Ever rediscovered an autobiographical creation, like a teenage diary or confessional recording, years later and experienced the torture of reading or listening to the younger version of you? Or sat awake in the early hours hearing an invisible voice of doom cataloguing your life’s greatest mistakes? Or met an old friend and jabbered on about how great things were ‘back then’, only to have most of your crystal-clear memories disputed by the other person?
These three forms of recognisable torment characterise ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, ‘Eh Joe’ and ‘The Old Tune’, three one-act Samuel Beckett plays directed by Trevor Nunn at the Jermyn Street Theatre. The ex-artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre has previous form with Beckett at this teeny-tiny basement theatre, having also directed ‘All That Fall’ here in 2012.
The most famous of the bunch, ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ opens with an extended skit involving a banana (genuinely very funny) before performer James Hayes huffs, puffs and grumps his way through the ignominy of hearing his younger self prattle on. Thematically, there’s quite a bit of crossover with the final piece, ‘The Old Tune’, in which Gorman (Niall Buggy) and Cream (David Threlfall) put the world and the younger generation to rights, their crumbling recollections interrupted by Max Pappenheim’s cleverly OTT soundtrack of cars roaring past.
The best one by far is ‘Eh Joe’, thanks to Beckett’s script and basic idea, and because the disembodied role of Voice is spoken by Lisa Dwan. She’s a superstar among hardcore Beckett geeks, and her voice dips and sways between sweetly twittering to hitman-menacing.
Nunn never really captures the most unsettling aspects of Beckett – to steal Hunter S Thompson’s words, these plays never got weird enough for me. But he does get at a very human side of all three. So unlike the case with other Beckett performances, where the absurdity or surrealism shines through, it’s the crushing sense of familiarity that haunts.