KRAPP'S LAST TAPE
Premiered University Theatre, 16 June 1999

Production credits

1958: Elvis went into the army. Miles Davis cut a record with Gil Evans. Johnny Devlin came to Christchurch. Elric Hooper played the Fool in Ngaio Marsh's King Lear. And Samuel Beckett wrote Krapp's Last Tape, a comic-tragic play in which a man at the end of his life, and the end of the millennium, attempts to rekindle his remembered youth by electronic means. But where is his memory to be found? In the remnants of his voice, recorded years ago? In his present image, a photograph, a video? In his body, when he sleeps, dreams, eats a banana? The fifties held such promise. The dream of consumerist prosperity and personal fulfilment - the overriding fantasy of Western Civilisation - was effervescent. It was warm in the fifities. Now, with technology making almost anything possible, the dream has grown cold. When did he lose hope? When did we?

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Publicity

Krapp's Last Tape
Free Theatre Press Release

Brunton is 'perfect Krapp'
By Anna Dunbar, The Press, 15 June 1999

Philosophy on stage
The Mail 15 June 1999

Red Mole features in Beckett play
Chronicle, June 1999

Former Red Mole is 1999 writer-in-residence
Chronicle, June 1999

Reviews

Beckett play by Free Theatre
Reviewed by Alan Scott, The Press, 21 June 1999

Krapp's Last Tape
Reviewed by Elizabeth O'Connor, Theatre News, Aug 1999

Research

Haydn Kerr, used Krapp's Last Tape as material for his MA research Clowning in the Avant-garde: Antonin Artaud's The Philosopher's Stone and Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, University of Canterbury, 2008