The Kilkenny Arts Festival presents another landmark in Gare St Lazare Ireland’s engagement with Samuel Beckett. The Last Tape is Romanian composer Marcel Mihalovici’s operatic collaboration with the Irish author. This production offers a rare opportunity to encounter one of Beckett’s few opera collaborations for its Irish premiere in a new hybrid version melding the opera and the original play.
On every birthday Krapp makes a tape recording of his thoughts. Now approaching the end of his sixty-ninth year, he listens back to a recording made half a lifetime earlier and is confronted with the choices that led him to privilege some parts of his life over others. In this final tape, he weighs the cost of those decisions.
This production marks the twenty-sixth Beckett production directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett. In this third collaboration with internationally acclaimed singer Mark Padmore – singing the role of Krapp alongside actor Conor Lovett perfoming – they are joined by pianists Ellen Jansson and Izumi Kimura, percussionists Alex Petcu and Glen Lyons, under Grammy-nominated conductor Elaine Kelly in Andrew Synnott’s new arrangement of Mihalovici’s original score. Set design is by Jesse Jones, Sound design by Mel Mercier , lighting by Simon Bennison, and costume by Valentina Gambardella.
The Samuel Beckett Society 
Is this production also available online? or perhaps on a video recorded during one of the performances?
Best wishes – Liz
Elizabeth Simpson
107 Seddon House
Barbican
London, EC2Y 8BX
esimpson@imperial.ac.uk
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