It was written in English in 1980, at the request of Daniel Labeille, who produced it on behalf of Programs in the Arts, State University of New York, for a festival and symposium in commemoration of Beckett's 75th birthday.
The play premiered on April 8, 1981, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, starring Billie Whitelaw and directed by Alan Schneider.
[2] A woman dressed in an evening gown is sitting in a wooden rocking chair; no other props or scenery are called for.
"[8] To achieve this effect Billie Whitelaw was encouraged by Beckett to "‘think of it as a lullaby’ which she interpreted as ‘soft, monotonous, no colour, soothing, rhythmic … [a] drive toward death.
"[12] "The first section details W’s decision to stop going ‘to and fro’ in the outside world in search of ‘another like herself’"[13] evocative of Molloy’s quest to find his mother.
It also marks the "beginning of her next phase of activity – sitting at her upstairs window, searching the windows opposite[16] to see another ‘one living soul … like herself.’"[17] "Life is nothing more nor less than the act of perception or the state of being perceived, or, in the words of Bishop Berkeley which find echoes throughout Beckett’s work, ‘esse est percipi’[18] (‘to be is to be perceived’).
She has stopped actively searching for another and given up watching for proof of the existence of another, but through all of this she has always had the voice for company; now she is "done with that"[25] too and has concluded that it is time she herself "was her own other … living soul.
"[11] The woman selects what initially appears like an unusual outfit for this final scene, an elaborate evening gown.
Having abandoned the search she opts for the rocker's "embrace"[4] ("those arms at last"[25]) dolled up as her mother[30] so that she can fulfil both roles, she can become her "own other".
[32] "In his original letter asking Beckett for the play, Labeille had directly associated the name of Irene Worth … with the project.
[33] Beckett declared himself "very pleased with switch to Billie"[34] and her performance benefited from a high degree of support from him as always.
"There was the frail figure of his maternal grandmother, ‘little Granny’, Annie Roe, dressed in ‘her best black’,[20] sitting in a rocking chair at the window of Cooldrinagh, where she lived out the final years of her life.
[35] Needless to say, knowing Beckett to be the art lover he was, one can catch glimpses of a number of paintings he was familiar with: Whistler's Mother, van Gogh’s La Berceuse [1] or Rembrandt’s Margaretha Trip (de Geer) [2].
A favourite of his, Beckett owned a copy of Jack B Yeats’s exhibition catalogue, which included one entitled Sleep, a painting of an old woman a sitting by the window, with her head drooped low onto her chest.
As Krapp sits on the "bench by the weir"[36] he realises his mother has passed on when "the blind went down, one of those dirty brown roller affairs.
"The chair asserts the pun ‘off his rocker’"[39] which could similarly refer to the dead mother in Rockaby who people maintained had "gone off her head".