Time mocks us all, ageing our bodies. But it mocks some more than others. In Harold Pinter's 1982 play A Kind of Alaska – inspired by Awakenings, Oliver Sacks's book about the victims of the 1920s encephalitis lethargica epidemic – Deborah wakes up after 29 years asleep to find that she does not know who she is now. Her only sense of herself is how she was at the age of 16, the year she was struck down. For Deborah, the past is an eternal present into which she retreats.
While it is illness that has robbed Deborah of her adult life, in Krapp's Last Tape, Samuel Beckett's 1958 play for man and tape recorder, it is Krapp himself who is responsible for a life unlived. Alone and unloved in his room, the 69-year-old failed writer, lover and son eavesdrops on his 39-year-old self reflecting on himself at 29, and in particular on the moment he deliberately cut himself off from love.
The pitch of both productions is just so. Mike Britton's design offers a room of plain simplicity that doubles as both hospital ward and study, and which in both cases also suggests a prison cell. The revivals are suffused with loss, yet tough and alert to the dangers of false nostalgia. If there is regret, it is for those "widowed" by Deborah and Krapp's absences from the world, for the children unborn.
The fascination here is not just in the revivals themselves (very decent though they are, with director Simon Godwin showing a capacity to sniff out tonal textures), nor in the performances – although Marion Bailey captures the heartbreaking girlishness of Deborah in Alaska, and Richard Bremmer is equally impressive as Krapp, always more cadaver than clown.
No, the real beauty is in the daring pairing of two plays that bounce off each other like reflections in a hall of mirrors. Deborah cannot stop remembering. Krapp can't even recall the things he once cited as memorable; even the meaning of words he once knew eludes him. Alone, each of these plays is small but mighty; together, they are like rolling thunder.
