On his 69th birthday, Krapp sits alone with his tape recorder and listens back to a recording he made thirty years earlier. Moving between listening, remembering and recording, he encounters his younger self, his memories and the life that has passed between the two voices.
Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, performed at The Cockpit Theatre, becomes in Dave Wybrow’s production a remarkably immediate encounter with time. Peter Marinker plays Krapp, but the production also brings another Peter Marinker into the room: his own voice, recorded in 1983 for the BBC radio version of the play. The result is a conversation across more than four decades, between the actor he was and the actor he is now.
What makes this particularly striking is the production’s treatment of time. Sitting close to downstage left, I could see Marta Fossati, the stage manager, working with her script and teleprompter. She quietly fed Marinker the stage directions into his ear, while he spoke the dialogue. This creates a fascinating sequence of temporal relationships: the time it takes Fossati to read an instruction, the time it takes Marinker to receive it, the time he takes to act, and the time we spend watching him decide how to respond. The stage directions, normally invisible to an audience, become part of the performance itself.
There is something extraordinarily precise about Marinker’s relationship with these instructions. At moments, it becomes difficult to know whether we are watching a thoroughly rehearsed choreography or an actor genuinely receiving information in the moment. That uncertainty creates a productive tension between thought and action. We watch the process of something being understood before it becomes something being done.
The performance is marked by a profound stillness. Marinker does not rush through Beckett’s language. Each word and phrase seems to arrive separately, as something to be encountered. The text consequently becomes less an uninterrupted stream of language and more a series of moments of perception. The wrangling of the banana, the unspooling and handling of the tape, the pauses between actions all acquire an unusual theatrical weight. The smallest gesture becomes an event because we are given the time to experience it.
This is particularly powerful in relation to Marinker’s recent diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. The production does not simply place this information around Beckett’s text. It finds theatrical structures through which questions of memory, processing and recollection can be experienced. The distinction between thinking, speaking, listening and doing becomes central.
The tape recorder is therefore much more than a prop. Its mechanical sounds, the forwarding and reversing of the tape, and the return of Marinker’s 1983 voice give memory a physical presence. The past is not represented solely through dialogue. It arrives as sound, with the younger Marinker speaking from another technological and personal moment in time.
Duncan Henderson’s production design supports this approach with a restrained visual world centred around Krapp’s desk, chair, recorder, tapes and scattered objects. Chris Lincé’s lighting design contributes to the production’s carefully controlled visual environment. The sparse stage gives Marinker’s body, the recorder and the actions around them considerable prominence.
I was also curious about the screens and their placement. Initially, I read them primarily through accessibility, but watching Marinker repeatedly look towards them revealed another theatrical possibility. They gave him a point of orientation, allowing him to engage the audience while working with information outside his immediate physical space.
What stayed with me most was the production’s ability to make time tangible. Wybrow’s direction turns Beckett’s meditation on memory into something that happens physically in the room. Marinker’s present body, his younger recorded voice, Fossati’s whispered instructions and the mechanical passage of the tape occupy the same theatrical moment. Krapp’s Last Tape becomes, quite literally, a conversation with time.
Krapp’s Last Tape plays at The Cockpit Theatre, London NW88EH from Wednesday 2nd September to Saturday 5th September. Read more and book your tickets at www.thecockpit.org.uk
Reviewer: Gaurav Singh Nijjer
Reviewed: 2nd September 2026
North West End UK Rating: