As the Beckett Estate has determined that Beckett’s works must be produced and performed within the parameters of his detailed stage directions, there is little room for interpretation by those who choose to stage his works. Everything comes down to the acting and, in the case of Krapp’s Last Tape, to the ability of one man to hold that stage. Westhead, intense and compelling, and returning to the theatre after several years of absence, looked as if he had never been away.

Krapp, at the age of 69, looks back over his life and tries to make sense of it through listening to recordings he made as a younger man, recordings which diarise the daily events of his life. As he listens, he recounts the bitterness of lost loves, unachieved ambitions and of too many nights of drinking in solitude. Westhead is in complete control of this material, his performance charged at times with hope and passion, and at other times with cynicism and regret.

The set, a desk covered with boxes of spools and the all-important reel-to-reel tape recorder, enables Krapp to travel back in time and relive his earlier years. Sometimes it substitutes for an old lover as he cradles it in his arms. Lighting kept the gaze on this spot, making Krapp at his desk appear to be frozen in time. And, as he hurls tapes to the floor, it is the derision in which he holds his past life and his seeming denial that there was ever any reason to hope in the first place that really bites. This is nihilism without the saving grace of existentialism.