Who is Krapp? Not much doubt here. With his seamed, pouchy features and his shock of close-cut, iron-grey hair, John Hurt bears a striking resemblance to Beckett himself in Robin Lefevre's revival of this solo landmark. And this is no mere wanton resemblance: most of the experiences recalled by the aged Krapp in his taped remembrance of things past have some echo, as biographers have revealed, in Beckett's own life.

But Hurt, too rarely seen on stage these days, brings more than a Beckettian likeness to the part. What he conveys, through a mixture of speech, silence and body language, is the sheer weight of the past: literally so, as he goes offstage to fetch a mound of tapes containing an audio diary of his life. Following Beckett's text, Hurt also implies the inescapability of memory. At times, his 69-year-old self derisively cackles at the follies of 30 years ago. But, as the aged Krapp recalls lying in a punt with his face in a girl's breasts, Hurt puts his ear close to the spool and clutches the tape recorder as if re-living his erotic past.

Beckett once called the play "nicely sad and sentimental". But I don't think it is either. For a start it clearly dwells on the physical problems of old age, something Hurt neatly conveys as he near-sightedly pores over his tapes and a dusty dictionary. Beckett also suggests we are both dogged and mocked by our past, which is the key to Hurt's exceptional performance. His Krapp is both an anally retentive elder who has codified his memories but also someone who, as he brutally says, now sits shivering in the park "drowned in dreams and burning to be gone". It is that tension between the need to relive and to escape the past that makes Hurt's performance a highlight of this Beckett festival.

• In rep till September 18. Box office: 0171-638 8891.