Memory. Remembering is really not a memory at all, but an experience. Remembering is actually a living consciousness that binds and plugs the nature of experience to a more distant memory, say, an ancestors arrival in America; it is to redefine memory as consciousness or articulate it as a conscious experience. The only way to convey a reality or a message, or a given vision in not by voicing an idea, but instead, through the embodiment of a conscious reality…
…Ah! (He bends over ledger, turns the pages, finds the entry he wants, reads.) Box . . . thrree . . . spool . . . five. (he raises his head and stares front. With relish.) Spool! (pause.) Spooool! (happy smile. Pause. He bends over table, starts peering and poking at the boxes.) Box . . . thrree . . . three . . . four . . . two . . . (with surprise) nine! good God! . . . seven . . . ah! the little rascal! (He takes up the box, peers at it.) Box thrree. (He lays it on table, opens it and peers at spools inside.) Spool . . . (he peers at the ledger) . . . five . . . (he peers at spools) . . . five . . . five . . . ah! the little scoundrel!… The dark nurse . . . (He raises his head, broods, peers again at ledger, reads.) Slight improvement in bowel condition . . . Hm . . . Memorable . . . what? (He peers closer.) …
—in Krapp’s Last Tape. It starts as it means to go on. Very slowly. And is all the better for that. All lugubrious jowls and cardigans, Bremmer’s Krapp is like a state-funded care home on two legs: he’s both pathetic and defiant, a wasted remnant of an earlier age. Staring across the light shed by a dangling lamp, he makes every breath count, finding the humour in this dark, bleak play and, in a way, having the satirical time of his life in commenting on the ludicrous optimism of his earlier recording.—Read More:http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/a-kind-of-alaska-krapps-last-tape/
Krapp still believes, despite his ostensible decrepitude, that he has the power to produce a game-changing great piece of art that will change the world, alter its trajectory. Somehow all those lost chances and regrets are just waiting to be re-emanipated and liberated in a great work of art that seems just beyond arm’s reach.As a monologue its disturbing. Its dark. After all, the volatile compounds of mortality, creativity and memory are antagonistically found in the same habitat. Krapp’s Last Tape is an individual going over an inventory of his life over a series of recordings, that were made on the eve of his birthday. Krapp is sixty-nine years-old, and the recordings seem to reinforce the mistakes that served as markers for each of those anniversaries. But he confuses memeory and remembrance, and that living consciousness get buried, and the futile search ultimately wears him down, inhibiting him and restraining until the conscious experience becomes a wall of futility preventing hm from creating something meaningful.
( see link at end) …Just as Box Three Spool Five is an annual entry of a diaristic nature, the present Krapp’s interaction with “that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago” seems to be a dialogue of sorts, although it consists mostly of switching the tape on and off and running it forwards and backwards, looking up a pretentious Latinism in the dictionary, and gestures of disapproval. Krapp’s réplique comes only in the penultimate speech, when he records a “virgin” tape for his 69th birthday. As he speaks into the microphone, distant memories overcome his more recent narrative and they break down, impelling Krapp to rewind once again, this time more radically: “he wrenches off the tape, throws it away, puts on the other, winds it forward to the passage he wants, switches on, listens staring front.”
Beckett was fifty-one when he wrote Krapp, immediately inspired by hearing a radio broadcast of Patrick Magee reading from one of his novels, and of course he wrote it for Magee to perform. Fifty or thereabouts is an age when many people experience a sort of break in their lives and begin to look back at the earlier part of our lives with some intolerance, if not disdain. As John Hurt said, “It’s about your perception of how you reconstruct your own life, how you accuse your old self.”
Memory and regret is universal. How many times in one day do you hear people say “if only” or “only if” – those two words that should never go together in the English language. You think: “I could have been so much this if I’d done that – if I’d played things differently.” In other words, saying: “If I wasn’t the person I was at the time making those decisions.” But that, of course, is what you were and that is what you are now. It’s something that is universal. This goes some way to explaining the spell that the play has on an audience, because it so acutely touches that point in everybody. We examine ourselves constantly.Read More:http://newyorkarts.net/2011/12/28/john-hurt-krapps-tape-dublin-gate-theatre-bam/#.UATPbPVb76Ma
—The decrepit Krapp, who we later learn is an author, every year on his birthday stirs himself from his torpor and records a message of what is happening to him. Consulting a dusty ledger (they must get through a lot of talc with two shows a night) he chooses a diary recording from when he was 39 and we listen along with him as his middle-aged self expounds on how his magnum opus will seal his status as a great writer and also his loss of a lover.—Read More:http://chrisnthat.blogspot.ca/2010/10/persistence-of-memory-is-at-heart-of.html
COMMENTS
