Inside a tiny theatre three lauded theatre artists are reflecting on memory.
Director Gale Edwards, actor and writer Jonathan Biggins and designer Brian Thomson, are mid-rehearsal for Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape at Woolloomooloo's Old Fitzroy Theatre.
“You can make any meaning you want out of Beckett but one of the more obvious ones is memory is linear and it gets wound round itself,” Biggins says.
His hands rest on an old reel-to-reel tape player, the other character in Beckett’s one-man play, which opens on Tuesday. Written in 1958, the work explores how we recollect our own past and is considered the Irish playwright’s most autobiographical work.
Director, Gale Edwards with Jonathan Biggins (centre) and Brian Thomson on the set of Krapp’s Last Tape.Credit:Dallas Kilponen
Set in a dingy and cluttered cellar-like study, a disintegrating old man sits down on the “awful occasion” of his 69th birthday to record his retrospective of the year and listen to a recording he made when he was 39.
“When he was 39 he was passionate,” Edwards says. “He still had that capacity for love and sex. He talks about sex. He talks about women. He obviously had an eye for women. But, what’s interesting is that we’re dealing with 69- or 70-year-old Krapp reflecting on what he’s said and what he believed when he was 39.
“And even the 39-year-old on the tape reflects on the fact that he’s been listening to himself at 27 and he’s gone, ‘Oh what rubbish'. He’s already judging his 27-year-old self. It’s fascinating how memory evolves, how we as humans evolve.”
There have been countless versions of Krapp’s Last Tape, including from John Hurt, Michael Gambon, Harold Pinter and Corin Redgrave. Thomson, who designed the original productions of Jesus Christ Superstar and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games and Priscilla Queen of the Desert, says each interpretation has a fresh story to tell.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s here or in the Metropolitan Opera, it is still the same challenge,” he says. “It is up to us, with whatever resources we can muster, to do the production that we think is the best of the storytelling.”
After a year off from The Wharf Revue, and between seasons of his one-man theatrical biography of Paul Keating, The Gospel According to Paul, Biggins loves the restrained nature of embodying Krapp.
“I read a quote from Orwell about autobiography that, any autobiography, if it was honest, would be a catalogue of failures.
“I think that’s true. No matter how well you do in your life, or where you get in your life, in retrospect it’s never regarded as good enough. That’s certainly Krapp’s position. But he made the fatal mistake of turning his back on love or the possibility of relating to another human being.”
Edwards, one of Australia’s most acclaimed international theatre directors, known for productions of operas, musicals and classic plays, draws strong parallels between Beckett and Biggins’ intellectualism and “astute perception” of the world.
“With Beckett, there’s this wonderful comic belief that, in our loneliness, our desolation, our struggling, our striving, we’re all sort of absurd,” she says. “We’re comic. This is not a comic play but Jonathan has such a natural ability at comedy and he’s got this extraordinary intellectual side, which I suspect is as close to Beckett as you’re going to get.”
Biggins, far from lonely or despairing, is ready to inhabit Krapp.
"I’m a fairly gloomy sort of person,” he says. “I don’t have a very positive world view. But, ironically, I’m one of the more cheerful people I know.”
Krapp’s Last Tape is at the Old Fitzroy Theatre, Nov 26 to Dec 14.
Source: Read Full Article