David Westhead and Stockard Channing presented a one-night-only performance of a Samuel Beckett classic in South Norwood last night.
KEN TOWL says he was fortunate to be there
Reel to reel: David Westhead getting down with his ‘other self’ in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape
Two conversations, and, sandwiched between them, Samuel Beckett’s one-act, one-man play, Krapp’s Last Tape, featuring memory, regret and bananas.
So, last things first: I enjoyed the Q&A session after the play. The questions were asked by members of last night’s appreciative audience at Stanley Hall. They were answered by actor David Westhead, the one-man in question, and by the director, Stockard Channing.
Yes, that Stockard Channing, whose extensive CV includes Rizzo in the movie Grease and First Lady Abbey Bartlet in The West Wing. Called by Westhead to join him on stage, all eyes were on Channing as she rose from the audience. She looked a lot like Elizabeth Taylor. The light seemed to shimmer around her. Here was Hollywood royalty in the Stanley Hall. South Norwood hadn’t experienced this level of glamour and celebrity since Captain Sensible opened the Sensible Gardens in 2014.
The pair related how they had come to collaborate on the project, Westhead describing his discovery of a performance of it in a Soviet-era apartment in Lithuania after following a trail of arrows painted on walls. When he asked old friend Channing to produce it, she had failed to leap at the chance. “It’s not what I do”, she said.
But she relented and so they rehearsed in Channing’s kitchen and, bound by Beckett’s notoriously strict stage directions, created a tight 43-minute version of the play.
A very academic sounding man asked the first question: “Of course, a lot of Beckett is quite ritualistic…but what I got from this was the emotion, which you did so beautifully. How do you do that?”
Quite reasonably, and a little self-deprecatingly, Westhead answered that the themes – lost love, lost ambition, age, death – were universal, that he had experienced all of these and so was able to draw on his own life to inform his performance. It was a good answer.
The second interlocuter prefaced her question with the caveat, “Mine isn’t as clever.” But it really was. “Why here?” she asked, “Why South Norwood?”
“You’ve got a great artistic director here,” replied Westhead, an answer which provoked a cheer. Like any good actor, Westhead could read the room. Here was a local audience, somewhat proud of the quirky cultural gem they were sitting in.
I reflected on the difference between Stanley Arts and Fairfield Halls, where I’d been last weekend. I couldn’t imagine anyone saying, “The thing about the Fairfield Halls is that they have great artistic direction.”
Cast and crew: Westhead and director Stockard Channing
Westhead explained: “Louisa sent me an email,” referring to Louisa Bartlett-Pestell, the chief executive and artistic director of Stanley Arts.
Krapp’s Last Tape at Stanley Arts had sold out. It had originally been planned to be staged in one of the Halls’ smaller rooms, but was moved to the main hall, demand being so great. Westhead could read the room; Bartlett-Pestell can read the runes.
The play itself is a curiosity. There is the inevitable intensity that comes with a cast of one.
The onus is all on Westhead to create a world for us out of his delivery of the script, the monologues, the stage directions, of course. But also how he fills the spaces and, this being Beckett, there are spaces. He is helped by what he described as the second character on the stage, the recordings of himself as a younger man.
Essentially the play is an old man’s ruminations on his own life through his responses to recordings that he made earlier in his life. At times it made me think of Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages”, and the line, “Ah, but I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now.”
Westhead’s old man is fiercely mocking and dismissive of his younger selves, and occasionally outsmarted by them. At one point, he has to look up a word (viduity) in a dictionary. I mean, fair enough, who knows that word, right? And then it dawns on us that he is looking up a word that he once knew. This man has lost so much over the decades, even words.
There is humour, too. After all, there is always humour in life, if you know where to look for it. Becket/Westhead do a lot with bananas, and even deconstruct and play with the classic trope of slipping on a banana skin. To say anything more on this topic would be tantamount to a spoiler, and you may wish to see it at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh when you go up for the fringe in the summer.
I had a chat with Westhead a day before I saw the play and he was very keen to talk about it. It was obvious that the project was a labour of love for him and Channing. They put the play on a maximum of four times a month. They have to fit it around paying work, since Krapp’s Last Tape doesn’t make any money. Nor is it designed to.
After Westhead’s experience in Lithuania, sitting in a room with some eight others in the audience, the plan was to tour the smallest of venues with the most minimalist of gear and take theatre out to the fringes. The entire set fits into the back of Westhead’s Ford C-Max. One time he took it to Los Angeles with just the reel-to-reel tape machine that supplies the voice of Krapp’s younger self.
And it also doesn’t make money because all of the takings go to the charity Wembley to Soweto, providing support to disadvantaged young people through training in photography.
How did he rate Stockard Channing as a director? “She’s brilliant!” he said.
He could hardly say anything else, but he justified this with her long experience as an actor herself, particularly on the stage, so that she knew how to communicate with actors, and was “direct and forensic”. And, anyway, they had been friends for years – they had even played husband and wife once in a film in 2000.
It could be “a bit lonely out there”, just Westhead and the tape recorder, he conceded but, on the other hand, there was a greater connection between the solitary actor and the audience, especially in more intimate venues.
In giving us this version of Krapp’s Last Tape, Channing and Westhead have created a legacy for themselves, a relatable, credible character brought to life in front of our eyes.
I don’t think he will mind too much if I assert that David Westhead is truly Krapp.
More by Ken Towl:
- Dara Ó Briain is a BIG act. Fairfield Halls needs more like him
- The Sweet Science will be landing a blow for women’s cause
- Coombe Lodge open at last, but it doesn’t seem quite finished
- Intriguing secret societies offer more than conspiracy theories
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