Krapp's Last Tape

I decided to answer Kristin's question that she gave us at the end of lecture: What was your cerebral response? What was your visceral response?

Let's start with my visceral or gut response. I thought that they play was extremely boring. Essentially, all this play is about is an old man who sits and listens to recorded tapes of himself from years past. There is no exciting plot with an epic fight at the end and the hero destroying the bad guy. There isn't a mystery that plagues us until the very end in which we finally found out that HE killed his wife. No, this play is simply about an old man who loves to eat bananas and sits around listening to tapes of himself when he was younger. Nothing very exciting about that.

However, on a cerebral level, my response was much different. I thought it was pretty clever for Beckett to use a tape recorder give us a picture on Krapp's past.When he wrote Krapp's Last Tape, tape recorders were a new invention and as such there weren't really known all that well throughout Europe. Using this new invention, Beckett designed the play so the way in which we got to learn about Krapp's past and how he came to be the way he is was through the use of the tape recorder rather than him telling us or a family member. Beckett embraced this new technology rather than being scared or skeptical of it, and really used the prop well in his play. Heck, the entire play revolves around the tape recorder. Without it, the play couldn't exist.