57 Years in the Making – Garrard Masterfully Handles a Beckett Classic
Jim Garrard and SALONTheatre deliver a textbook performance of Krapp’s Last Tape worthy of Beckett’s legacy.
Theatre Kingston’s Storefront Fringe (partnered with Kick & Push) delivers the must see performance of the festival with Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett. Krapp’s Last Tape is considered to be one of the finest one-person shows in modern English theatre, and the character Krapp is a coveted role for most veteran performers. Popular portrayals of the character include John Hurt, Harold Pinter, and Brian Dennehy.
Krapp’s Last Tape takes place on the 69th birthday of the titular character Krapp. Over the decades he has formed the ritual of recording the notable events and discoveries of his life from the previous year. On this birthday, he chooses to listen to a tape from when he was 39 years old and engages in a dialogue with himself throughout the course of the show. It becomes clear to the audience that Krapp has become a bitter and isolated old man over the last 30 years who has only the echoes of his past to keep him company. This is an absurdist piece that balances comedy and tragedy beautifully.
Needless to say, Jim Garrard had notable names to compete with in his portrayal of Krapp, and yet, he more than held his own in the scope of the play’s notoriety. He balances the absurd humour perfectly with sombre tones, anger-fueled explosions, and a dry sardonic wit common to Beckett’s characters. His masterful control of tone was employed to make the audience laugh, cry, and pontificate on their daily lives. Garrard absorbs you into the past with his trance-like voice enabling you to revisit his memories easily, both joyous and tragic.
With this being one of the first live, in-theatre, performances since the pandemic began, I was thrilled to feel the intimacy of the Baby Grand Theatre carefully curated and composed in respect to the audience’s experience. The seating was physically distanced and the staff ensured that health protocols were followed at all times, making this a safe and fun event for all involved.
The key to a good Beckett performance is to view his writing as a musical score, wherein the voice, body, and movement create tone, tempo, rhythm, and most importantly, silence. This holistic approach to theatre direction was clear in Garrard’s iteration of the character. From the opening moment he peels the banana to the stillness that permeates the silent finale of the piece, Garrard was able to competently conduct the audience through the challenging composition Beckett arranged. This technical ingenuity of acting gave the audience encouragement to laugh at the most tragic and heartbreaking moments of the play, reinforcing that taking life as seriously as Krapp does is a folly. Garrard and Beckett remind us that we need to laugh at ourselves, enjoy the small moments, and not dwell on the future or the past—all through the composition of the piece.
The set is clearly symbolic of Krapp’s personality. It is aged, chaotic, dingy, and quite frankly dull—which is great! Having degraded over time, the furniture around Krapp visually depicts and represents how he too fades away with each passing year. These elements work in perfect harmony to create a cohesive and connected performance that resounds the themes of bitterness, regret, and the loss of self.
Richard Feren (seven time Dora Award winning sound designer) is outstanding in his timing and attention to detail with his meticulous sound design. You would swear that Garrard was actually playing, stopping, and rewinding the recordings himself. Given the setup on stage, I genuinely believed that this was the case, only learning afterward that Feren was the mastermind behind the stellar recordings Garrard interacted with. The two virtuosos of Feren and Garrard are perfectly in sync for the entire performance.
The performance overall has a great deal of charm to it, Garard having envisioned himself in the role since he first saw the play at Queen’s University in 1964. These ruminations over the last 57 years have certainly delivered a philosophically powerful piece of art that challenges its audience to think for themselves, rather than tell them what they should walk away with; paramount in Beckett’s writing.
As a fan and familiar of Beckett, this play, and theatre of the absurd, this performance is truly textbook. There are, of course, moments that I prefer other representations of Krapp, but they are few and minor moments at best. Evidently, if I have to look at mere seconds of the performance to find fault with it, SALONTheatre and team have done an extraordinary job with breathing life into this Beckett classic.
I was left asking myself difficult questions following the closing silence of the play. Truly, a wave of existentialism washed over us all as we saw a defeated man, who never accomplished his goals, just sitting there in the silence, almost lifeless…
Most powerfully, there is a moment where Krapp’s past self explains that he has figured out his great purpose for existence only for his current 69 year old self to (laughably) fast forward and skip the explanation. It does not matter, nor will it ever. We spend so much time searching feverishly for meaning in the absurdity that is life, and in this pursuit, we distract ourselves from truly living. Garrard has imparted a powerful lesson in his version of Krapp’s Last Tape, and it is one that I personally will not soon forget.
If you cannot see every show in Theatre Kingston’s Storefront Fringe this year, I implore you to make time for this piece in particular. It will blow you away with how adeptly SALONTheatre has staged Krapp’s Last Tape. It is well worth the money for what it offers and the investment on Garrard’s part cannot be overstated when I say that this was truly an exemplary piece of theatre.
Krapp’s Last Tape presented by SALONTheatre runs from August 5-15, 2021. Check out the Storefront Fringe for tickets and more information regarding showtimes.