Krapp's Last Tape

Krapp, a disheveled, aged man, is in his den on “a late evening in the future” (3). He rummages through his pockets for a bunch of keys and unlocks a drawer of his table, in order to take out a banana. He “drops skin at his feet, puts end of banana in his mouth and remains motionless, staring vacuously before him” (4). Krapp begins to eat the banana while pacing in the bright light that surrounds his table. He slips on the peel, nearly falls, and nudges the peel off the stage with his foot. He finishes the banana and starts on a second. Again, he stands staring blankly with the end of the banana in his mouth. Beckett’s stage directions state that Krapp “[f]inally he has an idea,” and rushes backstage to have a drink, implied by a “loud pop of cork,” which sounds from off stage to indicate Krapp is drinking alcohol (4).

Krapp returns with a ledger that describes the contents of the reels of tapes that lie in boxes on his desk. Looking through the entries for a specific tape, he is amused by the word “spool,” and repeats it to himself with a “happy smile” (4). According to the ledger, the tape that interests him mentions the death of his mother, an “improvement in bowel condition,” as well as references he does not recognize: “the black ball,” and “memorable equinox.” Lastly, the ledger notes, “farewell to love.” Krapp “broods” over this, as he will do repeatedly throughout the play, and starts the tape(5).

On the tape, which he recorded thirty years ago, his voice is stronger and “rather pompous” (5). Thirty-nine-year-old Krapp feels himself to be at his intellectual peak. He reports that he is “sound as a bell, apart from [his] old weakness,” referring to his constipation, which bothers him all his life and is exacerbated by his compulsive eating of bananas (5). Having celebrated his birthday alone at a place called the Winehouse, he is back in his den, enjoying his solitude and the opportunity it affords for thinking. The new light above his table is “a great improvement” that makes him feel less alone, he says (5). He enjoys going out into the surrounding darkness and coming “back here to…me” (5). He has spent his birthday thinking about what matters most in life, “things worth having when all the dust has—when all my dust has settled” (6).

He has just listened to an older tape, from about ten or twelve years ago, when he was in his twenties and living “on and off” with a woman named Bianca (6). Thirty-nine-year-old Krapp claims he is glad that the relationship ended, though he expresses a little regret at remembering Bianca’s “incomparable,” “warm” eyes. He laughs at the twenty-something-year-old self he hears on the tape and his overly optimistic “aspirations” and “resolutions.” The older Krapp, listening to the tape, joins in his laughter (6). They laugh together until the tape mentions his past resolution to drink less, which only the older Krapp finds laughable.

On the tape within the tape, the Krapp who is in his twenties reports the death of his father. In addition to drinking less, he also plans to be less consumed by his sexual life. He “sneers at what he calls his youth and thanks to God that it’s over,” though the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp detects a “false ring” in the claim (6).

Krapp turns off the tape. He “broods” and goes backstage to drink. He returns, singing drunkenly, and resumes the tape. As the thirty-nine-year old Krapp talks about his mother’s death, Krapp again pauses the tape, struck by his use of the word “viduity,” an arcane word for the status of being widowed (7).After looking it up in the dictionary, he resumes the recording. On the tape, Krapp recalls sitting on a bench near his mother’s window and wishing that she would die. There, he also saw a nurse, a “dark young beauty” who threatened to call the police when he tried to talk to her (8). Krapp describes the moment in which he learned of the death of his mother while throwing a black ball around for a white dog. To his regret, he let the dog keep the ball.

Thirty-nine-year-old Krapp next recalls an epiphany he had standing at the end of a jetty. Although he calls it the most important thing he has to record about the year just passed, “never to be forgotten,” future Krapp forwards past it in disgust until he comes to a recollection of himself lying in a boat with a woman (9). After looking deeply into her eyes, Krapp says on the tape, “I lay down across her with my face on her breasts and my hand on her” (9).Here, Krapp turns off the tape. He looks through his pockets and once again goes backstage to drink. When he returns, he begins to record a new tape to mark the past year.

Krapp begins by insulting the younger self he has just listened to: “the stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that” (10). He discusses his regret at leaving the woman from the boat for the sake of his work, which he now derisively calls his “homework.” The woman’s eyes had “everything” that he was searching for in his intellectual endeavors (10).

Krapp says he has nothing to report. A year does not seem like a significant period of time to him now. He has sold seventeen copies of his latest book; eleven of these sales were to free international libraries. He “crawled out,” to the park, where he sat cold and alone (10). He also reread “Effie”(probably a reference to the novel Effi Briest). The novel reminds him of the woman in the boat, and he wonders briefly whether he could have been happy with her. He reports that in the past year he was also twice visited by a prostitute named Fanny, who was surprised by the sexual prowess he displayed at his age. He went to church once. Here, he pauses to sing the song again (“now the day is over”) before reporting that he fell asleep and fell off the pew. Krapp considers stopping his recording for the evening, and then for good: “Finish your booze and get to your bed now” (11).

He puts the other tape back in to listen to the scene with the woman in the boat again. The play concludes with the end of that reel, on which the younger Krapp claims, “Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back” (12). Krapp sits motionless, letting the silent tape run.