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Assembly Roxy – Upstairs
There’s something about seeing Beckett’s bleak, ruminative world in the middle of the day, stepping out of the Edinburgh sunshine into Krapp’s gloom, that sharpens the contrast and makes the piece land even harder.
It opens with two minutes of total silence. Westhead just sits there, taking in the space, and it is deeply uncomfortable in the best way. A gutsy way to start a show, and it immediately tells you this isn’t going to be unusual.
At a tight 43 minutes, this was a leaner Krapp than I’ve encountered before, and a livelier one too. There were moments, particularly in that closing stretch, that felt genuinely new to me, and the whole thing lacked the usual heavy finality of the title. This didn’t feel like a man recording his actual last tape so much as a man very much still rattling around in there. Whether that’s a directorial choice or just Westhead’s particular flavour of Krapp, I couldn’t say, but it made for a fresher watch than expected.
The real bonus was sticking around for the Q&A afterwards, where Westhead and Channing talked candidly about “finding his Krapp” and why the play still lands in 2026. Westhead also told the story of stumbling on the production entirely by chance, catching it in a gap between filming jobs, and falling in love with it there and then. With proceeds going towards getting cameras to children in Soweto, it’s hard not to root for it too.
Bonus points for the pre-show celebrity spot: we clocked Channing walking nearby and knew the face without placing it, only twigging afterwards that we’d been standing next to both the President’s wife from The West Wing and Rizzo from Grease. Not a bad way to start an afternoon.
Glad I caught this one.