The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Samuel Beckett · a play in one act · one actor and a tape recorder · written in English early in 1958 for Patrick Magee · scored on the English text as published in 1958 and 1959, a text for performance, read from knowledge; no text in hand
Mode
Monologue drama with a recorded partner; clown’s mime, memory play and elegy in one action
Mythos
The soul reviewing its life at the threshold; the shade that cannot be reached; light and dark divided on the stage, in the costume and in the speech
Phase
One late evening, a sixty-ninth birthday, and through the tape a thirty-ninth, with a still earlier year spoken of on the tape itself
Presentation
Drama; one act, one actor, one recorded voice that is his own, a table, a ledger and a tape recorder
Register
The young voice’s florid, Latinate prose and its plain lyric; the old voice coarse, short and broken; the stage directions timed as a score
Scale
One man, one room, one machine, three ages of one life
Governing Proposition
An old man on his sixty-ninth birthday, in a den lit only round his table, eats a banana, consults a ledger and plays a tape he made thirty years before, on which his younger self reviews the year, sneers at the self before him and announces that he has given up love for the work and a vision. The old man lets three episodes play, will not hear the vision, tries to record the year just gone and cannot, and puts the old tape back on for a girl in a punt. The wager of the play is that the self is a series of strangers, and that only a machine on a stage, the past speaking in its own unrevisable words with the present man’s hand on the switch, can show it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“A late evening in the future”: the first direction sets the play a little ahead of its own year, and the reason is practical before it is anything else. Domestic tape recorders were new in 1958, and a man of sixty-nine cannot play back a tape he made at thirty-nine unless the evening lies some way in front of the audience that watches it. The den is a table and a zone of strong white light, and the rest of the stage is dark. One actor plays it, and the only other voice is his own, thirty years younger, coming out of the machine. Beckett wrote it in English early in 1958 for Patrick Magee, and it was first played at the Royal Court Theatre in London on 28 October 1958, with Magee as Krapp, directed by Donald McWhinnie.
The play begins without a word. The old man unlocks his drawers, finds a banana, eats it, drops the skin and slips on it; the appetite cannot leave the bananas alone. He walks into the dark at the back of the stage and returns, and the sound of a cork has been heard. The business looks like a clown’s turn put in front of the play, and it is the play’s first argument. The appetite that cannot leave a banana alone, the bowels the tape will complain of, the bottle in the dark, are the body that the voice on the tape believes it has mastered. Before the young man speaks, the old one has shown in silence what the young one will deny.
The division the opening sets out holds to the end. The table sits in the light and the dark surrounds it, and the old man goes from one into the other and comes back. Every element in what follows will be placed on one side of that line or caught crossing it: the white of a nurse and the black of a ball, a vision of the dark the young man wanted to keep under, a girl in a punt in the sun. The set, the costume and the speech tell the same division, and so the stage is the first statement of the play’s law, given before any line has been spoken.
Movement II
When the old man speaks it is to a word. He finds the box and the spool in his ledger, and he says “Spool!”, savouring the word and lingering on it. The comedy is exact and has a point. The old man has little left but a few such pleasures and the habit of listening to himself, and the word he relishes is the name of the thing that holds his past. The ledger is the life in headings, kept by a man who has kept everything and can find his way to any year of it by box and number.
The entries for the tape he chooses are read out before it is played, and they give its matter in advance. One entry turns on a page. He reads “Farewell to”, turns the page, and reads “love”. The joke is in the turn of the page and the grief is in the word on the other side. Because the headings come first, what follows is recognition rather than discovery: the audience, like Krapp, knows what is on the tape before it is heard, and attends instead to what he will do with it.
He threads the spool and switches on. The voice that comes out is strong, pleased with itself and slightly pompous, a man of thirty-nine on his birthday, reviewing the year. It speaks in a prose of its own, florid and Latinate. Among its words is “viduity”, and the old man stops the machine and fetches a dictionary to look it up. The young man used the word; the old man has to be told it. That is the first sign of the play’s discovery: the man on the tape is a stranger, and the words of the past can be owned without being understood.
