Pinter, Harold

playwright and actor

(Représentation) [ENG] Harold Pinter joue "La Dernière Bande" de Beckett

Artesquieu · Jun 9, 2022 · partial coverage

• Samuel Beckett
• Harold Pinter
• Krapp's Last Tape
• monologue
• memory
• solitude
• theatre
• time
• sound recording
• performance

Coverage note: full (a performance of about ten minutes; the English auto-captions are slightly garbled, and names of people and places follow what is heard in the text)

Core ideas

The recording is a monologue: Krapp, an old man alone in his "den," marks his birthday by listening on a tape recorder to the tapes he has recorded in earlier years. He looks for the right reel ("box three, spool five"), eats bananas (and tries to refrain from a fourth), comments wryly on his bowel condition and notes the strange silence of the evening. On the tape, the Krapp of thirty-nine ("sound as a bell"), whom the old man hears with contempt ("that stupid bastard"), reviews his life: an old relationship (Bianca), resolutions to drink less and lead a less engrossing sexual life, the death of his mother (the house on the canal, the bench by the lake, a nurse in white and black with a dog, the small black rubber ball he gives to the dog when the blind goes down), and then a "vision" on a jetty in a high wind: he realized that the darkness he had struggled to keep under was in reality his "most unshatterable association" with the light and the fire of understanding.

Krapp replays the passage about the punt on the lake: a love scene with a young woman lying in the boat with her eyes closed, the drift among the reeds, an "extraordinary silence" in which everything moves beneath them. After hearing it, he dismisses his younger self's naivety ("hard to believe I was ever as bad as that") yet keeps winding back to it. He then records a new entry on the tape: the past year, a book that barely sold (seventeen copies), visits from Fanny, a bleak mood, and his regrets; he listens one last time to the passage about the punt. He ends the reel by saying that perhaps his best years are gone, when there was a chance of happiness, but that he would not want them back, "not with the fire in me now," as the tape runs on in silence.

The piece shows typically Beckettian themes: memory and its mechanical traces, solitude, the way each Krapp becomes a stranger to the previous one, irony about past illuminations, and the tension between wanting to relive a moment and refusing to relive it.

Excerpts