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.