Tape and Tour in Sheffield
I went over to Sheffield on Saturday to see Krapp's Last Tape, with Richard Wilson, and I've been trying to complete a review since then, but can't quite finish it; there's a hole at the point where I ought to describe his performance, and I'm not sure why. I don't think it was a fault of the performance, but after several days waiting my brain doesn't seem to have anything to say about it. So I might as well get on and post, before I forget about it, and noticing that today is Richard Wilson's 78th birthday provided some sort of deadline.
For those unfamiliar with Beckett's play (I hadn't seen it before, but had absorbed the storyline from various sources) the principal business is that Krapp has made regular recordings of himself throughout his life, as a sort of diary, and listens to them, apparently on some kind of schedule - after consulting a ledger, on this occasion he picks out Box Three Spool Five. This turns out to be the 39-year-old Krapp - we're told it was thirty years ago - who mentions that he's just been listening to a ten-year-old tape (which we don't hear). Box Three Spool Five covers various incidents, including the death of his mother, a Memorable Equinox (which appears to have been a sudden vision illuminating his place within the cosmos, though we don't find out what that was as the elderly Krapp finds it so unmemorable he keeps pressing fast forward), and his farewell to love, in which he describes being in a punt with a woman as they are apparently breaking off their relationship. This section he replays several times.
The play was performed in the Crucible Studio, which is a small theatre in the round. The set design was a dominant feature of the production; it was a sealed box, Krapp's den, which looked like a dingy office - an oblong room, with window panels forming most of the walls, and a door at one end (intriguingly this included a cat flap). It reminded me very much of the glass box occupied by the editor in one corner of the open plan office where I first worked, though I don't think it is an actual office, as in workplace (he's 69, and it's late at night). Or perhaps it's a very run-down TARDIS.
When the audience walked in, Wilson was already seated inside the box, and we had about ten minutes to observe him before the theatre doors were shut and the play began. It was an odd combination of intimacy and distance: he was only a few metres away, but completely separated from us. After a while the box began to rotate, very slowly, partly to ensure that he faced different sections of the audience despite spending large parts of the play seated at a desk; we also caught reflections of him from time to time in the windows.
The sound design was also a key feature, not just because of the importance of the tape which Krapp plays, but because they had to transmit his performance from inside the sealed box. The programme notes said they wanted the audience to feel they were in there with him, and through microphones we could hear his breathing and the rustling of papers.
Krapp has a fondness for bananas, and a couple of times he extracts one from a drawer, peels it, then opens the door of his box to throw out the banana skin. It happened to land very close to where I was sitting, and it was probably a good thing I wasn't on the front row. I already had a banana skin, from my lunch, wrapped up in a bag within my bag to be taken home for composting, and I would have been awfully tempted to pick up Krapp's banana skin to add to the compost - but it would have been risky, in case I was noticed and stole a laugh.
Perhaps because of my earlier thought about the box as a TARDIS, I began to think of Krapp as a Time Lord, perhaps coming to the end of his final regeneration and looking back over his earlier selves. The tape machine is probably some part of the TARDIS console; we know that preserves the memory of voices.
[And here is the hole in the review.]
I think the only other time I've seen Wilson on stage was also in Beckett; he did Waiting for Godot at the Royal Exchange in 1999. (That was the Exchange's second Godot - I saw Max Wall and Trevor Peacock do it in 1980.) I remember being very irritated by reviews which kept going on about how it was impossible to watch Wilson without thinking of Victor Meldrew; for those of us who hadn't seen One Foot in the Grave, it was quite easy. I still haven't seen more than about ten minutes of OFitG, so continue to react to him as an actor rather than a TV character. Except it's more complicated than that; although I've seen him in various parts over the years (Dr Constantine in The Empty Child, for instance), I'm probably most familiar with him playing Richard Wilson. That's not sarcasm: in addition to a guest role as himself in Father Ted, he's starred in a couple of series of a radio drama called Believe It!, a fictional autobiography, in which he tells assorted comic stories supposedly about his own life.
I happened to be in Sheffield the day before the Tour de France arrived, which was a good thing for me as it was possible to move about the streets without difficulty, but the city was already in celebratory mode.
East Midlands Trains were handing out little flags in the station, with a tricolore on one side and the union flag on the other.
