Peter McCormick told David Hennessy about his Samuel Beckett- inspired piece Beyond Krapp as it heads to Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s absurdist works, Krapp’s Last Tape and Eh Joe, Peter McCormick’s Beyond Krapp, which is staging at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, is a dark comedy that follows Cormac, a dead man, in the black void of purgatory as he’s taunted by snippets of his own funeral.
Cormac, also played by Peter, catches glimpses of his eulogy, conversations between loved ones and receives shattering voicemails from his ex-girlfriend, sent after his death, that tear apart his character and force a reappraisal of his life on earth.
As he looks back on his life will he regret not achieving what he wanted to? Or will it be more a case of that he had it all and didn’t realise it at the time?
Peter McCormick (26) is a writer and actor from Rathfarnham, Dublin, and recent graduate of the BA Acting programme at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow where he still based.
He completed his undergrad in English Literature at Trinity College Dublin before moving to Glasgow.
Peter is mentored by the award-winning playwright Meghan Tyler (Crocodile Fever) and is currently developing a comedy drama series for TV with the Scottish production companies The Comedy Unit and Create Anything.
He was recently named on the longlist for the David McLennan Award with A Play, A Pie, and A Pint, for which he is writing a new play about love and manipulation.
What inspired the play, I know from the title it was Krapp’s Last Tape to an extent..
“I read Krapp’s last tape when I was in Trinity as part of a module on modernism.
“It’s the same story that everyone has, you didn’t do the reading and you have to go into a tutorial and pretend that you have something to talk about.
“And Krapp’s Last Tape was by a long way the smallest book on the reading list so I was like, ‘Right, I’ll read that in one evening’.
“I sat down in the kitchen and read the play.
“And it really scared the life out of me, it absolutely terrified me and that doesn’t happen very often.
“It made me really fear about an unfulfilled life, a life of unfulfilled potential, of unfulfilled ambitions or the failure to understand that actually, it’s not about those ambitions.
“What it’s really about is accepting and embracing the love that’s given to you in your life and that the great tragedy could be failing to realise and acknowledge that that’s what matters as opposed to your own personal ‘I want to do this, I want to do that’.
“And so that really stuck with me.
“Then I was in second year of RCS and a fantastic playwright called Megan Tyler came in to do some writing with us.
“I had no ideas and Megan asked me, ‘What scares you?’
“And I said, ‘Krapp’s Last tape scares me’.
“And Megan said, ‘Okay, go and write out why it scares you. Write about those fears’.
“And that’s what I did.
“I spent an afternoon with an A4 pad just writing down what it was about Krapp’s Last Tape that gave me such a visceral, emotive response and we took that and turned it into a play.”
It’s an interesting concept being present at your own funeral and also that fear of you had it all but didn’t realise it..
“Yeah, exactly.
“There is always a fear of like, ‘Okay, I want to do all this stuff but what if that doesn’t actually make me happy? What if that isn’t meaningful enough? What if the person I’m in love with now is not someone I’m in love with in 10 years’ time? What happens if I get married and fall out of love?’
“It’s all these ifs and you can’t live your life like that, but they are real fears.
“This play was about trying to look at a guy who never was able to feel comfortable and happy and fulfilled in what was given to him until it was too late.
“Or is it? You’ll have to come to the play in order to work out what happens next.
“But in Beckett’s play, Krapp is too old now to do anything different.
“With my character, it’s not that he’s too old, he’s dead so he can’t go back and do anything different.
“It’s about working out, ‘Can I look at things differently? Can I appreciate things differently? Can I understand things differently?’”
The fears you speak of are likely to be very common in both women and men..
“Absolutely, I’m particularly struck by the idea of men being vulnerable.
“I went to an all boys school so the first time I ever sat in the classroom with a girl was when I was 18 on my first day of college, which is mad. That’s absolutely insane and it means that that development, and guys develop slower than girls anyway, is massively hampered by the fact that you’re just not used to being around the other sex.
“I think all the things that came from it, this sense of trying to prove yourself, the sense of having one idea about how to behave or thinking you know how to do things: It is universal but I always looked at it as the young male sense of ego and behaviour. I think we need to start talking to younger boys about how there are these darker sides within all of us.
“We need to acknowledge them from an early age that we can grow up being aware of them.
“A big part of my play is about this idea that the ex tells him that he was actually quite controlling and actually quite manipulative, he actually had a very warped understanding of an equitable relationship and only ever wanted to accept love on his terms, not on anyone else’s terms.
“I think those are things people do without really noticing.
“They’re subconscious things because they haven’t any other experience of love or they’re coming from a family background where they’re used to a doting mother perhaps.
“For me it was about trying to acknowledge that this isn’t a story about a bad guy but it is a story about a guy who got things really wrong and failed to be self- aware enough to fix them as they came along.
“Very much a young man type of issue right now is that you have a lot of guys who, because of easy access to stuff like porn and social media and the Andrew Tate stuff that’s on the rise, have a certain idea of how to behave, and how to engage in relationships and engage with love that is just gonna end up with far bigger problems down the road if we don’t start really trying to talk to them about it now.
“A lot of plays and pieces will look at that from really bad guys who are looking at very, like abusive type relationships.
“And yes, that happens.
“Domestic violence, all the rest of it is an absolute epidemic in Ireland at the moment but I think there’s so many ‘normal’ guys who aren’t behaving in abusive bad ways but just aren’t behaving in equal, fully respectful ways because they’re not self-aware enough to really think about it.
“I’d say that from my own experience, all this comes from my own experience of kind of learning as I just grew up, but kind of wishing I’d learned things earlier, rather wishing I learned all this stuff at 10, 11, 12 as opposed to 18, 19, 20.
