Assembly Roxy
Four stars
Old Krapp looks like he’s been waiting some time to have a rummage through the acquired detritus that passes as his archive in this new look at Samuel Beckett’s 1958 solo play. Originally written for Irish actor Patrick Magee, the play has survived into the twenty-first century despite technological advances that make Krapp’s endless spools look like something left over from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Performed here in actress Stockard Channing’s production by David Westhead, it begins with a silence worthy of John Cage before Westhead begins the elaborate business of unlocking his desk and unpeeling a banana. This becomes a mini performance by itself in a routine perfected long before Andy Warhol started unzipping the abstract.
As Krapp finally turns to the meticulously catalogued recorded accounts of his past, the interplay between recorded and live voices, the noises off and the sound of silence see the old boy rewind on what amounts to a sonic diary that is effectively a podcast in waiting.
This is delivered by Westhead with a sense of crumpled gravitas that suggests Krapp might be trying to pull together some kind of memoir, only to be distracted by the mix of heartbreak and happiness that fired his youth and shaped everything that followed.
Running at just over forty minutes, Beckett’s play remains a lovely excavation of how the past defines us long before we realise it, and which has layers of new meaning each time you see it.
As for the future, all profits from Channing’s production go to The Wembley to Soweto Foundation, which provides cameras to young people in South African townships. It’s interesting that a sound based play is providing the means to create a visual rather than an aural archive. But then, as shown by its mix of interior monologue and existential slapstick, Beckett’s back pages remain a tragicomic fusion of sound and vision.
Until Aug 30, 1.25pm.
The Herald, August 15, 2026
ends
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