Movement III
The tape of the thirty-nine-year-old holds three episodes that the old man lets play. In the first the young man has just listened to an earlier tape of his own, from years before, and he sneers at the self he finds on it. Three selves are in the room, each holding the one before in contempt. In the second he sits on a bench by the canal, outside the house where his mother is dying, and throws a ball for a dog. The blind goes down, and his mother is dead. The ball in his hand is black, and the tape sets a nurse in white beside it: the play’s two colours, in one episode about a death.
Then comes the vision, the thing the young man gave his life to: a night on a jetty in the wind, when he saw what he believed his work must be, the dark he had struggled to keep under. The old man will not hear it. He curses, winds the tape forward, listens, winds it on again. The play lets through only fragments of the revelation, and it is spared by being refused. Whether the play mocks the vision by cutting it off, or honours it by sparing it from an old man’s scorn, it does not say; it shows a man choosing, more than once, not to hear the thing he lived for.
What he will hear is the third episode, the punt. The young man lies with a girl in a boat on the upper lake, and her eyes open “to let me in”. They drift in among the flags. The water stirs beneath them: “under us all moved, and moved us”. The prose that was florid is now plain and exact, and the lyric is held in the voice of a man who is thirty years dead to it, played by a man who cannot stop listening. It is the love the ledger bade farewell to, and the young man is recording its end.
Movement IV
The old man switches off, takes the tape off, puts a fresh one on and begins to record the year just gone. He opens with the judgement of the man he has just been listening to: “that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago”. The contempt the thirty-nine-year-old felt for his elder is now his own, turned on the thirty-nine-year-old. The one continuous thing in the three selves may be the sneer.
The year has little to report. The work the young man gave up love for has come to nothing much: “Seventeen copies sold”. There is Fanny; there are church visits and the vespers he remembers from boyhood; there is an evening hymn he sings in snatches. The record runs on a few lines longer than the knowledge needs, and that is the one place in the play where something could be cut.
He cannot stay away from what he has just heard. The wish breaks through in two words, “Be again”, and the year cannot be finished. He abandons the new recording and threads the old tape again. The recording that was meant to be the year’s review is abandoned half made, and the record of his life ends, for this birthday, with the life he gave up rather than the one he lived.
Movement V
The old tape goes on at the punt, and the passage is heard a second time: the eyes opening “to let me in”, the drift among the flags, “under us all moved, and moved us”. The second hearing is not a repetition. The first time it was a memory played; the second time, after the abandoned recording and the failed year, it is the verdict, and it is the one passage of the old tape played to its end. The audience hears the same words and they have changed weight.
Then the tape goes on past the punt to what the thirty-nine-year-old said to close his year: “Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness.” And at once, in the same voice, the refusal: “Not with the fire in me now.” The young man thought the fire was the work and the vision, and that he could give up love for it. The old man, who has heard the vision wound past and the love played twice, sits and listens to his own refusal of the thing he has spent the evening going back to.