“A key part of the play is the girl says to him, ‘You always liked it when I cried’ because he could be the guy who wiped her tears and was there to put his arm around her.
“That’s a lovely thing to do in one way but take it with a slightly different approach. She always felt he liked to wipe her tears and put his arm around her because it gave him a sense of ‘you’re in a vulnerable position, and I’ll be there. I’ll be that kind of more dominant figure’.
“And it’s controlling with a lowercase c.
“It’s beginning to go down a slippery slope.”
It’s serious subject matter but it is dark comedy, isn’t it?
“I need to make myself laugh when I write and I have no interest in going to see a play that makes me go, ‘Oh Jesus, everything is awful’.
“And I come out feeling completely numb and in shock and not in any way able to actually consider what’s happened on stage because I’m just so depressed by it all.
“I don’t want to see that.
“But there are certain playwrights writers in general who are so amazing at flipping things around.
“David Ireland’s an example or the stuff that Sharon Horgan and Aisling Bea have done recently with This Way Up.
“They’re phenomenally in tune with their emotions and with people’s dark sides or the kind of the clouds that come into a brain, but they’re absolutely hilarious.
“That’s why you stay watching, because you become invested in a character because that character makes you laugh.
“So right from the start this play, hopefully anyway, is a comedy and this character is a really comic character.
“Irish people cannot look at death and funerals without having a laugh.
“We’re so obsessed with death and so obsessed with funerals but I think because of that obsession we’ve become fantastically stoic and for all the problems of Catholicism, one of the silver linings is that I do think we’re very good at looking at death and we do approach it really well: In a very, ‘Ah sure yes, we’ll all be there for you but let’s have a laugh about it’.”
People may not like to say it out loud but funerals are usually good fun as gatherings and celebrations…
“It comes out in the play.
“A big part of the play is my character Cormac going through who would have done the eulogy.
“He actually wanted to write the eulogy because the last thing you want is some chronology of your life without any sense of who you really were and all the things you’ve achieved and really being your essence.
“So he talks about how ideally, you’d write your own eulogy, you’d hire some desperate unemployed actor to read it for you.
“I’ve come out of funerals before and just gone, ‘Geez, that was a shite eulogy, wasn’t it? That was terrible’.
“A different one and you’re coming out going, ‘That was a great gig, really enjoyed it. I was gripped, I was entertained. That was a great gig’.
“Because a funeral is essentially a play.
“You get a great bit of music, you get a couple of speeches, long monologues and soliloquies.
“There’s all this action and movement.
“Mass is a show and I feel like eulogies or funerals really are the summit of the entertainment industry that is Catholicism.
“I wrote this piece really thinking my character wants people to have a great time at his funeral but then the obstruction or the obstacle to that is his mother who is there going, ‘No, no, no, I’ve contacted the priest, we’re having The Lord’s my Shepherd. We’re having this from Isaiah, we’re having all these different bits’.
“He wants dancers, he wants a chocolate fountain people can dip communion wafers into and it comes from my own idea of a funeral.
“I always thought I’d love instead of the prayers of the faithful, my favourite ten knock knock jokes to be read out instead.
“Or a roll call all the girls you slept with.
“So that’s what he wants and instead the mother’s there with your traditional funeral and that’s the machine that’s moving the comedy along throughout the piece.”
It takes inspiration from Samuel Beckett. I was wondering are there other inspirations in there, perhaps some McDonagh or Marina Carr given its such dark comedy?
“Beckett was the source material.
“Beckett was the original inspiration in terms of he wrote Krapp’s Last Tape and that’s where this all comes from.
“He’s in Purgatory and his Purgatory is a cheesy Italian restaurant and it’s a cheesy Italian restaurant because that’s where he went on his first date with this girl.
“You get these voices from this girl kind of haunting him in the space.
“Beckett showed me that you can do absolutely anything with theatre.
“You can have things like tracks being played from a tape that go on and on and on.
“But if it’s got really, really good writing- And I’m a million miles away from Beckett in that sense, but he’s an inspiration in that if it’s really, really good writing, you can hold an audience, you can do it.
“The modern version of that would be David Ireland who just takes you on a journey where you think you’re going in one place and then suddenly you have these insane things happening whether it’s a baby being put in a bin bag and smashed on the stage or someone’s Academy Award getting shoved into his eye.
“You don’t see this stuff coming.
“I saw Ulster American and I came out going, ‘I can write anything’.
“As long as you ground it and make an audience buy into it, then you can take it wherever you want.
“It’s a very Irish piece.
“There are two voices that come in.
“One is the love that he’s left behind and the other is his mother.
“The actors had to be Irish and it wasn’t that they had to be Irish purely from an accent point of view. They had to be Irish because they had to understand that nature of grief and the way we reflect and talk at funerals and after someone’s death.”
I was going to say it would be a very different play if the character was English, but I actually don’t think that would be a play?
“My producer’s English and he was like, ‘So how long has he been in Purgatory?’
“And I was like, ‘Two or three days’.
“And he goes, ‘They’re burying him already?’
“I said to someone recently, ‘Can we get together on this day in two weeks’ time?’
“He goes, ‘I have to go to a funeral that day’.
“I was like, ‘Are you planning on killing him? How the hell do you know you have a funeral that day?’
“I want the audience to come out and it’s a bit of a cliché but say, ‘I laughed and I cried. I feel like I’m coming out of a funeral of someone who had their time’.
“It’s not a depressing funeral, a funeral that you come out feeling that bit more aware of who you are and that you’re alive and who you’re with and who you love.
“That’s how I want the audience to feel when they walk out.”
Beyond Krapp plays until 26 August at Pleasance Courtyard, Cellar, 60 Pleasance, EH8 9TJ as part of Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
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