous banana speaks to this, too. He is a man bunged up – by his own physical and mental stagnancy, but also by the (im)passage of time.    

Much like Krapp himself, productions of Beckett’s plays are more or less frozen in time as per the dictates of the playwright’s notoriously stringent estate. There is not much modern interpreters can do bar follow the scripts, with their precise stage directions, like musical scores. But there is an element of novelty, much trumpeted in the publicity around it, that sets this production apart from previous ones. Performer Stephen Rea recorded the younger Krapp’s dialogue thirty years ago – with no certainty he would ever play the part – so as to set up a distinction between the two voice qualities should the chance ever arise to put the theory to the test. That opportunity did, of course, finally arrive in the form of an approach by director Vicky Featherstone, and the result is as good as any production I have seen (the last, also at the Adelaide Festival, in 2016, was directed by Nescha Jelk and featured Peter Carroll in the role).

The contrast between the younger and older Rea’s voice is striking. On the tapes he sounds posher, clearer and more clipped, the pitch slightly elevated. In person, now aged seventy-eight, he is gruffer, scratchier – more, in a word, Belfast. The conceit goes beyond a gimmick and proves touching in the way it gives emphasis to the play’s dialogue between the present and the past, and two versions of the same man – one with everything ahead of him, the other full of regret and rumination.

Physically, too, Rea is wonderful in the role. When he disappears into a concealed upstage space to, we presume, neck a bottle of wine, his pigeon-toed shuffle is a thing to behold. While seated, he holds himself like a man overcome, shoulders forward and head bowed, visibly horrified by his younger self’s habit of laughing inappropriately. He looks, always, haunted to the point of catatonia by those women so unerringly conjured by Beckett’s words – eyes like ‘chrysolite’, standing in ‘shabby green coats on railway-station platforms’.   

Kevin Gleeson’s sound design, picking up and amplifying Rea’s footsteps into unnerving echoes, is effective, as is the meeting of Paul Keogan’s lighting and Jamie Vartan’s set design in the form of a slanting corridor of light which connects the desk with the offstage space. In another uncanny touch, the first time Rea leaves the stage the door to this space slides open of its own accord as though there is another, unseen agency at work. Featherstone’s direction subtly ups the play’s hauntedness with such touches, but otherwise leaves the emphasis firmly on Rea’s performance.

And what a performance it is too.

Krapp’s Last Tape (Landmark Productions) continues at the Adelaide Festival until 8 March 2025. Performance attended: March 1.