As a director and designer, Robert Wilson has long been a consummate master of painting with light, creating successions of breathtaking stage images. With the best will in the world, though, he has never been the go-to guy for emotional or psychological insight. Krapp’s Last Tape, which he also performs, looks a treat as long as you have no prior knowledge or expectations of Samuel Beckett’s play to which to compare it. It also sounds pretty impressive, with its soundscape of relentless thunder and rain outside the monochrome archive in which his Krapp resides, until the external noise shuts off suddenly after 25 minutes or so and Wilson opens his mouth.

The Fritz Langesque Expressionist aesthetic of Wilson’s production naturally puts one in mind of silent film associations, so… you know that moment in the movie of Singin’ In The Rain when the heartstoppingly beautiful silent screen diva Lina Lamont is suddenly revealed to have a Brooklyn screech of a voice? It’s very much that kind of experience, as if the hero of Lang’s own Dr Mabuse films spoke like one of the more annoying characters from Sesame Street. (Even the vampiric mathematician the Count would at least make a kind of sense: “Box three, spool five, ah-ha-ha-ha!”) Wilson chooses to give his ageing Krapp an inane, singsong whine, in contrast to the recorded voice of his thirty-years-younger self, which is deeper and more resonant… though, alas, no more eloquent in its delivery.

Those who believe that Beckett’s plays are routinely devoid of human empathy should watch recordings of the Krapp'ses of, say, John Hurt or the late Harold Pinter before encountering Wilson’s performance. This would be a dual revelation, firstly of how much real feeling exists in the ground state of the play – Beckett’s situations are almost always inhuman, his characters all too human – and then of how utterly Wilson fails to convey or, seemingly, even to grasp or be bothered with any of it. At the curtain call on Friday night, a single voice was loud in its sustained booing; another member of the audience then yelled a remonstration to the boo-er, but I’d rather have shaken his hand.
 
Written for the Financial Times.