The Company
Krapp Stephen Rea
Creative team
Director Vicky Featherstone
Set Designer Jamie Vartan
Costume Designer Katie Davenport
Lighting Designer Paul Keogan
Sound Designer Kevin Gleeson
Audio Director Stephen Wright
Production Manager Eamonn Fox
Stage Manager Ciara Gallagher
Assistant Stage Manager Méabh Crowe
Costume Supervisor James Seaver McGlynn
Associate Lighting Designer Eoin Lennon
Associate Sound Designer Fred DeFaye
Sound Engineer | Original Tapes Bill Maul
Set Construction TPS
Photographer Patricio Cassinoni
Graphic Designer Gareth Jones
For Landmark Productions
Producer Anne Clarke
Associate Producer Jack Farrell
Marketing Manager Sinead McPhillips
Marketing Assistant Hannah Morris
Publicity Sinead O’Doherty | O’Doherty Communications
Event Information
Time: A late evening in the future
Place: Krapp’s den
Running time: 55 minutes. There is no interval.
Age guidance: 11+
Post-show talk, Fri 2 May
Free to same-day ticket holders.
Audio Described performance, Fri 2 May at 7pm
Audio described by Caroline Burn
Touch tour at 6pm
Presented by the Barbican
Supported by Cultúr Éireann | Culture Ireland
About the Play
In Beckett’s one-act play we meet Krapp, a man in his late sixties. Every year, on his birthday, Krapp records a new tape – a review of the year just gone. But on this occasion – his 69th birthday – he listens back to a tape he recorded years before.
One of Samuel Beckett's greatest dramatic achievements, the work's introspective narrative and sharp wit offer a compelling reflection on our own journeys of self-discovery and the inevitable march of time.
The Tapes
I had no certainty that one day I might play Krapp, but I thought it a good idea to pre-record the early tapes so that the voice quality would differ significantly from that of the older character, should the opportunity ever arise to use it.
So I politely asked my good friends Stephen Wright, fine radio producer, and Bill Maul, genius sound engineer, to record the appropriate pieces.
They were happy to assist and their work was, as always, superb.
That was that, and I forgot all about it.
And then one day twelve years later, Anne Clarke, gifted theatre producer, invited me to play Krapp, directed by my long-time collaborator, awesome theatre director Vicky Featherstone.
And, after a few days’ panic, I agreed.
Why wouldn’t I? After all, I had the early tapes.
Stephen Rea
Dublin, January 2024
Meaning and Rhythm
Tanya Dean joined Vicky Featherstone and Stephen Rea at rehearsals to discuss their work together on Krapp’s Last Tape. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tanya Dean (TD): I know you two have worked together before on David Ireland’s play, Cyprus Avenue, in the 2016 Abbey Theatre/Royal Court co-production. Did that experience influence the decision to work together again on this?
Stephen Rea (SR): It’s always good to work with somebody that you like and trust and admire, and someone who you think will understand the material. So it was a very simple choice.
Vicky Featherstone (VF): I was introduced to Stephen in Cyprus Avenue, and it’s been one of the great honours and privileges of my life to meet him and to work with him, to get to know him, and for him to become part of my family and my world. We do create communities to make theatre; we come together because we believe in our shared humanity. I do think that’s how you make your best work. And we talked about doing Krapp’s Last Tape, because Stephen had said that he wanted to do that play at some point far in the future.
SR: Roughly 12 years ago, I did record the early tapes. When I’d seen the play before, I was never quite convinced by the early tapes; I thought it was a bit frozen. So I recorded it.
VF: It’s extraordinary, because the play is in three parts, really: the setting up, the listening, and then the speaking. And I was watching Stephen as Krapp listening to the tape, listening to himself, and I was thinking that this is the older person genuinely listening to the younger person. The authenticity of that is heart-breaking. That is what Beckett wrote, and Stephen has created it.
SR: It is like when you watch a film that you’ve been in; after a while, it stops being you. You watch it differently.
