Speaking of Beckett, two other theatrical highlights of December for me were a pair of productions of his short works: Krapp’s Last Tape, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, starring John Hurt and directed by Michael Colgan, and a collection of really short works assembled by directors Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne into an evening called Fragments, presented by Theatre For a New Audience at the Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Krapp shows us a man, on his 69th birthday, recording his reflections on his life to this point, as he has done annually for decades. But there isn’t much to the recording he makes; he has precious little to say. Mostly he listens to a recording he made thirty years earlier, when he was still relatively young (though he already felt as though life as such had passed him by, and that what was left, what still animated him, was the urge to record his thoughts and feelings, on tape and on paper, and thereby turn his experience, even especially his experience of disappointment, into art.

It’s a pretty terrifying work for a blogger to confront, for obvious reasons. This was my second confrontation, though, and as always when one confronts a classic repeatedly different aspects come to the surface. The Beckett estate’s controlling attitude toward how his works are performed paradoxically makes the small differences from one production to the next stand out more sharply, which I suppose is a backhanded argument in favor of our overly-broad construction of copyright. My first encounter with Krapp starred Brian Dennehy, than whom a more different actor than John Hurt can barely be imagined. What struck me immediately about Hurt was how much he looked like Beckett himself; what struck me next was, in contradiction to my first impression, how English he seemed, and how strange that Englishness felt in Beckett. But I warmed to him very quickly, and I think he got think he got Beckett’s whimsy – the whole business with the bananas – more than Dennehy did. His anger was more despairing, less self-lacerating than Dennehy’s was; Dennehy’s Krapp, I think, came to him via O’Neill, more via O’Neill the writer himself than via any of his characters, a raging darkness of self-hatred, where Hurt raged more against the dying of the light.

What struck me about the text itself, this time, was how conventionally poetic the 39-year-old Krapp’s tape was. This text, after all, was written by Beckett. But it doesn’t sound like Beckett, not the Beckett of drama and not the Beckett of the novels either. A Beckett who might-have-been, perhaps, had he not taken his literary vows of poverty and silence. Which led me to reflect on Krapp as a meditation on that very choice. Beckett’s renunciations, so central to his achievement, left him in the position of the elder Krapp, listening mockingly to the sound of someone still foolish enough to wish to speak.

Which is an even scarier thought than thinking of Krapp as a blogger.

Fragments was an international production of continental sensibility, which felt much more at home, to me, in Beckett, but the five short pieces, though great fun, were less revelatory than Krapp, which I suppose is what I expected. The pieces are vaudevilles, basically: a blind man and a wheelchair-bound man struggle against each other for supremacy as they struggle together for survival (Rough For Theatre I); two men, of pessimistic and optimistic temperament, respectively, take turns waking, going about their daily routines, and retiring for the night (Act Without Words, II); three women take turns gossiping in pairs while the third stands apart to be gossiped about (Come and Go). What struck me about them all together was the degree to which Beckett depends on performers and directors who understand his humor. He wrote these routines for clowns, essentially, and reading a script intended for a clown can’t be terribly funny.