Review by Simon Jenner, May 10 2026
★ ★ ★ ★ ( ★)
There’s a strange sensation when you see Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape over the years. It shrinks like white dwarf, smaller and more concentrated each time. It’s distinctly the case as Ross Ericson takes the part created in 1958 for Patrick Magee – with his uniquely flint-edged tenor range and gravelly warmth. Ericson plays just three times at the Rotunda, Bubble for Grist to the Mill Productions till May 12. It’s a gem of the Brighton Fringe. Of course you blink and it’s gone.
It seemed – in fact was – longer, when Max Wall in 1988, aged 78 produced a skirling, wildly physical version with Beckett’s approval. James Hayes too took on a touch of that vaudevillian glint in his Jermyn Steet traversal in January 2020. It’s something we’ve seen in post-Beckett Beckett, notably in the 2009 Waiting for Godot with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. And now Gary Oldman has transferred from York to the Royal Court.
Ross Ericson in ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’. Photo Credit: Peter Williams
Ericson’s prepared to wait. At least seven minutes slips by as he stands and sits at his small mid-century writing desk, in his khaki overalls. Never mind the delicious anachronism, or splice of a life. This is sci-fi Beckett. Beckett briefly notes it’s “A late evening in the future.” To take that with Beckettian literalness: a man of 69 with at least 42 years of tape perhaps about 2000, stubbornly still using a 1950s reel-to-reel to Millennium fireworks.
Last tape? It’s never explained but last as in previous is part of it. Krapp’s splicing perhaps like a DJ on a turnstile, but his choice is thirty years old. Ericson gives a centred un-eccentric performance; a little fizz of energy, a precise vocal register. Particularly on his delight in “spoooools’.
Ericson enjoys the encoded pratfalls: unpeeling a banana that shadows out of itself like an antique dildo; then actually (not nearly, as indicated and usually done) tripping over the skin. There’s eating your masculinity, despite Krapp’s vaunted sexual performance recently, and his 39-year-old taped self, resisting with difficulty eating a third despite his “condition”. If any of this seems gratuitous just check the straitjacketing text. There is still though a wild freedom in being so encased in “four or five” paces as one wildly latitudinous direction has it. And, as ever, Ericson makes us wait.
Krapp re-inscribes his life with its previous meanings with that relished “spooool” but he’s gradually pushing himself to the side of his own life by playing back memories with an ever-increasing supply of years to choose from. And isn’t that a metaphor for what we do anyway? As we age – if we’re not careful – we re-encode the cut memories and false commands that condition us into a rictus of habitual self-parody. Krapp is us, with a techno-tic. His name evokes the fundament in the fundamental, not to mention he’s a failed writer, with copies of his book “seventeen sold, of which eleven at trade price to circulating libraries overseas. Getting known.” There’s that ironic glint of affirmation you can never entirely dismiss.
Ross Ericson in ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’. Photo Credit: Peter Williams
Ericson accents statistics too – something intrinsically Beckettian most of us ruminants never do to this degree. That’s the point. Beckett’s extreme logic is the outcome of any vaguer summing-up. It’s replete with his fixation on his affair: “head between her breasts.. my hand upon her” which he revisits with an onanisitc wistfulness. And – recalling his Trilogy – desire arises for a nurse whilst visiting his dying mother in a nursing home.
But Krapp’s conclusion is brought out with Ericson reflecting on the tape over past years even then. Krapp’s 39-year-old self affirms: “Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn’t want them back.” That book. Beyond the swell of the sea, a beguiling conceit, the recorded voice on speakers is rather loud and needs taming. But the synching, including cuts is as razored as splicing a tape: credit to tec and lighting from Michelle Yim. The only possible thing one misses is a slight difference of timbre, to imitate the younger man. Wall alone managed it.
Each performance I’ve seen seems to make this work briefer, less epic, more graspable. Yet the text runs to just nine pages. Perhaps we’re getting it and Krapp’s Last Tape spools ever swifter in our imagined replay. Even after lights-up the tape runs on, white-noising the living. Absorbing, truthful, authoritative. Ericson joins the voices.
Technical light and sound: Michelle Yim.
‘Krapp’s Last Tape’. Photo Credit: Simon Jenner