Krapp is still, and the tape runs on in silence. The play does not say the choice was wrong; it shows the wish to be again and the refusal in one man, in the space of a few minutes, and leaves him between them. The last image is the form’s own statement: the past continues without him, in its own words and then in no words, and the man who owns every word of it can only listen. Beckett directed it himself at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt in Berlin in 1969, and the notebook he kept there shows how closely he read that silence.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds almost nothing to take. The banana business looks like a clown’s turn bolted on, and it is not: the appetite that cannot leave the banana alone, the skin he slips on, the constipation the tape will mention, are the body the voice on the tape believed it had mastered, and the opening says in silence what the young voice will deny. The ledger gives the tape’s matter before it is heard, so that listening becomes recognition. The vision is required because it is skipped, the punt because its second hearing is the verdict. What holds the axis from the top is the new recording, where Fanny and the church visits run a few lines longer than the knowledge needs.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. The self is not continuous: the man who made a choice is a stranger to the man who lives with it, and each self holds the one before in contempt, “that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago”. Memory recorded is not memory possessed; Krapp owns the very words of his past and cannot get back into it. The thirty-nine-year-old gave up love for the work and the vision, and the work came to seventeen copies. The play gives no verdict on the choice. It shows the wish, “Be again”, and the refusal, “Not with the fire in me now.”, in one man within minutes. Held at 9.0 because the disclosure is drawn tight round one life, and part of what it gives is a dusk.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One passage carries the height, and carries it as few passages in modern drama do: the punt on the upper lake, the girl’s eyes opening “to let me in”, the drift among the flags, “under us all moved, and moved us”, the lyric held in the recorded voice of a man thirty years dead to it. The play earns the height by repetition: the passage is heard, and heard again, and the second time it is grave. There are other rises: the blind going down in the house on the canal while the young man throws a ball for a dog, the vision on the jetty glimpsed and cut off, the closing silence. Held at 8.8 because the elevation is concentrated by design in one passage.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The particular is a sordid, exact old man with bananas and a dictionary; the archetype is the soul reviewing its life at the threshold, and the shade that cannot be reached: an Orpheus who can hear Eurydice’s voice as often as he likes and never lead her up. Part of this is built, not evoked. Light and dark divide the stage, and the tape tells the same division, the white nurse, the black ball, the dark the young man struggled to keep under; the figure is the set, the costume and the speech at once. The vespers remembered from boyhood and the vision on the jetty set the sacred calling beside the profane. Held at 8.6 because the archetype stays half named: Krapp is a man more than a figure, and the Orpheus is evoked.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The turn is the tape recorder made a stage partner: a dialogue between a man and his own younger voice, which he can interrupt, rewind, curse and skip, and which cannot hear him. No play before it had put a man’s recorded past on stage as an agent. The inheritance is the monologue and the one-actor play, Strindberg’s The Stronger, Cocteau’s La Voix humaine with its telephone, and the memory play; the turn is that the absent partner is the self. It was Beckett’s return to English for the stage, and to an autobiographical matter he had kept out of the French plays. The stake was real after Godot had fixed what a Beckett play was. Held below the top because the solo form was inherited and the wager bounded by its scale.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the play loses what it knows. A narrated memory would be the old man’s version of the past; the tape is the past in its own words, unchanged, so that the present cannot revise it and can only switch it off. The machine makes the discontinuity of the self audible: the young voice’s confidence and the old body’s silence occupy the stage at once. Its controls are the drama. Rewind, wind forward and stop are Krapp’s choices about his life, and the audience watches him choose, more than once, not to hear the vision he gave his life to. The last image, the man still and the tape running on in silence, says what no line could. Held a shade below the summit because the form does one thing, once.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence first: sixty-eight years of return, a large criticism, Beckett’s own work on the text as its director in Berlin in 1969, and productions that keep finding new readings, Magee’s, Beckett’s with Martin Held, Harold Pinter’s in 2006, John Hurt’s on the stage and in Atom Egoyan’s film of 2000. The open questions persist. What the vision on the jetty was, and whether the play mocks it or honours it by sparing it; whether the final refusal is strength, pride or self-deceit; whether the old man’s sneer at the young one repeats the young one’s sneer at his elder, so that contempt is the one continuous thing in him; the debt to Proust, on whom Beckett wrote. Held below the top because the yield is bounded by the play’s scale.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The field is the drama in English and French of the twentieth century. The intrinsic force is that the play makes a technology the medium of self-confrontation and makes listening a dramatic act, and it shifts the Beckett stage from the universal figure to the dismembered personal memory, the line that runs to Eh Joe, That Time, where three recorded voices of one man play to a silent face, Not I and the late short plays. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the most staged short plays of its century, a standard vehicle for great actors in old age, and the recorded self passed into later solo performance and memory theatre. Held here because the theatre took from it a device and a mood more often than a reorganisation of possibility, a reach inside the larger reach of Godot.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over sixty-eight years since the premiere. The text survives whole, printed in the author’s English and in his French, with his own production notebook beside it; nothing is charged on form. Presence is continuous and wide: staged every year somewhere, in many languages, taught wherever modern drama is taught, recorded and filmed. Its surface was fixed to a technology, the reel-to-reel recorder, now itself antique, and the play has outlived the dependency: “A late evening in the future” has become a late evening in the past without loss, and the machine reads now as memory’s own furniture. Held a tenth below the widest figure because its presence runs mainly through the theatre and the academy, and less across the culture than Godot’s.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on Beckett’s English, with no translation between. The command is of three instruments at once. The stage directions are a score, timed to the pause and the gesture: the keys, the drawers, the bananas, the march into the dark and back with the sound of a cork. The young voice has a prose of its own, pompous and florid, with Latinate words held up for inspection, “viduity”, which the old man must look up, and then without warning, in the punt, plain and exact. The old voice is coarse, short, broken. The comic timing of “Spool!” is exact, and the ledger is a small art of its own, a life in headings. Held off the top because the medium is narrowed by choice, and because the mime asks more of the actor’s invention than the text secures.
