The theater lovers of the city were given a message that life is lone journey through a play Krapp’s last Tape, which was staged here on Monday at Hindi Bhawan.
Directed by Gagan Shrivastava, the play was wonderfully played by the artistes of Arth Theatre Group, Bhopal. The play is an adaptation of a one act English play Krapp’s last Tape written by renowned playwright Samuel Beckett.
The story is all about an old man and the memories of his past that he used to record in a tape every year on his birthday. This man Krapp is a lonely elderly man who is almost taking his last breath and wants to revive some past memories just to smile or feel the same time period.
The play surrounds the story of the male protagonist Krapp, who is an old man almost 69-year-old, who every year on his birthday makes a recording on a reel-to-reel tape. He listens to his earlier selves with various degrees of loathing, anger, grief, impatience and nostalgia, and then records his entry for the past year. He listens to a particular memory several times. As with so many of Beckett’s theatrical creations, the audience witness Krapp in a kind of purgatory, suspended between life and death.
The last tape he played was recorded when he was 39 and what experiences he had during that time was again revived in front of his eyes. In the play the audience also witness various changes of Krapp’s nature from a small boy to a young teen and then finally to the old age. How his perspectives, his life, his dreams experience changes were shown in the play beautifully.
Notably, the play is a self interaction as Krapp talks within him and looks back to life only to discover that he is all alone now and life is journey traveled in solitaire. This one-act play by Samuel Beckett has no story line or any concept it just an interaction of a man with himself. According to the director of the play Gagan Shrivastava, “This play is just an act where a man relives his experiences of 10 years back no message is given through this play. It identifies the strong feature of our memories and I feel that somewhere each individual is connected through Krapp.”