TD: The tape that Krapp is listening to gets filed in the ledger under ‘Farewell to Love’; what do you think is the relationship that Krapp has to love?
VF: I think that he’s a fool for love and he falls very quickly; something that recurs all the way through the play is how he falls into people’s eyes and that shifts him in some way and he seeks that out. And of course, he has his big epiphany – which is the same as Beckett had – standing in the wild storm and thinking about the work that he should make; and he can’t, because love has stopped him from being able to. So love is the most important thing in his life, and the thing that he has to get out of his life in order to be able to continue to create. But then he can’t create, so he’s lost everything. So I think Krapp is deeply, deeply romantic.
And he is trying to remember what this tape is in order to get back to that feeling, which I feel was the purest moment that he had. He ended it and he’s had to live with the emptiness ever since. And he’s realising, I think, in this last day or night, that literally nothing has happened that’s been worthwhile in his life since that moment. It’s desperate. What Krapp does – which is something that we recognise in other people – is he sabotages his own happiness because he can’t handle the weight of it.
TD: And of course there is also a deliciously sly humour to Beckett: ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ and a literal banana peel moment. How are you finding working with the comedic aspects?
VF: I think Stephen – which is why he’s so perfect for this part – naturally holds melancholy and darkness, and a childlike sort of humour, both in the same beat. And that is definitely what Beckett was playing with.
And I think as well that the comedy at the beginning (with the banana skin and all the repetitions) is so that we can’t sentimentalise the fact that this man is old and that it’s his last tape. Beckett throws us into something else; we don’t start it with sadness. He decentralises it every time. That has to be left until it’s time for us to think of that. It’s so clever.
TD: Stephen, you of course actually worked with Beckett at the Royal Court; how did that come about?
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SR: Well, it all goes back to Jack McGowran. Jack gave me my first job in London, in Shadow of a Gunman. I’m always shocked when young Irish actors don’t know who Jack was and who don’t know who Marie Kean was; they might have heard of Patrick Magee. But to me, those people were always part of my heritage because they transformed Irish character acting.
In 1976, they were going to do Endgame at the Royal Court for Beckett’s 70th birthday, and Jack [who had famously played Clov in the 1957 production at the Royal Court] had died. So the Royal Court phoned me up and asked me to meet with the director, Donald McWhinnie, because Donald had said, ‘well, you need an Irish actor who can be funny.’ And so I met with Donald and he said, ‘would you play Clov?’
Jack’s widow, Gloria, sent a message to me saying Jack would be proud. And Tara, his daughter, eventually gave me Jack’s copy of Shadow of a Gunman. And so I’m very connected to Jack. And I don’t say that gives me any right to say that I was as good as him or anything like that. But I absolutely worshipped him.
Donald McWhinnie was a truly great director; so articulate, so well-read. He did the first production of The Caretaker by Pinter and he did the London version of Translations by Friel (which I appeared in as well). Donald directed the production of Endgame and there I was, in the room with the great Beckett (who was at all the rehearsals) and Patrick Magee. So Magee and Beckett and McWhinnie and this little whippersnapper. It was a heavy learning experience, because Endgame is a tough thing. I remember Beckett saying he loved Endgame, and he didn’t like Waiting for Godot. And I said, ‘well, it’s been absorbed.’ And he said, that’s it, he said, it has been absorbed.
So it was an extraordinary learning experience for me. I was climbing a mountain to get at the level of these three men. When Magee was on form, it was certainly the best performance I’ve ever been on a stage with; it was absolutely incredible and inventive beyond belief. It’s the movement away from the whole notion of naturalism.
TD: I remember reading in an interview that you said that Beckett gave you a couple of notes that you found transformational for the possibilities of what modern acting could be.
SR: I asked him the meaning of a particular line. He said, ‘don’t think about meaning, think about rhythm.’
