Robert

Wilson: 'There are schools teaching stage decoration. Burn those schools!'

Samuel Becketts austere play, Krapps Last Tape, is a consideration of memory, reflection and
identity. On his birthday each year, Krapp repeats a ritualised recording of an audio tape
discussing himself and his life, while also reviewing tapes of his previous years. Krapp is 69
when the play takes place, his world suffused with the sad, unspeakable knowledge that he
lives mired in the missed opportunities of his youth.

At Perth festival, Krapp is portrayed by artist Robert Wilson, a man who could never be accused
of a missed opportunity. At 71, he is renowned as one of the great experimental
theatremakers, valorised as a director, writer, performer, painter, choreographer, sculptor,
video artist, scenographer and sound and lighting designer. And as the Beckettian creature he
portrays sifts recordings for the substance of his own memories, from Wilson himself,
memories too tumble.

My mother was a great typist, he says as I open my keyboard. She said she loved to type
because it gave her time to think. She was a secretary for an insurance company. She was a
poor girl; shed grown up in an orphanage and she went to a business college and then
worked to put her brothers through school. And she did and in 1941 she became an executive.
Imagine that then a woman insurance executive in 1941.

She loved the machine, he continues, conjuring a typewriter into our conversation. This play
is a little bit like that too this guy in love with his tape recorder his partner, the machine. Its
so curious, I havent done this play for some time but the last time I did it was six or eight
months ago and although they told people to turn off their cell phones there was everyone
texting ... maybe not that different from whats happening on stage here with the tape
recorder. Becketts picked something very timely, with all these kids out there, typing away.

It is Wilsons capacity to explore these spaces between perception, memory, observation and
analysis that defines his practice. Born in Waco, Texas, he originally trained as an architect and
that understanding of light, space and structure is the conceptual foundation of all of his work.

I think that Ive always been a kind of structured person, he says. I had a meeting just before
coming to Australia with a poet and songwriter ... and we were talking about a new work so I
made a diagram. Were not even sure about the subject matter yet, but I talked about the time
and the space and the structure he was a bit taken back.

Its this way of approaching a work from its conception as an interrelated structure of planes,
space and light, that informed Einstein on the Beach his famous collaboration with composer
Philip Glass.

Groundbreaking when it premiered in 1976 and restaged at the Melbourne festival last year,
the opera is staggering in the scope and detail of its unique design and presentation. Wilson
could see the whole work as a time/space construction from first discussions he says using

the back of a boarding pass and illustrates to me the structural process through which he
conceived it.

Its the same as the way painters traditionally measure space, he explains. Look at my hand:
we view it up close and I can see it as a portrait, but if I see it over here I can see it in a still life.
If I go across the street I can see it in a landscape painters have always seen things in this way.
So it is with life; last night you would have thought simultaneously about what you did that
night, what you did the night before and what you did as a little girl. The mind operates that
way I formalise it.

This formalisation means making theatre in the way that a painter plans a painting.

In my theatre I start with horizontal movement and in the first moment of rehearsal, I light the
space, Wilson says.

This was precisely how Wilson created Krapps Last Tape. I started lighting the space to
discover it, he tells me. First he worked on the movement with no text and then the light with
no text.

Without light theres no space because light creates the space and the work must be its own
time/space construction, he explains.

So much of what we see in the theatre tends to be decoration, merely illustrating what were
already thinking. But the Lord gave us eyes so we could see as well as we hear! There are
schools teaching stage decoration as a subject and they actually call it that. I say: burn those
schools!

If Krapps tragedy is that of an old man whose choices have led him only to a lonely
conversation with himself, Wilsons joy is in sharing and discussing his work.

To play the silence and to have the humour is to play Beckett, he tells me, and places the
scribbled-on boarding pass on the black-clothed table in front of us to demonstrate.

I can put a black dress on the black table but if I put the white card on the black, it makes black
blacker, he says. It makes the dark darker. When youre playing King Lear you have to have a
little humour or you will have no tragedy when the king dies.

Wilson smiles: The light is essential for the darkness.

This article was amended on 24 February 2014 to correct the name of Krapps Last Tape in the
standfirst.