“Krapp’s Last Tape” at Cockpit Theatre
Jeremy Malies in Central London
★★★★☆
5 September 2026
A 69-year-old man hunches over a reel-to-reel recorder on his birthday. The machine is playing a tape made by his younger self who in turn has been reflecting on a tape made in early adulthood. Peter Marinker, who is Krapp here, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease two years ago. A Beckett specialist who is now 85, he first appeared as Krapp at the precocious age of 41 in 1983. Astoundingly – they appear to come from another realm – the recordings we hear are from that production.
Stage manager Marta Fossati can be heard live throughout reminding Marinker of how he should move around the space and when he should activate the machine’s buttons. Of course, this creates a distance between character and actor but Fossati contrives to become an extension of Marinker and the approach works in terms of hinting at alter egos. The pensive intensity remains and the inner gloom is even darker.
A huge takeaway is Marinker’s bravery and lack of ego as he makes us speculate on what might lie ahead in old age amid “the sour end of the cud” and on “this mucky orb”. Only the line “Perhaps my best years are gone?” fails to land now since the question is hardly up for speculation. It does introduce extra irony I suppose if it’s intended to be against the character.
However limited his achievements – the gags about modest book sales are well done – we have to accept that Krapp is a writer of sorts and acutely alive linguistically. Marinker succeeds notably here and I enjoyed his puzzlement over the word “viduity” which is part of an important set piece.
Marinker earns the occasional violent gestures amid subtle accumulation of detail. His gifts are now compromised but he has a significant body of work to look back at when investigating his own box of memories, notably with Beckett specialist John Calder and The Godot Company (including playing Vladimir in Waiting for Godot at the Cockpit Theatre in 2014). It’s salutary to think that Marinker first saw Godot in 1961 only eight years after its premiere. Frail in some respects, he still manages the big sweeping lines in a single breath when necessary.
Marinker plays the role in the kind of dressing gown and slippers that you associate with an invalid. Yes, his character has free rein with the tape recorder and has been able to spend the afternoon on licensed premises but I wondered if director Dave Wybrow might be hinting that Krapp is now in sheltered accommodation with a warden.
Beckett only dimly understood what a tape recorder was when he wrote the play in 1958 and asked a technical friend about the workings of the now commercially available Ferrograph models. And the play had to be set in the future so that Krapp’s earliest recordings could be many decades old.
The playwright knew immediately that this could be an instrument to help him express his obsession with memory and the act of remembering. Any such change would of course have to involve Beckett’s legendarily protective estate, but surely it won’t be long now before this piece can be done with Krapp using an MP3 player or iPod?
As is often the case with Beckett’s plays, the exact meaning of the title is up for debate. I only tumbled to this when seeing it in France where the title is La Dernière Bande. Is it Krapp’s final tape or his latest tape? Here you have to reckon it’s the former. I wanted to reach out and touch Marinker who was only inches away from me as he showed his character facing up to mortality but insisting he does not want any of the years back. And I could have easily caught one of the banana skins as it was thrown towards me. With the extra performative level from Fossati and the overall metatheatricality it might not have been so shocking.
There is none of Krapp’s usual detritus by way of books and bric-a-brac here in design by Duncan Henderson who hints skilfully at the recesses of Krapp’s lair and perhaps the recesses of his mind. The usual clutter would pose a hazard for Marinker who still manages most of the precision needed with the main props. The closing moments feature the sound of one of the reels grinding away and you could soon sense it as being a peek at eternity which is a suitably bleak Beckettian vision on which to end.
Put this with major recent productions starring Gary Oldman at York Theatre Royal/Royal Court and Stephen Rea internationally including the Barbican, plus a long-running UK touring production and a fine fringe version at Brighton Fringe. Spools and spools of the play in fact. But this might be the most layered that I have seen. So long as men remember women in rowing boats and on railway stations while fretting over opportunities spurned and underachievement, this phenomenal play (it is surely one of the most important from the last century) is not going to go out of fashion. I doubt that I will tire of it.
All proceeds from the production are being donated to the Alzheimer’s Society.
