One of the marquee offerings in this year’s Adelaide Festival, this beautifully calibrated production of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, featuring the Irish actor Stephen Rea, might be the most direct line to the playwright we have.

Rea met Beckett in 1976, when playing the role of Clov in Endgame at the Royal Court for Beckett’s 70th birthday. He took notes from the man himself – one to the effect that an actor should be zeroing in on rhythm rather than ‘meaning’.

No actor worth their salt is ever going to forget advice like that, and in Krapp’s Last Tape, we sense the care with which Rea attends to the text, its words and its actions.

Stephen Rea in Krapp’s Last Tape. Photo © Patricio Cassinoni

Directed by Vicky Featherstone and designed by Jamie Vartan, it’s a visually spare production: a grey table placed long-side to audience; a dusty steel lampshade suspended above. There’s an aperture in the back wall, through which Krapp trots on and off. There are no domestic touches. It’s a space, pure and simple. A self-interrogation room.

Krapp, too, is similarly difficult to contextualise. He’s old but oddly youthful...