To stage Beckett today is to verify the crisis of civilization that he prophesied: De Tavira
The monologue by Luis de Tavira (in the image) goes through three stages of the life of an older man who scrutinizes his memories.Photo Luis Quiroz
An old man plunged into the most extreme loneliness celebrates his birthday following his habit of recording his impressions of what he lived through; however, on this occasion he searches for the recorded tapes of other anniversaries, in such a way that he embarks on a trip down memory lane.
During this journey, he reflects, laughs and talks with the man he was in the past by listening to his younger self in a recording in which he narrates crucial moments of that time.
Such is the story that the play deals with Krapp’s last tape, written by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, whose protagonist is played by the teacher Luis de Tavira.
Directed by Sandra Félix, Krapp’s Last Tape it’s a melancholy monologue
in which we see an older man scrutinizing his memories, without being able to recognize himself in that young man he was. During the dialogue with himself he travels through three time planes: his youth, his adulthood and his old age.
“He is a man who investigates, navigates and is shipwrecked in the testimonies of memory, who begins to look for what he calls ‘the grain among the straw. What is discovered there is that the journey of memory is not about the past, but about the future, about what endures in the present of what has been. The question: what is it that lasts? it is what marks the journey and the thoughts of the character”, commented the teacher Luis de Tavira in an interview with The Conference
In this piece, Beckett portrays human vulnerability and fragility, the passage of time and the harshness of old age, through an older man who confronts his imperfections, both those of then and his present. He tells us about the aspirations and unfulfilled dreams of an aging person, about the awareness of a resounding failure, regarding what matters in life. Memory becomes a kind of ruthless court
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Today, Maestro De Tavira continued, “Samuel Beckett has become a classic; however, his work at the time was exactly the opposite. It was disruptive, scandalized and provoked the values of a supposed civilization that breathed optimism after the Second World War. As a playwright, Beckett makes the deepest criticism of the dehumanization of the model of social life, which today is a verified diagnosis.
To put Beckett on stage today is to verify that what he prophesied has been more than fulfilled, since we are experiencing a crisis of civilization that increasingly shows us the degree to which dehumanization has reached, hence the daily challenge is to ask ourselves how do to be less inhuman than we are. Proof of this is violence, isolation, the disappearance of consciousness and the value of life and death.
Drive of attachment to the past
Krapp’s Last Tape reflects on that drive that human beings have to preserve the past, to prevent time from going astray. The paradox is that this drive exists because of the awareness of finitude, because we know that we and our lived moments are finite, because we know that our time ends like life in old age. In other words, there could be no desire to remember if there was no danger of losing those memories. What we are trying to say here is that we are mortal, although we are on the road with a sick heart of infinity.
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Beckett, De Tavira concluded, questions the meaning of memory. Undoubtedly, forgetting in life is essential, but so is memory. Memory has the ability to invent our lives; in other words, life is an invention of memory
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Krapp’s last tape, written by Samuel Beckett, directed by Sandra Félix and starred by maestro Luis de Tavira, it is presented on Saturdays and Sundays at 6:00 p.m. in the La Gruta forum of the Helenic Cultural Center (avenida Revolución 1500, San Ángel). The season ends on September 11.
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