Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's story about Krapp's Last Tape

The first time I encountered 'Krapp’s Last Tape' I was bored. The occasion was an initial read-through in a small Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania theatre that was producing an evening of five short Beckett plays, one of which I had been cast in.

I was twenty-three years old at the time and had a grand opinion of my acting ability as well as what the future held for me. Meanwhile, I was enduring a dreary existence, chronically single, jobless, antisocial—with the exception of theatre—and living alone on the outskirts of the city. I was convinced that things were about to change and that all I had to do was wait. There was a nagging awareness, though, that if there was any hope of altering my life, artistically and emotionally, I had to take it upon myself and move to New York. I had been contemplating this for several years but I was paralysed by the prospect of leaving a city I had lived in most of my life and that was so comforting. So instead I decided to just wait.

It was a cold night in January 1992 when I, along with several actors, sat around a folding table and read from the five Beckett plays that comprised the evening. I had been cast in 'Rough for Theatre One' where I played an energetic and conniving invalid. I liked my play. And I liked all of the other plays excluding 'Krapp’s Last Tape', which struck me as a convoluted and pointless story about an old man named Krapp who listens to a tape recording he made of himself thirty years earlier.

Four weeks of rehearsals passed. It was now February. I was still single. And still waiting. The night before we opened I was afforded my only chance to sit in the audience and watch the other plays of the evening. I found them all quite entertaining, charged as they were with Beckett’s darkly humorous vision of life. The final play was 'Krapp’s Last Tape' and it began with the actor, made up to look elderly, sitting at a desk with a tape recorder and a lone light bulb dangling above him. This was proceeded by ten wordless minutes of eating bananas that were absolutely hilarious. I laughed aloud in the empty theatre. And after that the story proper began with Krapp listening to the tape recording of his younger self.

Suddenly it was no longer funny.

The juxtaposition of watching a solitary old man in his dark apartment was unsettling. Furthermore, it was evident that the young man in the recording had an inflated view of himself and his possibilities while we, the audience, were given to understand that what had resulted thirty years later were missed opportunities, lost love, and abject isolation. Beckett’s message was simple: time passes.

Sitting in the audience I thought about how I was only twenty-three years old, but that one day, sooner than I expected, I would be thirty-three years old, and then I would be forty-three, and that it was possible that I would end up, in my old age, exactly the person I was now, still dreaming of change.

“Perhaps my best years are gone,” the young Krapp says at the close of the play, his pompous tone slightly diminished. “When there was a chance at happiness.”

And with the tape recorder running on in silence, the old Krapp stares out at the audience, a look of defeat, as I stared back in horror.

I might not have been so affected by the play if not for the fact that for the next three weeks, three nights each week, I sat in the dressing room having to listen to it until every word had been memorized. And when it was ending I would take my place offstage for the curtain call watching that last moment with Krapp looking out at the audience and the disembodied voice intoning, “Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness.”

The following year I was living in New York City.