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 gratification of those very bodily appetites that, earlier, he had resolved should be out of his life. Eating bananas and drinking have become a [daily routine]. Of the physical activities that he once considered excesses only sex has come to play a reduced part in his lonely existence" in the form of periodic visits from an old prostitute. Although this is a play about memory, the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp himself remembers very little. Virtually all the recollections come from the tape. As evidenced most clearly in the novel "Murphy", Beckett had a decent understanding of a variety of mental illnesses including