The other one was a beautiful note: Clov says ‘I’ll leave you’, and he repeats it. And I said, ‘at this point, Sam, is he leaving to go to the kitchen or is he leaving for good?’ And Sam said, ‘it is always ambiguous’. And that is a great note for acting that isn’t based on ‘intention’. Because people do spend their lives not knowing what they’re going to do.
VF: It’s the first time I’ve done a play for maybe 25 years without having the writer in the room. I know so much has been written about Beckett, but I’ve really approached this, like, as if it’s a new play. What’s so exciting is being able to have the direct conversation with Beckett through Stephen in a way. And Beckett’s understanding of the whole of theatre is so shocking, when you just look at how he’s refined his work and the purity of it.
SR: Most people’s understanding of theatre is to be very versed in it and to repeat what other people have done. Whereas he saw it as a particular thing: part of it was music hall, and poetry, and music, very much music.
VF: He’s so amazing with language and with rhythm, but he really looks at that in a three-dimensional setting and a lot of writers – a lot of brilliant writers – don’t do that. They leave that for the people who will interpret the world. He immediately puts it into something; his writing of it is three-dimensional, which is kind of mind-blowing. The thing I think that we’re really observing in our rehearsals is how vital the rhythm of the physical stuff is, as well as the language, and how the rhythm affects the audience.
SR: And also, we are becoming part of the tradition of doing it. Those actors, they changed things. In a strange way, sometimes it takes a long time for a play to become available to everybody. But eventually, through many performers, it becomes more available.
VF: And it really does feel like we’re all looking at a new play that hasn’t been done before. We are not bringing a weight of pain or history to it, and that feels really exciting.
Biographies
Landmark Productions
Landmark Productions is one of Ireland’s leading theatre producers, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2024. It produces wide-ranging work in Ireland and shares that work with international audiences. landmarkproductions.ie
Led by Anne Clarke since the company’s foundation, its productions have received multiple awards and have been seen in leading theatres in London, New York and beyond. It co-produces regularly with a number of partners, including, most significantly, Galway International Arts Festival, Irish National Opera, ANU and the Abbey Theatre. Its 33 world premieres – and counting – include new plays by major Irish writers such as Enda Walsh, Mark O’Rowe and Deirdre Kinahan, featuring a roll-call of Ireland’s finest actors, directors and designers.
Numerous awards include the Judges’ Special Award at the Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards, in recognition of ‘sustained excellence in programming and for developing imaginative partnerships to bring quality theatre to the Irish and international stage’; and a Special Tribute Award for Anne Clarke, for her work as ‘a producer of world-class theatre in the independent sector in Ireland’.
Landmark’s art-led work is funded by The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon. Its international touring is supported by Culture Ireland.
Special Thanks
We are grateful to the following for their help with this production:
Leonard Daly, Denis Desmond, Caroline Downey, Muireann Doyle, Druid, Cue One, Tracey Ferguson, Kate Ferris, Nick Forgacs, Ambassador Martin Fraser, Rob Furey, Gate Theatre, Abbey Theatre, Danny Hones, Irish National Opera, Michelle King, Jim McConnell, Isobel Mahon, Neil Martin, Orla Moloney, Jenn Morgan and all at Curtis Brown, David 'Spud' Murphy, Nicola Murphy, Noel Murphy, Barry O'Brien, Cian O’Brien, Kelly O’Connor, Alannah O’Leary, Gavin O'Sullivan, Kevin Reynolds, Aidan Wallace and Jonathan White; as well as Toni Racklin, Liz Eddy and the entire team at the Barbican.
We are grateful to the Arts Council of Ireland / An Chomhairle Ealaíon for its support of the original production, and to Culture Ireland for its support of the performances at the Barbican.
