Driving Himself Crazy

This old man, Krapp, is immensely disorientated, desolated, nostalgic, and most of all mentally perturbed. There is a lot of silence in the performance, its not surprising since there is only one actor and the tape that he plays on stage. This silences, along with the emptiness of the stage and the body language of the actor, Patrick Magee, reflect the disappointment of life that the character realizes he had been living for the last sixty nine years. It is his own blankness and desperation that has lead him to insanity. Undeniably he is crazy or on the way to craziness, his movements and face expressions demonstrate the contrary to sanity. The title of the piece Krapp’s Last Tape is indeed the ending scene of a man. Within whom Samuel Beckett might see himself or identifies with the feeling of blankness that Krapp is feeling.

There is a bit, if not absolute of obsessive behavior in Krapp. The way he takes the bananas, looks at them as if asking himself what they are (0:53 Part I) and pills them, both, and eats them while he wonders at uneven pace back and forth in front of his desk. More so the way he walks all the way to the wall to go in a straight line toward the doors where he gets the metal boxes and tape recorder that he will listen to for the rest of the play. He does this several times doing exactly the same path to go through the doors, which is schematic and repetitive. The same way his life has been. So schematic that he has been recording his life for a long time every birthday, and he listens to the tapes and reminds himself that he has been a failure and that his “best years are gone” (6:48 Part IV). And yet he still records another one for this sixty-ninth birthday. This obsessive behavior has to be an indication of Beckett’s own behavior.

What impressed me the most was the disturbed face that the actor does not drop. His movements are those of an old man, but, as I said before a mentally sick old man. He listens to the tapes extremely concentrated and distressed, he is listening to himself so there is meta fiction in the play. He is driving himself crazy.