Originally published in The Stage.
Which productions most inspired, moved and delighted our leading theatremakers? West End producer Sonia Friedman chooses an unforgettable rehearsal performance by Harold Pinter of Krapp’s Last Tape.
Krapp’s Last Tape, Royal Court Upstairs, London, 2006
In 1988, I’d recently started at the National Theatre where I was deputy stage manager on Mountain Language. It was my first experience of watching a writer direct his own work, and not just any old writer – this was Harold Pinter, the greatest living writer of the time. And he took me under his wing. I was a kid and he gave me one of the greatest compliments of my life. A DSM operates the show: it’s about timing and cues and Pinter is all about timing. He was with me in the box on the cans and he said to me: “You’re the most musical person I’ve ever worked with: you instinctively understand all the rhythms of my work. Thank you. I have no notes.”
Two years before he died, when everyone knew he was very sick and very frail, I saw a dress rehearsal of him performing Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. I was invited by Harold and Ian Rickson, the director, and I was one of very few people in the auditorium. It was a very difficult rehearsal because he hadn’t yet worked out how to operate his wheelchair properly. Because the character has to keep leaving the stage to get things, he kept banging into the walls and the fury, the frustration, the desperation was extraordinarily moving and overwhelmingly powerful. He was so fucking angry, as the character but also as himself: angry at his health, angry that he couldn’t do it, angry that the wheelchair wasn’t helping him... It was the man and the work and the play – a play about memory, time, loneliness, death, futility and art all meshed into one. It was, no question, the greatest thing I have ever seen.
Afterwards, Ian asked me to talk to him. I went into the bar and he was on his own, still furious. And Harold Pinter furious was like no one else on the planet. But I wanted him to know what the experience had been for me, watching this genuinely great artist allow himself to be so frail and so unsentimental about coming to the end of his time. He was clearly grateful that I wasn’t remotely concerned about the wheelchair problems and that I had been so moved.
The run was sold out so I never saw it again. But I didn’t need to. Nothing could have matched what I witnessed.
Analysis – David Benedict
Not even the 1958 first performance of Beckett’s solo memory play about mortality could have been better cast than Ian Rickson’s spellbinding, nine-performance-only revival in the 69-seat Royal Court Upstairs.
At 76, Pinter was not only great casting because he began as an actor, but he and Beckett had been long-standing friends. They not only admired each other’s work but were also given to rattling around Paris and London together. And since both were famous for choosing words with immense consideration, it was unsurprising that Pinter’s performance revealed the weight and feeling underscoring every beat and word of the play.
Glowing like a late-Rembrandt portrait under Paule Constable’s lighting on Hildegard Bechtler’s set, Pinter’s Krapp was driven not just by barely suppressed rage, but there was also humour timed to perfection to ratchet up the tension. Unforgettable.
Mercifully, the show was filmed and is available on YouTube.