Krapp's Last Tape: It's a date!

It's probably my favourite piece by Beckett, and I still remember how moved I was by John Hurt's performance at The Gate Theatre in Dublin in 2001.

 Photograph: Anthony Woods/Gate Theatre digital archive/University of Galway

The story of the play is of a 69-year-old man making his annual recording of his thoughts on his birthday, laughing cynically at the recording of his 39-year-old self, and then losing his cynicism as his thoughts move back and forth between his old self and his current self. One of the many challenges for the solitary actor on stage is to convince in the younger recording while responding to it as the older Krapp. Hurt did that brilliantly. 

But what if a recording were made when an actor was actually thirty-nine, so that he could play the piece when he was sixty-nine? The actor would be responding to his own reality, as well as that of the character he was playing.

That's the idea behind a project by Art Over Borders, where the actor Samuel West made the recording in 2006, and the actor Richard Dormer in 2008. And a limited number of (very) early-bird tickets went on sale last Sunday, Beckett's 120th birthday, for West's performance in 2036.

I bought two. So, if we're not all tempting fate to an outrageous degree, Martine and I will be in Dublin on Saturday, March 22nd, 2036, to see West's performance. I'm looking forward to it!

Am I an award-winning writer?

Well a few months ago I wondered here if I should call myself a writer at all. Then I found out that I was an award-winning writer: I won the 2025 Cúirt New Writing Fiction Prize.

www.cuirt.ie

When I first began writing short stories just four years ago I devoured many collections in order to understand the form and appreciate its subtleties. One of the collections I most enjoyed was Dance Move by the outstanding Belfast writer Wendy Erskine, so I was completely gobsmacked when in her capacity as the prize's judge she wrote this about my winning story Deconstruction:

Complex relationship with a lightness of touch, I loved this story with its brilliantly judged dialogue. Who knew that an IKEA furniture forum could be mined for such gold?

I was floating on air after reading that and receiving her congratulations on BlueSky.

So there I was in Galway last week, reading my story at the Cúirt festival in the company of six brilliant writers. 

I'm still floating on air.