Save-the-date cards have become quite the vogue in recent years. But few give quite as much notice of an event as the announcement of two productions of Krapp’s Last Tape that won’t be staged for more than a decade.
On April 13th, Samuel Beckett’s birthday – he was born in 1906 – an (extremely) early-bird booking portal will open to allow far-sighted theatregoers to reserve places at two groundbreaking performances of the writer’s play that are scheduled for the second half of the 2030s.
The Irish actor Richard Dormer and the English actor Samuel West will perform alongside themselves in new versions of Krapp’s Last Tape that take a particularly precise approach to the work.
The one-act play, which Beckett wrote in 1958 for the actor Patrick Magee, is the Nobel laureate’s unflinching portrait of a disillusioned old man who sacrificed the possibilities of love and happiness for a life devoted to “futile scribbling”.
In the opening stage direction we are told that the eponymous character is 69 years old. Three decades earlier he had recorded himself talking: the first words we hear from his tapes are “Thirty-nine today”. What unspools is a sardonic, often embittered dialogue between the world-weary Krapp and his younger self, whose voice floats out from a reel-to-reel recording.
In what appears to be a first for a production of Krapp’s Last Tape, when West and Dormer perform the play they will use recordings that they made 30 years earlier, at the age of 39, in line with Beckett’s vision.
West recorded the play’s “Spool 5″ tapes in a BBC studio in London in 2006, just before his 40th birthday. Dormer did the same two years later, on his 39th birthday, at the BBC in Belfast. The broadcaster is keeping them safe so that, in 2036, West can perform alongside his younger self and, in 2038, Dormer can do likewise.
“I came up with the idea for what is, to the best of my knowledge, a first-time exercise in absolute artistic accuracy,” says Seán Doran, one of the founders of the new Beckett Biennale, a festival series that kicks off in 2026. “Happily, Richard and Sam agreed to take part. I don’t know why it’s never been done before. The notion of hearing the same voice, but tonally different, mellowed and roughened by the passage of time, is key to the piece.”
These innovative versions of Krapp’s Last Tape will be among the headline events at the sixth and seventh editions of the Beckett Biennale, which Doran has established with Liam Browne, his creative partner at the festival organisation Arts Over Borders. (They’re also responsible for Oh My Godot!, a new celebration of the playwright this weekend and next, with free events in and around Enniskillen, in Co Fermanagh, including intriguing stagings of Waiting for Godot; and for the upcoming FrielDays festival, in August.)
It’s a duologue for one actor, but one of the voices is gone. It can no longer be reached. I think that’s a fascinating, almost unique situation in drama
— Samuel West
Enniskillen, the Co Fermanagh town where Beckett went to boarding school, is one of the locations closely associated with the writer’s childhood where the biennale will be staged; another is Greystones, in Co Wicklow, where his family had a holiday home and where he and his father walked the hills together.
For all his wealth of stage and screen experience, this is West’s first professional encounter with Beckett.
“I’ve never done Beckett before,” he says. “I find myself in the unusual position of having done half of the play already, without rehearsing the other half. I don’t know what the challenge will be yet, because I haven’t started. I want to get to the second half at the proper time and not pre-empt the effect that hearing a tape of the 39-year-old me is going to have when I’m 69.
“At the moment it’s not a play for me, it’s just a taped diary. It’s a duologue for one actor, but one of the voices is gone. It can no longer be reached. I think that’s a fascinating, almost unique situation in drama.”
Dormer has history with Beckett, having played Lucky in the landmark 2005 production of Waiting for Godot directed by Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. One reviewer described Dormer performing the character’s famously impassioned diatribe “with a lilting, rhythmic and syncopated musicality” while the audience watched open-mouthed.
He started his acting training with Ulster Youth Theatre and, after graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, joined an outstanding group of contemporary Northern actors, including Conleth Hill, Adrian Dunbar and Patrick O’Kane.
Few who were present at Belfast’s Arts Theatre in 1987 for the opening night of Ulster Youth Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet will forget his swaggering debut as Mercutio, when he eclipsed everyone else on stage.
Dormer devoted himself to theatre in his early career, winning several awards, including an Irish Times Irish Theatre Award for best actor for his edgy, vulnerable young Kenneth Pyper in Frank McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. While continuing an upward trajectory on stage, he started to get the itch to write.
