The Irish Repertory Theatre gives the title Beckett Briefs to the Ciarán O’Reilly-directed 80-minute round-up of Samuel Beckett’s Not I, Play, and Krapp’s Last Tape. Brief they may be by the slowly, fast-ticking clock. As, however, the one-act later works of what many of us consider the most significant 20th-century playwright, they’re endlessly lengthy in meaning and implication.
Krapp’s Last Tape gets opening pride of place here. Usually running somewhere between 35 and 45 or so minutes, it’s the most autobiographical piece from the shy, retiring Beckett, as he’s been characterized. More notably, Krapp is a role many maturing actors think they must take on, like Lear, to prove their worth. That’s in the same way serious younger actors feel they must scale Hamlet.
About Krapp’s Last Tape: After hearing Irish actor Patrick Magee’s raspy voice in a radio drama and riveted by it, Beckett constructed the piece for him. His version, available on YouTube is perhaps definitive. But played now by F. Murray Abraham, this Krapp has to be ranked one of the best ever. In its 46 minutes this is the most impressive performance now on any New York City stage.
For those who don’t know the classic—an instant classic on its 1958 opening—the 69-year-old, unkempt, shabbily-attired Krapp is seen listening to a tape he made when he was 39. At first disapproving of his former self, he soon wavers. He only gets to the ambivalent reminiscence after fiddling with the table on which he sets his tape machine, also after eating two bananas, throwing the peels on the floor, and slipping on one of them.
There you have the often slightly comical Beckett’s way of sending up possibly the world’s most famous sight gag. And it’s clearly indicated in the one-act’s myriad stage directions. Indeed, Beckett is so demanding about his stage directions that, consequently, he issues a tough challenge to actor’s attempting to differentiate their interpretations from predecessors.
Director O’Reilly following Beckett’s requirements faithfully, Abraham quickly turns the challenge into a mere trifle. It’s in his stooped-shoulder carriage, his hesitant voice when he speaks, which isn’t that often. From second to second, it’s on his emotive face, his capturing the wretched essence of a man who—in the famous phrase from his novel The Unnamable—can’t go on but will go on. (Note: Just about every Beckett character can’t go on but will.)
Afflicted throughout his life with an ultimately unexplainable depression, Beckett allows despair, disillusionment, pessimism to haunt his works, along with a hope—maybe a hope against hope—viewed most pointedly and memorably in the stranded, ever-hopeful Estragon and Vladimir of Waiting for Godot, arguably the 20th-century’s most significant play. (Incidentally, Beckett was so unsure of his writings that longtime companion and eventual wife Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil often had to deal with producers and publishers.)
Beckett reiterates his compulsive sentiments in the later one-acts he off-handedly (disparagingly?) referred to as “dramaticules.” Not I (1972) focuses—“focuses” is the operative work—on a woman’s intensely red lip-sticked mouth. That’s it. Nothing more is seen on a completely black set. (Charlie Corcoran judiciously sees to all sets, Michael Gottlieb to the lighting). She speaks rapidly, with only short stage-directioned stops and in what might be termed a stream of consciousness some could describe as William Faulkner-like prose but is surely influenced by James Joyce, Beckett’s significant mentor.
She—okay, her mouth—speaks so rapidly in the third person, she resembles an unstoppably gossipy neighbor. Listeners can be forgiven for not assiduously following her train of urgent concerns. More than probably, Beckett regarded such bewilderment as an acceptable response. Indeed, at least once the giveaway phrase about making “some sense of it” is uttered by the 70-year-old woman compulsively releasing her disjointed disquisition.
Sarah Street enacts the obscured person identified only as Mouth. Importantly, Not I (1972) was written for Billie Whitelaw, a major Beckett muse, who, on first reading the monologue, told her benefactor that it’s “unlearnable and unplayable.” Nonetheless, she learned it and played it. So has and does Street, with the result being that her actor’s accomplishment may be the truly astonishing Not I effect of a dramaticule that Beckett wouldn’t have been surprised if audiences threw their hands up at it.
The same expertise goes for the three actors—Kate Forbes, Roger Dominic Casey, Street—who enliven (if that can be said) Play. Unlike Mouth, more of them are visible, their upper bodies. Borrowing from the trash cans he employed in Endgame, Beckett plops Woman 1, Woman 2, and Man in urns. Now dead, a condition that may not immediately strike first-time witnesses, they blab their relationships. Apparently, Woman 1 and Man are married or at least involved in an enduring relationship and Woman 2 is Man’s mistress or some such.
Again, we have rapid gabbers—this time a trio—whom Beckett is daring audience members to follow, to “make sense” of what they’re saying. With Gottlieb furiously switching his spotlight, Forbes, Casey, and Street are securely on top of their hellish assignments.
In Disjecta, a 1984 collection of Beckett’s writings, he reports, “More and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it.” There you have it. In Beckett Briefs, language evanesces, billows, fulminates. It questions, but it can’t be ignored.
Beckett Briefs opened January 26, 2025, at the Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through March 9. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
