Adrian Dunbar could have called his Beckett festival “Unwound”. Over four days, across theatres and outdoor sites in Liverpool, he presents short plays by the writer he reveres “like a secular saint”, whose characters unravel as death circles round.
First, the old man combing recorded chronicles of his younger years, in minor masterpiece Krapp’s Last Tape. Denis Lavant is remarkable at showing Krapp’s decline. Tendrils of hair unspool from his head, his posture is as crumpled as his storage boxes, and his stiff limbs judder across the stage like a decrepit animatronic. Creaks could be from the stage or his legs.
His routines loop – comically caressing a banana, his only companion – until he freezes, like a stuck tape, when rewinding to squandered romance: “I could have been happy with her.” His hollow expression suggests he’s bulldozed both by amnesia and sorrow as memories evaporate.
If Jacques Osinski’s production modulates a little roughly between Beckett’s comedy and pathos, Krapp’s desolation is poleaxing – his hand cupped to his ear, trying to catch sounds and memories, spooling back as his own tape winds to an end.
As tapes have B-sides, so does the festival. Dunbar’s adaptation of Beckett’s radio play All That Fall plunges the audience, for its duration, into darkness at Toxteth’s disused reservoir. All senses fall away except sound. It has to work hard, as do our imaginations.
The simple plot of a woman being continuously interrupted by townsfolk on her way to meet her husband at a station, where there’s been an accident, falls away along with the dialogue in the building’s echoing acoustics, the cast reading behind us while we sit facing a wall. A ghostly whistle and hiss of steam help transform the arch we’re huddled around into a train tunnel, after which an initially chirrupy burst of Schubert sounds funereal. But the constant darkness feels incongruous with these country bumpkins’ trivial conversations. Beckett’s characters try to see their way through the murk. Little is gained by making us do the same.
Star ratings (out of five)
Krapp’s Last Tape ★★★★
All That Fall ★★