That ambition was realised when, in 2002, he and Rachel O’Riordan, his ex-wife, who is now artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre in London, set up Ransom Productions.
The company launched its slate with Hurricane, Dormer’s virtuoso one-man show about the Belfast snooker star Alex Higgins, which transferred from Belfast to Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the West End of London.
It was after seeing him portray the renowned snooker player that Hall cast him as Lucky.
“Peter Hall saw Hurricane on a night when I threw a drunk out of the theatre,” Dormer says. “I propelled him out into the foyer, then came back on stage, picked up my lines and carried on.”
Something else I learned from Beckett is the art of what’s not said. It’s all in the pause and the silence and the beat. Beckett is the master of the silence, which is written all through Waiting for Godot – and Krapp
— Richard Dormer
Hall “said he’d never seen anything like it before. He said I was an actor, a writer, a producer and a bouncer – and if I could handle that, I could definitely handle Beckett. He told me that Lucky’s outburst is one of the most difficult speeches in modern theatre, but he reckoned I could do it. And, yes, it’s really complex and demanding, the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
Over the next few years Ransom produced an impressive raft of rarely performed plays and new works, most directed by O’Riordan and several written by Dormer. In 2013 the Abbey Theatre in Dublin commissioned him to write Drum Belly, a sleek, dark thriller about Irish and Italian gangsters in late-1960s New York.
“I reckon I am a better actor than I am a writer, because I’m not good at editing my work,” he says. “But writing plays made me a better actor. I covered a lot of ground in those plays: snooker, the art of the actor, quantum mechanics, the Famine, gangsters.
“Something else I learned from Beckett is the art of what’s not said. It’s all in the pause and the silence and the beat. Beckett is the master of the silence, which is written all through Waiting for Godot – and Krapp.
“When I read a script I want to know what happens in that silence, that beat. It’s into those moments that actors project their fears, their worries, their insecurities. Some find it a difficult, intimidating experience, but when it works in a theatre it’s profound.”
The year 2012 saw the start of a string of high-profile screen appearances, kicking off with Good Vibrations, the story of the Belfast punk visionary Terri Hooley, a role Dormer had previously played at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast.
Dormer is still widely recognised as the fearless warrior Beric Dondarrion in the HBO series Game of Thrones. He’s also well known from Sky Atlantic’s Fortitude – his favourite gig – in which he appeared alongside Stanley Tucci and Christopher Eccleston.
In 2023 he returned to Belfast for the BBC police drama Blue Lights; he also appeared in the Belfast writer Ronan Bennett’s recent television adaptation of The Day of the Jackal, and features in the new season of Gangs of London.
“When Sean asked me to record Krapp’s speech in 2008, with a view to it being performed 30 years later, I felt afraid,” Dormer says. “As a smoker and a drinker, I didn’t think that I would live to see 69. At 39 I didn’t want to think about mortality. It felt too much like tempting fate. But now we’re more than halfway there, and I’m starting to feel excited that I’m still here and healthy enough to do it.
“There’s a possibility that I might do my own Krapp’s Last Tape at next year’s Biennale, which would be good – in case I don’t get to do it again! It’s been 15 years since I was last on a stage, and I’m keen to get back. The last time was when we brought Hurricane to the Belfast Grand Opera House, when Alex died.
“We’d done it a few years previously in the Opera House. One night, during that run, I was arriving at the theatre in a black cab and I saw this little guy in a long raincoat standing outside. It was pouring with rain, and as I passed I saw the big advertising banner blow down and unfurl itself like a great wilting flower around his feet.
“I waved to him out of the cab window, and he did a sort of a pirouette and a graceful bow. There he was, this small figure with his life story falling down around him. That was the last time I saw Alex Higgins.”
Spooling back to Krapp’s Last Tape, Doran reflects on a work that he describes as “a counterpoint of present pain to past happiness, something many people will recognise. Particularly in Richard’s case, these performances will actualise the exact dates and ages specified by Beckett. Our extremely-early-bird tickets will allow aficionados, with some humour, to buy into the long time lapse of the play’s central conceit.”
Extremely early-bird tickets for Krapp’s Last Tape go on sale on artsoverborders.com on Sunday, April 13th; free tickets for the Oh My Godot! series are available through eventbrite.ie or eventbrite.co.uk
