Spielzeit 26.08. - 09.10.

Krapp’s Last Tape

by Samuel Beckett Theatre

»…but the clouds…/ When the horizon fades;/ Or a bird's sleepy cry./ Among the deepening shades.« / William Butler Yeats

Director
Jossi Wieler
Stage and Costumes
Anja Rabes
Dramaturgy
Julia Lochte, Thomas Oberender
Lighting Design
Jürgen Tulzer
 
 
Film
... nur noch Gewölk ...
Director
Samuel Beckett
Man
Klaus Herm
Woman
Cornelia Boje

»One evening, late, in the future«: Krapp, a lonely old man, speaks into a tape recorder, just as he has every year – but now perhaps for the last time. What remains of life that was worth the effort? What is left when Krapp separates the wheat from the chaff? In the old recordings to which he listens, his former life speaks, and when he looks back at this there was only one hope of happiness: being together with his lover.

20 years later in the television play ... but the clouds ... Beckett wrote a sequel to Krapp’s Last Tape: a man, possibly the 70 year-old Beckett himself, kept going by a regular daily routine, waits in his room at night for a woman to appear, perhaps his muse. He implores her, but she rarely comes. Then he occupies himself with mathematics or with nothing until he has to leave the darkness and loneliness of his quarters at dawn. In his early 50s Beckett described in Krapp’s Last Tape a man whom he would himself embody 20 years later – held by memories and desperate for youth and creativity. The absences or appearances of the women, whether lover or muse, simply indicate the passage of time.

»Beckett did not live in time but alongside time. ›Only the tree is alive‹ – this is a Beckett sentence which could have been spoken centuries ago in a bare cell by Confucius or Master Eckhart, Mohammed or Ibn’Ata Allah, because there is a serenity within it. Maybe the last thing which cannot be bought.« (Thomas Oberender)

The film will be shown at the Foyer of the Maschinenhaus before and after the performance.

... but the clouds ... is presented with kind permission of Südwestrundfunk (SWR).

A visiting production from the Münchner Kammerspiele and the Salzburger Festspiele.