A person with curly hair sits at a table, knocking over several small rectangular objects with their arm. The scene is dramatically lit against a dark background.

Prep School: Krapp’s Last Tape

In Krapp’s Last Tape, the eponymous Krapp records a tape every year on his birthday. On his 69th birthday, he listens back to a previous year’s tape.

Actor Samuel Rea, who stars in the one-act, had the foresight to record himself in 2009, in the event of a future opportunity to play Krapp. In this production, he plays against his own younger self on cassette.

I had no certainty that one day I might play Krapp, but I thought it a good idea to pre-record the early tapes so that the voice quality would differ significantly from that of the older character, should the opportunity ever arise to use it.

Learn more about the production.

OFFICE HOURS

Stephen Rea, Vicky Featherstone and Professor John Waters give a mini masterclass in all things Beckett. Learn about the advice Stephen didn’t take from Sam Shepard and the acting notes he got from Beckett.

RELATED EVENTS
  • Wed Oct 8 – Sun Oct 19, 2025

Stephen Rea: Krapp’s Last Tape

  • Theater
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INDEFINITE ARTICLE

François Noudelmann on Samuel Beckett and Listening to What Ends

At the end of the play, the tape recorder has the last word, humanity having become nothing more than an ear.

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A person with curly hair sits alone at a dark table, leaning over audio equipment, with books and items scattered on the floor. A single overhead light illuminates the scene in an otherwise dark room.

GET INTO IT

Krapp’s Last Tape Trailer

GET THEE TO THE LIBRARY

Recommended readings to get you in gear for the show.

  • Emily Hodgson Anderson. Shadow Work: Loneliness and the Literary Life. Columbia University Press, 2025. 
  • Galina Kiryushina, Einat Adar, and Mark Nixon, editors. Samuel Beckett and Technology. Edinburgh University Press, 2021. 
  • Mantra Mukim. Samuel Beckett’s Lyric Failure. Bloomsbury, 2025.
  • Daniel Sack. Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Routledge: 2016.

CURRICULAR SPOTLIGHT

Learn more about NYU’s Media Preservation program, which ensures that physical media in NYU’s archives – such as cassettes – are appropriately handled, digitized and otherwise preserved.

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EXTRA CREDIT

“I am Sitting in a Room,” by Alvin Lucier, is a seminal piece of audio performance art in which Lucier records himself reading a text, and then plays that recording back into the same room repeatedly, exploiting the sonic resonances of the physical space in order to ultimately abstract and distort the original recording into an eerie, haunting set of echoes. Learn more about this work, and listen to a 1990 recording available via Bandcamp.

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Album cover with a simple drawing of a chair in a purple corner. Text around the chair reads “I am sitting in a room.” “ALVIN LUCIER” appears in bold at the top on a black rectangle.