“O Rocky Voice, / Shall we in that great night rejoice? / What do we know but that we face / One another in this place?” W. B. Yeats, 'The Man and The Echo'. / I remember an unusually long silence before the performance began - a shared mood of anticipation, an extended moment for intellectual and emotional preparation - and then again when it was over, another long shared silence - time to recoup, absorb, and to wonder at what we had witnessed. Harold Pinter's season acting the main, the only, part in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape ran for a mere ten performances at the Royal Court in October 2006 but it was destined for theatrical history from the moment it was announced: 'This man in this play at this time', as the critic of the Times Literary Supplement would put it. He might have added 'in this place' as the Court was celebrating fifty years as the home of the English Stage Company. When Pinter appeared in front of us it was clear just how much the recent illness had left its marks (as, no doubt, had its cure), molesting the face and impeding the body, all too fitting a Beckettian touch. Even the electric wheelchair was both a surprise (one hadn't, perhaps, realised the full implications of his illness) and a reminder of Endgame's Hamm, of the kind of prop favoured by a playwright who was never afraid to make comedy out of disability. Not that there was much space for comedy now. Omitted from this production were not only Krapp's desperate pacing round his room, but the opening banana routine, the comically clumsy rewinding of the tape (Pinter simply used a second machine) and the songs. What remained was skeletal. Beckett himself once described Krapp in animalistic terms as being 'like a tiger in a cage' and 'a badger in his hole', but Hildegard Bechtler's dusty set was almost a graveyard, more like a dead-letter office, a foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.