Krapp's Last Tape Krapp's Last Tape Krapp's Last Tape is a one-act play, in English, by Samuel Beckett. With a cast of one man, it was written for Northern Irish actor Patrick Magee and first titled "Magee monologue". (Patrick Magee is familiar to many moviegoers as the writer who Alex cripples while invading his home and raping his wife in "A Clockwork Orange".) It was inspired by Beckett's experience of listening to Magee reading extracts from "Molloy" and "From an Abandoned Work" on the BBC Third Programme in December 1957. The play was first performed as a curtain raiser to "Endgame" (from 28
Waiting for Godot the Absurd" (1960), argued that "Waiting for Godot" was part of a broader literary movement that he called the Theatre of the Absurd, a form of theatre which stemmed from the absurdist philosophy of Albert Camus. Absurdism itself is a branch of the traditional assertions of existentialism, pioneered by Søren Kierkegaard, and posits that, while inherent meaning might very well exist in the universe, human beings are incapable of finding it due to some form of mental or philosophical limitation. Thus humanity is doomed to be faced with "the Absurd", or the absolute absurdity of the existence in lack of