Krapp’s Last Tape Trailer
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.
Stephen Rea: Krapp’s Last Tape
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.
Office Hours: Coming Soon
Get Into It
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.
Read All About It
The Guardian | January 2024
Review: Stephen Rea is hauntingly good in Beckett’s masterpiece
Rea brings a harsh, almost sarcastic tone to his self-criticism, deepening its pathos.
The Guardian | May 2025
Holy Krapp! Gary Oldman and Stephen Rea unspool Beckett’s masterpiece about memory
Krapp’s Last Tape is not quite a monologue.
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.