Adelaide Festival, first held on Kaurna Yerta in 1960, may not be the oldest arts festival in the nation (that accolade goes west, to Noongar boodja, where the first Perth Festival was held in 1953) but it is certainly the festival that the rest of the sector looks to and, where possible, attends.
Adelaide Festival is also the international arts festival with perhaps the best-documented impact of its ability to transform and transport Australian audiences:
“During Festival time I often think about the young people who will engage with the shows, perhaps experience a particular art form for the first time, and be moved and activated by it in a way that will also change their lives,” Jared Thomas recalls in Catherine McKinnon’s Adelaide Festival: 60 Years 1960-2020, Wakefield Press’ authoritative tome about Adelaide Festival’s rich and resonant history.
For those young people present at the Dunstan Playhouse on Saturday night, watching Stephen Rea would have been a masterclass in and of itself. Rea is the Irish actor of stage and screen best known internationally for work in films such as Black 47, a revenge thriller about an Gorta Mór (‘the Great Hunger’ aka the so-called Irish ‘famine’), The Crying Game and V For Vendetta, and renowned to theatregoers for superlative work at Dublin’s The Gate and Abbey Theatres and London’s Royal Court.
Samuel Beckett’s text, for this writer at least, takes on greater profundity and resonance as one ages (Beckett himself, a Nobel Prize-winning Irish playwright, short story writer and novelist, was not quite 52 when he wrote Krapp’s Last Tape, which feels now like him looking towards the end of his life); it is also famously exacting. Witness, for instance, Beckett’s opening description of just part of the one-act play’s wordless opening scene:
Krapp remains a moment motionless, heaves a great sigh, looks at his watch, fumbles in his pockets, takes out an envelope, puts it back, fumbles, takes out a small bunch of keys, raises it to his eyes, chooses a key, gets up and moves to front of table. He stoops, unlocks first drawer, peers into it, feels about inside it, takes out a reel of tape, peers at it, puts it back, locks drawer, unlocks second drawer peers into it, feels about inside it, takes out a large banana, peers at it, locks drawer, puts keys back in his pocket. He turns, advances to edge of stage, halts, strokes banana, peels it, drops skin at his feet, puts end of banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously before him. Finally he bites off the end, turns aside and begins pacing to and fro at edge of stage, in the light, i.e. not more than four or five paces either way, meditatively eating banana. He treads on skin, slips, nearly falls, recovers himself, stoops and peers at skin and finally pushes it, still stooping, with his foot over the edge of the stage into pit. He resumes his pacing, finishes banana, returns to table, sits down, remains a moment motionless, heaves a great sigh, takes keys from his pockets, raises them to his eyes, chooses key, gets up and moves to front of table, unlocks second drawer, takes out a second large banana, peers at it, locks drawer, puts back his keys in his pocket, turns, advances to the edge of stage, halts, strokes banana, peels it, tosses skin into pit, puts an end of banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously before him.
In Landmark Productions’ sparsely beautiful Krapp’s Last Tape, skilfully and precisely directed by Vicky Featherstone (the inaugural Artistic Director of the National Theatre of Scotland from 2005-2012, subsequently becoming the first female Artistic Director of London’s Royal Court Theatre from 2013-2023, and now a freelancer, directing this play at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre in early 2024), the production veers away from Beckett’s text in this early scene. Instead of Rea’s lugubrious Krapp – an ageing, bitter, alcoholic, failed and self-lacerating writer – pushing the banana skin off stage with his foot, Krapp laboriously picks up the skin and throws it, with a deliberately theatrical gesture, stage right into darkness, thus setting the scene for a production that honours Beckett’s masterful text, but which is also thrilling its own rough, shambling beast.
The play also departs from the text in other ways, most notably when Krapp shambles offstage to open a bottle of spirits – we hear the pop of a cork as the bottle is opened but not the actual act of taking a nip. In the text, Beckett writes:
Krapp switches off, broods, looks at his watch, gets up, goes backstage into darkness. Ten seconds. pop of cork. Ten seconds. Second cork. Ten seconds. Third cork. Ten seconds. Brief burst of quavering song.
Here, Krapp opens a door onto a brightly lit space backstage, far from the first time that the interplay of light and darkness – reminiscent of the chiaroscuro used so thrillingly in film noir as well as nodding to early silent cinema, and a motif from the text the production will return to again and again – will be employed in this exemplary production.
Read: Dance review: A Quiet Language, Australian Dance Theatre, Adelaide Festival 2025
Comic flourishes, such as Rea holding up a banana like a smile while ‘staring vacuously before him’, heighten the black humour present in so much of Beckett’s stage writing – in contrast to the playwright’s unwarranted reputation as being bleak, dour and impersonal – while Rea’s performance is nothing short of magnificent.
The flashes of anguish and sadness in his eyes when recalling past love and unresolved grief; the barking laughs that transform into wracking coughs; Rea’s awkward, clownish, shuffling gait as Krapp (which Kevin Gleeson’s subtle but superb sound design amplifies and echoes wonderfully); the deliciously exaggerated articulation of the word “spooooool” when preparing to play a recording of his arrogant younger self on the antique reel-to-reel recorder Krapp cradles so tenderly, as if it were the lover he once spurned – collectively, every element of this production coheres, compels and shapes it into life – a vibrant, thrilling, exhilarating production about a sad shell of a man looking back on the life he once had.
‘Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.’
Krapp motionless staring before him. The tape runs on in silence.
CURTAIN
Only here there is no curtain – only darkness. The darkness that has surrounded Krapp since the start of the play, since before the play began; the darkness he has battled his entire life, drawing him away from the light of love, of hope, of happiness. The darkness engulfs him – and all of us.
Darkness. And then rapturous applause.
Krapp’s Last Tape
By Samuel Beckett
Performed by Stephen Rea
Landmark Productions
Presented by Arts Projects Australia and Adelaide Festival
Director: Vicky Featherstone
Set Designer: Jamie Vartan
Costume Designer: Katie Davenport
Lighting Designer: Paul Keogan
Sound Designer: Kevin Gleeson
Audio Director: Stephen Wright
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
Tickets: $40-$50 (full time student) etc
27 February – 8 March 2025
The writer visited Adelaide as a guest of Adelaide Festival.
