Diaries at the ready: Samuel West lined up to star in Beckett play... in 2036
When it comes to forward planning, a new arts festival is going well beyond normal expectations.
The organisers of the Beckett Biennale, which from next year will celebrate the great Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, are this weekend naming the actor who is signed up to star in a 2036 production of Krapp’s Last Tape at their sixth festival. And, in a unique coup de théâtre, Samuel West will be giving a performance that he has already partially recorded: in fact, he did it 19 years ago.
Beckett’s daring short play, one of his most popular works after Waiting for Godot, revolves around the thoughts of Krapp, who at 69 listens to a recording made by his younger self back on his 39th birthday. Writing in 1958, Beckett gave most of the dialogue to this disembodied voice from the past. A recording is usually played to the audience from a reel-to-reel tape machine.
West, now 58, had the foresight to record these taped lines from the play when he was actually 39, back in 2006. So when he eventually reaches the correct age for the older Krapp he can play both parts with true vocal authenticity for the first time in theatrical history, as far as anyone knows.
The time-lapse play, West told the Observer, is like “a two-hander”, but with only one actor. “It is all crystallised beautifully by using this technology of the tape recorder, which was a new thing when Beckett wrote it,” he said.
The first Beckett Biennale will take place in July next year, split between venues in the playwright’s native Enniskillen in Northern Ireland and Greystones in County Wicklow in the Republic of Ireland, where Beckett walked in the mountains with his father. Run by Seán Doran and Liam Browne of Arts Over Borders, the biennales will pick up the duo’s previous work, steering the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival, staged in Northern Ireland until 2022.
West, who is the son of Prunella Scales and the late Timothy West, made his original recording under the supervision of Katie Mitchell, the acclaimed director, but he remains uncertain how good it will sound to him when he hears it again. “I last listened to it a few weeks after making it, and immediately thought I could do better. I went back to the director and said, ‘I want to re-record them,’ and she, very properly, said, ‘You can’t. That’s the whole point.’”
Doran took the recording to the BBC, asking it to protect the tape from degrading and stow it away for possible use 30 years later. “To the best of my knowledge this hasn’t been attempted anywhere before,” he said. “Beckett’s play is a perfect miniature that catches that moment we will many of us arrive at, when we suddenly see the years that have gone by and the opportunities lost.” A limited number of Extremely Early Bird tickets for the 2036 production will be on sale from 13 April, Beckett’s birthday.
“The first words of the play are ‘39 today’,” West said. “And I thought to myself back then, I can really only do this once. So I asked Katie, who I really admired, if she would consider directing me in it when we were older, if we were still around. She has messaged me recently to say, ‘Count me in’.”
In 2008 Doran also asked the Irish actor Richard Dormer to record the same lines on his 39th birthday. The hope is that Dormer will play the part at the seventh biennale in 2038, when he too reaches 69. “Richard told me then it was his most depressing birthday ever!” Doran said. “Many wonders and surprises await us and, God willing, we’ll look forward to meeting up with Samuel in 2036 and Richard two years later. It’s not all that far off, after all.
“I was very fortunate that Samuel and Richard were keen to take part and fulfil the first half of the bargain at least. It’s very exciting, 19 years on, that we can announce, with a little more confidence, what we set in motion back then.”
