Images of Beckett - Index of

yearning. The repetition of the tape with the girl
in the punt fascinates Krapp but also leads him
inexorably back to that sense of loss and failure in
which the play is steeped. Looking at the play from
the outside (in as much as he could do so) in order
to direct it brought Beckett to focus on themes
that widened the resonance of his work and to
incorporate details into his directing that removed
what was inessential and highlighted the central
theme of separation or reconciliation.
Early in his career as a writer, Beckett
recognised the fundamental importance of silence
in music. In his letter written in German in 1937 to
Axel Kaun, he suggested that it should be possible
to dissolve ‘the terrible materiality of the word
surface...like for example the sound surface,
torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh
symphony’. 130 In writing plays, such a possibility
became a concrete reality for Beckett. Silence held
both positive and negative associations in his
theatre. It allowed him to capture ‘a whisper of that
final music or that silence that underlies all’, while
it retained at the same time a strongly positive
dramatic force. 131 This is particularly striking in
Waiting for Godot, in which (in Beckett’s own words)
‘silence is pouring into this play like water into a
sinking ship’ and yet in which frozen moments of
total silence compellingly hold our attention. 132
In Krapp’s Last Tape, too, the associations between
Barry McGovern in Waiting for Godot, 1999
(Right) Samuel Beckett, directing Happy Days in 1979
BECKETT AS DIRECTOR 145