[caption id="attachment_68743" align="alignright" width="600" caption="John Hurt debuted in the Gate Theatre’s production of “Krapp’s Last Tape” in 1999."]
It’s difficult to believe that John Hurt, one of England’s finest actors, had never appeared in New York until this month’s star turn in Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater. It would be splendid, though, if before too long some producer could give Hurt and Michael Colgan’s Dublin Gate Theatre production a bit of a run in a Manhattan venue, off-Broadway or on. In 1958, Beckett created in “Krapp’s Last Tape” a brilliant, hour-length work dealing with a 69-year-old man studying his birthday by reassessing a portion of his life from 30 years earlier. The medium that allows him to examine his past are tape recordings he had made at various points in his life.
As time passes, the play seems more and more significant among Beckett’s works, and not merely because it provides sterling actors with an incomparable vehicle. When Hurt was playing the role in Brooklyn, Brian Dennehy was doing it at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater. Meanwhile, at numerous companies around the country, amateur and professional directors and aging actors have realized precisely what the play holds for them.
It would, however, be difficult if not impossible to imagine any doing it better than John Hurt, for whom the play, under different circumstances, might easily have written, so probing, so incisive and so moving is the 71-year-old actor’s performance in the role. “Krapp’s Last Tape” is about loss, regret and denial. Among the wonders of Hurt’s performance is the graceful and seemingly easy manner in which he differentiates between the youthful tapes of three decades earlier and his vocal delivery on this 69th birthday. It’s doubtful than many, perhaps any, of the actors who have done the play in the past could possibly have achieved as much as Hurt has done. John Hurt, a sometime resident of Ireland, has scores of TV (“I, Claudius” as Caligula) and film (“Elephant Man”; “1984”) credits to his name and is starring in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” currently showing in cinemas. If he isn’t as well known in this country as he ought to be, it is partly because earlier on, there were two other gifted actors whose similar names made confusion with him almost unavoidable -- William Hurt and John Heard, both American.
In the Gate production, which debuted in Dublin in1999, under the direction of Artistic Director Colgan, Hurt, in a white shirt and a dark, sleeveless sweater, sits at a battered desk, hovering over the tape recorder. Sometimes he embraces it, almost hugging it. At other moments, he seems to be repelled by it, as though it is the source of the intense pain he feels as he remembers the past, almost experiencing it all over again.
Since that first performance, Hurt has played Beckett’s moving, evocative play often. He first took it to London in 2000 and he played both Dublin and London again in 2006. Colgan also sponsored a “Beckett on Film” anthology at one point and Hurt played “Krapp,” directed by the Canadian, Atom Egoyan.
