“Krapp’s Last Tape” at Tobacco Factory, Bristol

Simon Thomas in the South West
★★★★☆
29 April 2026

Samuel Beckett’s one-man play Krapp’s Last Tape, which premiered in 1958 as a curtain-raiser to the English-language version of Endgame, often draws star names. Gary Oldman, whose interpretation first seen at York Theatre Royal is about to be unleashed on London, is the latest. Hopefully it’s not unfair to British actor David Westhead to say that the better-known name for this less high-profile production, which is currently touring smaller venues in the UK and turned up at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory for two performances, is that of the director.

Stockard Channing is a veteran Hollywood actor, best remembered for her turns in the 1977 movie Grease and more latterly TV’s The West Wing. As a long-term friend to Westhead, she allowed him to persuade her to make her directorial debut for a long-cherished project of touring Krapp’s Last Tape. If it’s difficult to see the joins between direction and acting, the two of them together come up with a fine take on the part, which is more subtly attuned to Beckett’s elliptical text than some showier interpretations.

John Hurt gave a deeply charismatic and funny performance, while Harold Pinter upstairs at the Royal Court, in a late tribute to his fellow playwright, was full of poignancy and pain. Westhead opts for a restrained and quietly internalised approach that really brings out the beauty and subtlety of Beckett’s lines. Moments of great significance pass as throwaway reflections, while giving a lingering sense of their meaning. This is perhaps Beckett’s most personal play, full of countless self-directed references: the death of his mother, the girl in the shabby green coat on the railway station, on Croghan on a Sunday morning with the “bitch” (his mother’s dog which Sam often took walking), the harbourside epiphany as the sea beats furiously and his reading of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest are all deeply personal allusions for the playwright.

Krapp, the name borrowed from his first play Eleutheria (excluded from the complete works), sits in his shabby room on his 69th birthday (not clearly stated in the play but evident from Beckett’s detailed notes) and listens to his younger self on a tape he has randomly chosen, scoffing at the younger man’s aspirations and self-reflections. There is a striking contrast in Westhead’s 39-year-old persona on tape and the rambling banana-eating cynic we see before us. The younger man in turn sneers at the even more naive whelp he has just listened to from an even earlier tape.

Again not overt in the text but Beckett made clear that this is the old man’s last tape because death is stalking him like another character in the room. What comes across in Westhead’s performance is the utter loneliness of a solitary man, who doesn’t have even the fragile companionship of Didi and Gogo in Waiting for Godot. He can only grasp reluctantly onto a distanced relationship with the younger man who, as with Winnie in Happy Days and the voice in Not I, he can barely acknowledge as himself.

Beckett stated that the play has a strong connection with Othello, which might surprise the first-time viewer. As with everything else he wrote, it’s a far from obvious association. The text is full of images of light and dark, white and black, as is Shakespeare’s tragedy, and he sealed the connection with the use of the word “chrisolite” (Othello talks of “another world, of one entire and perfect chrisolite” in Act 5, Scene 2) and of the name Bianca for the woman Krapp once lived with in Kedar Street.

The pacing of Channing’s production allows these allusions to drop into the audience’s consciousness and there’s a strong sense of significance in the way Westhead places the imagery, leaving a burning and lasting impression. For anyone not lucky enough to have secured a ticket for Oldman’s upcoming sell-out run at the Royal Court, this production – which continues to tour the UK – is well worth seeing.