Saga of missed joy

There is no sadder or more terrible sight to be seen on the London stage than John Hurt's gnarled face and arms. These crucial body-parts are displayed in Samuel Beckett's 55-minute monologue, a summing-up of Krapp, whose 69-year-old life has whittled down to almost nothing but never added up to much.

Hurt wears an expression by turns vacant and reminiscent, ravaged but accepting. His is the face of somebody who has caught sight of the ghost of his younger self and heard it speaking of love lost or never quite found.

Hurt's head is bowed down on a desk. In painfully childlike fashion, his hands clutch and hold an ancient tape machine. The voice of Krapp, recorded when still a young man, speaks lyrically of a long-ago summer day, punting on a lake with some adored girl.

These moments encapsulate and convey the essence of Krapp's Last Tape. An old man seeks to raid the past, by listening to one of the taped observations he recorded on each birthday and by looking through a ledger in which he noted details of autobiography both trivial and crucial.

The familiar Beckettian sense of nullity and terminal pessimism, of lost hope and stoic despair, is for once qualified.

The gruff Krapp may perhaps be teetering on the rocky edge that slowly lets you down to senility, but you catch a hint that if he had not abandoned the girl in favour of his failed literary career he might have achieved that condition unknown in Beckett, a little touch of happiness.

Robin Lefevre's production, the last in the Beckett centenary Festival organised by the Gate Theatre Dublin and Barbicanbite, makes too much of Krapp's gross eccentricities, but is steeped in the right mood of inexorable desolation.

Hurt's Krapp hit me for six when last in London. Now it scores just four - the actor's eloquent face still speaks sad volumes but his speeches are no longer freighted with such emotional vehemence or anguish over missed joy.

Krapp's Last Tape