Krapp's Last Tape
Samuel Beckett’s moving meditation on time, memory and ageing is performed by renowned Irish actor Barry McGovern, one of the world’s most revered interpreters of the great playwright.
Samuel Beckett’s moving meditation on time, memory and ageing is performed by renowned Irish actor Barry McGovern, one of the world’s most revered interpreters of the great playwright. This brand new production is directed by Michael Colgan, longtime Artistic Director of Dublin’s Gate Theatre.
An old man sits alone at a table, preparing for his annual ritual: to archive the last year of his weary life on tape. As he’s done on his birthday, ever since he was a young man. Listening in on an earlier recording, he’s drawn into a chilling dialogue with his younger, brashly confident self – but are the memories he evokes better left unheard?
Beckett’s haunting one-man play is a brief but highly intense experience, giving voice to the conversations we have with ourselves across time – an essay in loneliness, but shot through with grim humour.
Barry McGovern has been performing Beckett’s stage works for more than three decades to huge international acclaim, and was widely praised for his near-legendary I’ll Go On, based on Beckett’s trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable, at the 2013 International Festival. He is widely considered one of the world’s leading interpreters of Beckett, in performances that feel lived rather than simply acted, and that embody both Beckett’s humour and his darkness.
Michael Colgan was Artistic Director of Dublin’s Gate Theatre for over 30 years, and is a long-time devotee of Beckett’s work, which he has directed internationally, and has produced for film and television.
This landmark production brings together two of the world’s finest Beckett interpreters in an unforgettable and deeply personal drama by one of the world’s greatest ever writers.
Michael Colgan Director
Barry McGovern Actor
A production by Clare Street