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
Krapp's Last Tape eighty degrees to make coitus possible in the position he is in!'"––a position that Rosette Lamont proposes also "suggests that of a suckling babe." Beckett would not be 69 until 1975 so, from his perspective, with Krapp a proxy for him, the action is set in the future. The first line of the play explicitly sets it 'in the future', although nothing onstage reveals this. Beckett wrote this play shortly before he turned 52 years old. As it happens, with "Waiting for Godot", success had found him but, at 39, the future must have seemed a lot bleaker for the