Krapp (whose name bears certain excremental connotations) is in his room listening to old recordings on his tape-recorder, thoughts, events and situations that he has recorded throughout his life which is now slowly reaching its end. He reacts emotionally to this re-living of  past events as he comes face to face once again, just like everyone must, with the great mystery of life.

 

This work is a milestone for one-character plays as it explores situations of loneliness and the fragmentation of character suffered by  a person who has not a social, nor biological nor religious goal. At times he has tried to find meaning in love and in creation but he never ultimately manages to do so. The only thing which comforts him is his ritual with the old tape-recorder, the ritual of his birthday, but also the switching on and off of the tape-recorder, the phrases which are repeated. “What’s one more year? Thoughts and constipation.”  This particular phrase summarises Krapp’s character well. On the one side we have the mind and on the other the body which is symbolized by the bowels and what is produced by them. Waste and shit. That is Krapp’s very name and the substance from which he is made.

 

Panos Skouroliakos first interpreted Samuel Beckett’s monologue “Krapp’s Last Tape” in 1996 at the “Semio” Theatre, directed by Nikos Diamantis, translated by Costas Stamatiou, art direction by Ilias Deloglou. He returns, seventeen years later, to the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation to once again search for the meaning of life through the enchanting, mournful words of Samuel Beckett.