THE old man rose painfully as the performance ended. The applause built slowly from a single clap of hands to a tumult. Harold Pinter, playwright and actor, weakened by the years and by illness, had just performed Krapp's Last Tape, by his friend and fellow Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett."It is beyond acting," said Gillian Hanna, an actress in the audience at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. "There is something about the coming together of this particular piece and this performance that took me somewhere else." That place, she said, with a bleakness that might be expected, was "an icy steppe" or an apocalypse.
It was not just the sparseness or the long, brooding silences that prompted a degree of rumination in the audience at this hot-ticket run of only 10 performances. (The £25 [$62] tickets for the performances, which end tonight, were reportedly being offered on eBay at seven times their face value.) Pinter is now 76, and has battled cancer of the esophagus. He said last year that he would not write any more plays, so there was an inevitable sense of valediction.
"Given Harold's recent health problems, there's a coming together here that's more than just a performance," said one member of the audience during a brief question-and-answer session with the director, Ian Rickson, after the show. "There's a moment of theatre history coming together here." The production had borne out his point.
Pinter sat in an electric wheelchair for his performance as Krapp, a 69-year-old man revisiting a tape recording he had made at 39, rising from it only to acknowledge the audience's applause at the end.
"Perhaps my best years are gone," the voice on Krapp's tape intones in the closing moments of this one-man, one-act play, first produced in 1958, which probes the interstices of memory. "But I wouldn't want them back."
That, too, found an echo in the auditorium. Sitting in the audience was Henry Woolf, 76, a school friend of Pinter's and a fellow actor who commissioned Pinter's first play, The Room, in 1957 and who offered his own critique with wry melancholy. "What I felt was a great sadness at the leaking of my own life into the eternal drainpipe, and Harold's, too, of course," he said.
The production, part of the program for the Royal Court Theatre's 50th-anniversary season and for the centenary celebration of Beckett's birth, has been hailed by British reviewers both as a triumphant final hurrah for Pinter and as a lean and compelling performance by an actor-playwright whose own plays draw heavily on broken language, pauses, silence.
In The Guardian, Maev Kennedy called it "one of the most anxiously awaited events in the theatrical calendar, the coming together of the two masters of the speaking silence and the pregnant pause". In his session with the audience Rickson said the piece was so powerful that sometimes, when it ends, "there's just silence".
He had, he said, eschewed parts of the original script that show Krapp gorging on bananas. "This is the first 'yes, we have no bananas' version," he said, speaking from a set strewn with boxes of tapes where Krapp has hurled them. The wheelchair remained behind Krapp's desk like a sentinel.
It was "an artistic decision", Stephen Pidcock, a spokesman for the Royal Court, said.
Rickson asked rhetorically, "Were we serving Sam by taking the bananas out?" He then offered a wry answer: "Harold said he had a conversation with Sam, and Sam said it was OK."
Rickson called Pinter's effort in performing the play "heroic".
The two men rehearsed on afternoons from 2.30 to six o'clock for four weeks. Audiences, Rickson said, had been "awed" - a mood caught by reviewers.
Last year Pinter's health forced him to deliver his Nobel acceptance speech in a video recording that showed him sitting in a wheelchair as he unburdened himself of a passionate tirade against US foreign policy, saying; "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them."
His health this year seems more robust.
"Pinter's stoic bravery in putting on this remarkable show shines through; he sits and moves around in a wheelchair from necessity," Nicholas de Jongh wrote in The Evening Standard. At the end, he added, Pinter "walked out unsteadily but his crucial place in modern theatre is secure".
In The Times, Benedict Nightingale bemoaned the excision of the bananas but said that "in every key respect this is surely a performance that would have delighted Beckett".
Famously, the most frequently repeated stage direction is that Krapp should brood, and, Nightingale wrote, Pinter does so "with an intensity that signals the loss of hope, self-contempt and an inner bleakness that lets up only when he hears his 39-year-old self remembering a dreamy moment with a loved one in a boat that rocks 'gently, up and down and from side to side"'.
"And all along Pinter makes you feel the gravity, the meticulousness, the sheer power of his endeavour," Nightingale wrote. "This is an old man's last-gasp search for a meaning he knows he'll never find."
by Alan Cowell in The New York Times
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