Score: 9.2 / 10
One law governs. Light and dark divide the stage, the life and the speech, and every element is placed on one side of the line or crossing it. Take the two most distant elements, the banana farce at the start and the punt elegy at the end: they obey the same law. Both are appetite, bodily and erotic, which the young man thought he could renounce for the dark of his vision, and which the old man still serves, with bananas and a bottle and with the girl he has kept on tape. The voice of each age keeps its own rhythm, and the time scheme, the future setting and the three ages, holds without a slip. Held at 9.0 because narrowness is not coherence: the law governs one man and one room.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged at the play’s own scale. Consciousness, fully, across three ages. The body, in appetite, constipation, drink and decay. Love: the girl in the punt, the others on the tape, Fanny. Death: the mother’s, behind the blind on the canal. Vocation and its failure: the work, the vision, seventeen copies. The sacred, in the vespers and the vision. Time itself, the subject. They are integrated, not listed: one man’s renunciation joins them. What holds the axis at 7.5 is what is absent: labour, the family beyond the mother, the state and history appear not at all, and the natural order only as backdrop, the canal, the water, the wind on the jetty. Everything is seen from one chair. The play holds more than its size would suggest, and no more than one life.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.4, then The Inevitable and The Made at 9.2. A form in which the past speaks in its own unrevisable words and the present man’s hand is on the switch, so that every turn of the action is an operation of the machine; a structure from which almost nothing can be taken, where the silent banana business argues before a word is said and the vision is required because it is skipped; and three instruments, the timed stage directions, the young voice and the old, each characterising the self it belongs to.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5, held by what is absent from one chair: labour, the family beyond the mother, the state and history do not appear, and the natural order is a backdrop of canal, water and wind. A low mark on a small form describes the form; this one holds more than its size suggests, and no more than one life. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.6, where the light and dark are built into the stage but the Orpheus is evoked and Krapp stays a man more than a figure.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.4, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Imperishable at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.8.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, a play in one act for one actor and a tape recorder, written in English early in 1958 for Patrick Magee. It was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, on 28 October 1958, with Magee as Krapp and Donald McWhinnie directing, in a double bill with the English Endgame; first printed in Evergreen Review in 1958; and published in book form by Faber and Faber, London, with Embers, in 1959. The work scored is the English text as published in 1958 and 1959, read as a text for performance, stage directions included. Beckett’s French version, La Dernière Bande, made with Pierre Leyris and published in 1959, is a version and is not scored. His own production at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin, in 1969, with Martin Held, and the production notebook he kept for it, published in the Theatrical Notebooks edited by James Knowlson, are context: they show how he read his own text, and the trims and stage business he made there are not scored as the work. The play is in English, so no translation stands between the reading and the work. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Words are quoted only where they are certain; everything else, including the ledger’s other entries and the wording of the episodes on the tape, is paraphrased. The length of the printed text, the playing time, the interval between the earlier tapes, the title of the hymn and the details of the first printing are not given.