Krapp, 39

Axis, Ballymun

AS HIS 39th birthday looms, the American actor Michael Laurence begins to feel like Krapp. The famously isolated character of Beckett’s 1958 play had difficulty operating a reel-to-reel recorder at the age of 69, reviewing a tape made 30 years earlier.

What he would make of Laurence’s MacBook Air is anybody’s guess.

For all those technological advances, their shared predicament remains starkly unaltered, which Laurence delivers in blunt summation: “Thirty-nine years to do something, 49 years to fail, 59 years to love someone, if you’re lucky, and 69 years to die.”

His intention, though, is to turn this anxiety into an achievement: to record Krapp’s early monologue at the age of 39 and incorporate it, 30 years later, into a full production.

There’s something limiting in that literalism (Laurence Olivier’s advice to Dustin Hoffman springs to mind: “Have you tried acting, dear boy?”) but Laurence and his director George Demas treat it as a device, constructing a series of previous birthday recordings as a microscope for self-enquiry, fretting all the while that the endeavour is narcissistic or solipsistic. (In a knowing tribute, Laurence has to look the last word up.)

Self-obsession doesn’t become the issue of this visiting production from the Soho Playhouse as much as over-elaboration. Krapp’s life was a study in alienation and ambiguity, and while Laurence wittily uses 10th-grade student reports to trace its surface – “a boring old man who loves to be lonely” – his recorded conversations with Demas about the symbolic end of love don’t seem fathoms deeper.

Moreover, even in his one-man show Laurence is rarely alone, couched in conversations with his director, the recorded reflections of his deceased, doting mother, or reported conversations with his wife – and we’re never in doubt about his worries.

Laurence gives an attractively dry performance, leavened with implausible self-deprecations and amusing efforts to learn an accent (Northern Irish, for some reason).

But the actor playing Krapp must access oceans of pain, loss and inevitability and make them universal.

Laurence, auditioning for the future, is convinced that it’s the part he was born to play. The real lesson of Krapp is that the role fits everybody.

Runs until tomorrow