The last tape

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The last tape (English original title: Krapp's Last Tape ; French title: La dernière bande ) is a one-person piece in one act by Samuel Beckett from 1958. It premiered on October 28, 1958 under the direction of Donald McWhinnie in London's Royal Court Theater with Patrick Magee .

While the London production was generally panned by criticism, the German premiere , together with the world premiere of Albee's Die Zoogeschichte , directed by Walter Henn with Walter Franck on September 28, 1959 in the workshop of the Berlin Schiller Theater, was a success. Ten years later, on October 5, 1969, there was a new production of the play by the author with Martin Held , which was celebrated as particularly successful and was also shown as a guest performance in other cities.

content

The decrepit madder, an unsuccessful scribe and grumpy hermit, who, with his white, unshaven face, red nose, messy gray hair, black, far too tight, far too short long trousers and oversized white shoes, looks like a shabby circus clown, crouches, "late at night in the future", at a small drawer table with a tape recorder and several boxes full of old tapes.

He looks motionless in front of him, then feels in his trouser pocket for a bunch of keys, chooses the right key, uses it to open one of the drawers, takes a large banana from it, caresses it and, after removing the shell, carelessly sticks it on the floor has dropped in your mouth. Without biting off, he stared again motionless, finally straightened up and began to pace up and down the stage ramp while slowly eating the banana. He slips on the bowl, threatens to fall, but can still catch himself, bends down to the floor, inspects the Corpus Delicti and with a small kick he takes it from the stage to the stalls. With a deep sigh he fumbled again for his key ring, and the same game was repeated with a second large banana, but this time he threw the peel into the audience from the start.

Suddenly an idea occurs to him. He puts the peeled banana in his vest pocket and hurries into the black background of the stage. Break. You can hear a cork pop. Break. Krapp returns to the table with a thick catalog under his arm. He begins to leaf through it and, despite his short-sightedness, tries to decipher the title of the directory, soon discovers what he is looking for, selects the appropriate box, rummages in it for the tape he is looking for, laboriously threads the reel into the tape recorder and presses the playback button. With one ear close to the loudspeaker because of his hearing loss, he listens to the diary-like recording that he once made on tape. Only briefly does he endure the grandiose tone of his youthful self, which babbles about great future plans as a writer. Then he interrupts himself, continues the recording and listens again, before he unwillingly curses and removes the tape from the device, rummages in the catalog and in his tapes and begins to listen to further excerpts.

While searching for a happy moment in his memories, he finally comes across the note of a love scene that he experienced thirty years earlier. Krapp rewinds the same passage over and over again and listens to his former self like a stranger. He follows the wording of the romantic description of his alter ego , which tells of a boat trip with his beloved, ever more closely . Finally he stops the machine, connects a microphone and starts commenting on the scene in a new recording. With a croaking old man's voice, he mocks himself: "It's hard to believe that I was ever so stupid."

Krapp's ambitious artistic ambitions have vanished as well as his feelings of love. What remains are dead memories, alcohol and self-irony. Krapp puts the tape with the love scene back on. His lips speak silently to the text. When the recording is over, he stared again, motionless and rigid. The tape continues soundless as the curtain falls.

interpretation

"Human existence as a border situation between life and death, characters who insist on the eternally disappointed illusion of waiting or the certainty of playing their decline in tragicomic helplessness -. That is what all the pieces Beckett's" The cycle of such apocalyptic scenarios show 's Last Tape human demise in the futile search for his lost identity. After man has gone through all stages - from the banana-eating ape-man to the vainly self-circling Homo sapiens - his thought mills, like Krapp's sound reel in the final image, only turn in idle mode. The swan song for humans as the measure of all things sings, as so often with Beckett, a croaking old owl who expects nothing more - and yet continues to wait. Language is no longer checked for its truthfulness and used as a medium of knowledge, but only interrogated for its tonal content : “Spool. Coil. Spuuule. “Krapp intones the word again and again and, in the absence of other delights, gets intoxicated by its mere acoustics, a clown between life and death who bridges his end times with pantomime trifles and idle self-reflections, which instead of self-knowledge only lead to even more self-alienation.

reception

The last volume was added to the ZEIT library of 100 books .

literature

  • Michael Gassenmeier: Krapp's Last Tape. In: Klaus-Dieter Fehse et al. (Ed.): The contemporary English drama . Athenaeum Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M.1975, ISBN 3-8072-2096-8 , pp. 101-123
  • Rudolf Nissen: Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape. In: Hans Weber (Hrsg.): Dramas of the 20th Century for English Lessons in Upper Secondary School - Interpretations, Diesterweg Verlag Frankfurt aM et al. 1982, ISBN 3-425-04209-2 , pp. 82-95

expenditure

  • Samuel Beckett: Krapp's Last Tape and Embers . Faber & Faber, London 1959, ISBN 0-571-06209-1 (English first edition).
  • Samuel Beckett: The last tape = La dernière bande = Krapp's last tape . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1974, ISBN 3-518-36700-5 (trilingual edition: English original version and French translation by Samuel Beckett, translation into German by Erika Tophoven and Elmar Tophoven; ISBN of the Suhrkamp edition from 2000).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life a tape . In: Der Spiegel . No. 19 , 1959, pp. 51-52 ( Online - May 6, 1959 ).
  2. ↑ It was also recorded for television and, after its first broadcast in some third-party television programs on January 30, 1970 ( This week on television . In: Der Spiegel . No. 5 , 1970, p. 154 ( online ). ) - on May 11, 1970 in the first program of the ARD ( This week on television . In: Der Spiegel . No. 20 , 1970, pp. 242 ( online ). )
  3. ↑ Kindler's New Literature Lexicon , Volume 2, page 380.