To ÂBe AgainÊ? Some musings on KrappÊs Last Tape and A Kind of Alaska
Joseph Spence
BeckettÊs KrappÊs Last Tape (1958) and PinterÊs A Kind of Alaska (1982) resonate remarkably with each other and form a perfect theatrical double bill. They were written about twenty-five years apart, but just after each of the playwrights had reached the age of fifty. They are works by writers at the height of their powers and, perhaps surprisingly given their subject matter, among their authorsÊ most affecting, affirming and accessible works. In both of these exquisite poetic miniatures layers of plot and character have been peeled away to offer a radical exploration of the human condition. Each of the playsÊ main characters addresses the problem of communication in ways that are dramatically compelling. While Krapp, a loquacious failed writer, engages in angry dialogue with his younger selves, Deborah in A Kind of Alaska , a woman who has been frozen in time, deploys linguistic convention and sharp witty retorts to protect herself from too much reality. (Deborah is drawn as a perfect specimen of plucky English womanhood and it is no coincidence that A Kind of Alaska was the first play Pinter wrote after his marriage to Lady Antonia Fraser in 1980.) It is clear from both plays that human beings cannot bear stark reality. KrappÊs den is like PlatoÊs cave in which a prisoner sees everything by the flickering light of a fire rather than under natural light; the glare of the sun, representing the truth of his situation, would be too much for him. Deborah, having had her strange situation explained to her, reverts to childhood and imagines herself retreating into a hall of mirrors in which she sees only reflections of
reality, as Krapp sees the shadows of reality in his den.
These plays are family dramas. Krapp reflects movingly on his motherÊs death and on a relationship that never quite was with a beautiful cousin. Deborah awakens to find her sisterÊs husband in attendance at her bedside. He has been in attendance for many years, while another sister has given up her life to look after their widowed father. All the characters in these plays have experienced what Krapp calls a Âlong viduityÊ: years of solitariness, akin to the state of widowhood. Krapp imagines he could have found solace only with the heroine of Effi Briest Âup there on the Baltic, and the pines, and the dunesÊ, his own kind of Alaska. Time plays cruel tricks with each of the main characters in these plays. Krapp, at sixty-nine, listens dismissively to Krapp at thirty-nine, reflecting on the arrogance of Krapp at around twenty-nine. Deborah awakens after twenty-nine years and is at one time both the sixteen year old she was when she ÂstoppedÊ, a victim of encephalitis lethargica , and a woman of forty-five. Caught between her two worlds, she reveals a childish adult mind. She teasingly accuses her doctor of having interfered with her (she admits that she may have encouraged him) before reflecting: ÂI am childish. Out of tuneÊ. This recalls KrappÊs admission of the Âfalse ringÊ to all he hears when listening to his younger self. Krapp and Deborah are characters defined by their being rather than by what they do, but while Krapp is bitter about Âeverything on this old muck ball, all the light and dark and famine and feasting of⁄the agesÊ,
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