ABSTRACT
The recorded speech Beckett uses extensively in Krapp's Last Tape, Ohio Impromptu, Rockaby and That Time differs from the full, palpable, self-present speech which the metaphysics of presence always associates with the theatre, and whose privilege over writing in logocentric thinking, as a source of reliable meaning, Derrida identifies and reformulates. In Ohio Impromptu, interruption by the listener's knocks halts speech as Krapp halts his tape recorder, and the code of knocks is itself, like all codes, entirely constituted of contextual iteration. The voice and style of the younger Krapp suggest speech under the particular stress that the awareness of a recording brings with it, speech darkened by the threatening shadow of repeatability. The Krapp's Last Tape moves to dissolve or undermine the dramatic qualities most commonly associated with speech immediacy, originality and continuity. As with Ohio Impromptu, the dramatic interest of the play comes from the emerging relationship between what is described in the recorded monologue.