From the Barbican
Barbican Centre Board
Chair
Sir William Russell
Deputy Chair
Tijs Broeke
Deputy Chair
Tobi Ruth Adebekun
Board Members
Randall Anderson, Munsur Ali, Michael Asante MBE, Stephen Bediako OBE, Farmida Bi CBE, Zulum Elumogo, Jaspreet Hodgson, Nicholas Lyons, Mark Page, Anett Rideg, Jens Riegelsberger, Jane Roscoe, Despina Tsatsas, Irem Yerdelen
Clerk to the Board
John Cater and Kate Doidge
Barbican Centre Trust Chair
Farmida Bi CBE
Vice Chair
Robert Glick OBE
Trustees
Stephanie Camu, Tony Chambers, Cas Donald, David Kapur, Ann Kenrick, Kendall Langford, Sir William Russell, Sian Westerman
Directors
Chief Executive Officer (Interim)
David Farnsworth
Deputy CEO (Interim)
Ali Mirza
Director of Development
Natasha Harris
Head of Finance & Business Administration
Sarah Wall
Director for Buildings & Renewal
Dr Philippa Simpson
Director of Commercial
Jackie Boughton
Director for Audiences
Beau Vigushin
Director for Arts and Participation
Devyani Saltzman
Executive Assistant to CEO
Hannah Hoban
Theatre Department
Head of Theatre and Dance
Toni Racklin
Senior Production Manager
Simon Bourne
Producers
Liz Eddy, Jill Shelley, Fiona Stewart
Assistant Producers
Mrinmoyee Roy, Mali Siloko, Tom Titherington
Production Managers
Jamie Maisey, Lee Tasker
Technical Managers
Steve Daly, Jane Dickerson, Nik Kennedy, Martin Morgan, Stevie Porter
Stage Managers
Lucinda Hamlin, Charlotte Oliver
Technical Supervisors
James Breedon, Charlie Mann, Josh Massey, Matt Nelson, Adam Parrott, Lawrence Sills, Chris Wilby
Technicians
Kendell Foster, David Kennard, Burcham Johnson, Bart Kuta, Christian Lyons, Kieran Poynter, Fred Riding, Fede Spada, Matt Turnbull
PA to Head of Theatre
David Green
Production Administrator
Caroline Hall
Production Assistant
Ashley Panton
Stage Door
Julian Fox, aLbi Gravener
Creative Collaboration
Head of Creative Collaboration
Karena Johnson
Senior Producer for Learning and Participation
Oluwatoyin Odunsi
Senior Manager
Sarah Mangan
Producer
Josie Dick
Assistant Producer
Carmen Okome
Marketing Department
Head of Marketing
Jackie Ellis
Deputy Head of Marketing
Ben Jefferies
Senior Marketing Manager
Kyle Bradshaw
Marketing Manager
Rebecca Moore
Marketing Assistants
Antonia Georgieva, Ossama Nizami
Communications Department
Head of Communications
James Tringham
Senior Communications Manager
Ariane Oiticica
Communications Manager
HBL
Communications Officer
Sumayyah Sheikh
Communications Assistant
Andrea Laing
Audience Experience
Senior Audience Experience Managers
Oliver Robinson, Liz Davies-Sadd, Ben Skinner
Ticket Sales Managers
Jane Thomas, Bradley Thompson, Lucy Allen
Ticket Sales Team Leaders
Molly Barber, Alex Steggles, Máire Vallely, Nicola Watkinson, Charlotte Day
Operations Managers
Tabitha Fourie, Aksel Nichols, Ben Raynor, Samantha Teatheredge, Hayley Zwolinska
Operations Manager (Health & Safety)
Mo Reideman
Audience Event & Planning Manager
Freda Pouflis
Venue Managers
Catherine Campion, Scott Davies, Maria Pateli, Lotty Reeve, Shabana Zaman
Assistant Venue Managers
Sam Hind, Bronagh Leneghan, Melissa Olcese, Daniel Young
Young Crew Management
Dave Magwood, Rob Magwood, James Towell
Access and Licensing Manager
Rebecca Oliver
Security
Operations Manager
Naqash Sheikh
Audience Experience Coordinator
Ayelen Fananas
