Krapp and Two Other Short Plays, Teatr Polski in Poznań

A play about a man who listens to his own voice from the past and tries to understand who he truly was. In the silence between the recorded and the lived life unfolds the most important drama — the drama of human identity.

The protagonist of Beckett’s monodrama Krapp records a “spoken diary” every year on his birthday. Now, at the age of 69, he listens back to his old tapes to revisit his life: youthful recklessness, later years of orderly asceticism, and the strange state of old age, no longer fitting into any previous incarnation. Do we ever truly have a single “self”? Is our life a continuity, or a collection of fragmented voices? These questions resonate with full force in Beckett’s texts: Krapp’s Last Tape, Dramatic Fragment II, and Ohio Impromptu, which together form the performance.

The demanding role was played by Andrzej Seweryn, whose premiere coincided with his 70th birthday. Previously, the part of Krapp had been performed by Polish theater legends such as Tadeusz Łomnicki and Zbigniew Zapasiewicz. Seweryn continues this line of great interpretations. His Krapp is inwardly shattered, embittered, bitterly ironic — yet profoundly human. He builds the character with minimal means: a glance, a gesture, a pause, the precision of a spoken word. Here, words carry the weight of silence, and the sound of replayed memories becomes a full-fledged stage partner.

On stage, he was joined by Antoni Ostrouch. This was concentrated theater, stripped of ornament, intimate, where every detail mattered. Voice, rhythm, breath — all led toward a confrontation with the inevitability of passing. “A magnificent role by Andrzej Seweryn,” wrote Witold Sadowy, and these words were neither exaggeration nor courtesy, but testimony to an exceptional encounter: of an actor with his role, and of the audience with a timeless question.