And there was a street market near the Town Hall (where I'll be returning for a wedding later in the month). The stalls were of various nationalities (I bought some fancy Italian biscuits), but there was a determinedly French theme. Of a decidedly cliched variety, but then why not.
Also posted on Dreamwidth, with
comments.
For those unfamiliar with Beckett's play (I hadn't seen it before, but had absorbed the storyline from various sources) the principal business is that Krapp has made regular recordings of himself throughout his life, as a sort of diary, and listens to them, apparently on some kind of schedule - after consulting a ledger, on this occasion he picks out Box Three Spool Five. This turns out to be the 39-year-old Krapp - we're told it was thirty years ago - who mentions that he's just been listening to a ten-year-old tape (which we don't hear). Box Three Spool Five covers various incidents, including the death of his mother, a Memorable Equinox (which appears to have been a sudden vision illuminating his place within the cosmos, though we don't find out what that was as the elderly Krapp finds it so unmemorable he keeps pressing fast forward), and his farewell to love, in which he describes being in a punt with a woman as they are apparently breaking off their relationship. This section he replays several times.
The play was performed in the Crucible Studio, which is a small theatre in the round. The set design was a dominant feature of the production; it was a sealed box, Krapp's den, which looked like a dingy office - an oblong room, with window panels forming most of the walls, and a door at one end (intriguingly this included a cat flap). It reminded me very much of the glass box occupied by the editor in one corner of the open plan office where I first worked, though I don't think it is an actual office, as in workplace (he's 69, and it's late at night). Or perhaps it's a very run-down TARDIS.
When the audience walked in, Wilson was already seated inside the box, and we had about ten minutes to observe him before the theatre doors were shut and the play began. It was an odd combination of intimacy and distance: he was only a few metres away, but completely separated from us. After a while the box began to rotate, very slowly, partly to ensure that he faced different sections of the audience despite spending large parts of the play seated at a desk; we also caught reflections of him from time to time in the windows.
The sound design was also a key feature, not just because of the importance of the tape which Krapp plays, but because they had to transmit his performance from inside the sealed box. The programme notes said they wanted the audience to feel they were in there with him, and through microphones we could hear his breathing and the rustling of papers.
Krapp has a fondness for bananas, and a couple of times he extracts one from a drawer, peels it, then opens the door of his box to throw out the banana skin. It happened to land very close to where I was sitting, and it was probably a good thing I wasn't on the front row. I already had a banana skin, from my lunch, wrapped up in a bag within my bag to be taken home for composting, and I would have been awfully tempted to pick up Krapp's banana skin to add to the compost - but it would have been risky, in case I was noticed and stole a laugh.
Perhaps because of my earlier thought about the box as a TARDIS, I began to think of Krapp as a Time Lord, perhaps coming to the end of his final regeneration and looking back over his earlier selves. The tape machine is probably some part of the TARDIS console; we know that preserves the memory of voices.
[And here is the hole in the review.]
I think the only other time I've seen Wilson on stage was also in Beckett; he did Waiting for Godot at the Royal Exchange in 1999. (That was the Exchange's second Godot - I saw Max Wall and Trevor Peacock do it in 1980.) I remember being very irritated by reviews which kept going on about how it was impossible to watch Wilson without thinking of Victor Meldrew; for those of us who hadn't seen One Foot in the Grave, it was quite easy. I still haven't seen more than about ten minutes of OFitG, so continue to react to him as an actor rather than a TV character. Except it's more complicated than that; although I've seen him in various parts over the years (Dr Constantine in The Empty Child, for instance), I'm probably most familiar with him playing Richard Wilson. That's not sarcasm: in addition to a guest role as himself in Father Ted, he's starred in a couple of series of a radio drama called Believe It!, a fictional autobiography, in which he tells assorted comic stories supposedly about his own life.
I happened to be in Sheffield the day before the Tour de France arrived, which was a good thing for me as it was possible to move about the streets without difficulty, but the city was already in celebratory mode.
East Midlands Trains were handing out little flags in the station, with a tricolore on one side and the union flag on the other.
And there was a street market near the Town Hall (where I'll be returning for a wedding later in the month). The stalls were of various nationalities (I bought some fancy Italian biscuits), but there was a determinedly French theme. Of a decidedly cliched variety, but then why not.
Also posted on Dreamwidth, with
comments.