Gary Oldman’s theatrical journey from panto Cat to Krapp’s Last Tape at York Theatre Royal on return after 45 years

Gary Oldman in rehearsal for Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Picture: Gisele Schmidt

GARY Oldman’s return to the York Theatre Royal stage after 45 years in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape from today had sold out, but a combination of returns and additional seats are newly available. Hurry, hurry.

Once the pantomime Cat that fainted thrice in Dick Whittington in his 1979 cub days on the professional circuit in York, Oscar winner Oldman now directs himself – and provides the set design too – in Beckett’s melancholic, tragicomic slice of theatre of the absurd in his first stage appearance since 1987.

“York, for me, is the completion of a cycle,” says Oldman.“It is the place ‘where it all began’. York, in a very real sense, for me, is coming home. The combination of York and Krapp’s Last Tape is all the more poignant because it is ‘a play about a man returning to his past of 30 years earlier’.” 

What happens over the course of 50 minutes in Krapp’s Last Tape? Each year, on his birthday, Krapp records a new tape reflecting on the year gone by. On his 69th birthday, Krapp, now a lonely man, is ready with a bottle of wine, a banana and his tape recorder. Listening back to a recording he made as a young man, Krapp must face the hopes of his past self.

Oldman, who turned 67 on March 21, now takes on a role premiered by Patrick Magee in 1958 and since played by the likes of Albert Finney, Harold Pinter, John Hurt, Stephen Rea and Kenneth Allan Taylor, the long-running Nottingham Playhouse pantomime dame, writer and director, in the play’s last performance at York Theatre Royal in 2009.

Gary Oldman with York Theatre Royal chief executive Paul Crewes surveying the main house auditorium

Oldman has been considering going back to the stage for a long time. “I have never been far from the theatre and, in fact, have been discussing plays and my return to the theatre for nearly 30 years,” he posted on Instagram.

The April 14 to May 17 production of Beckett’s one-act monodrama was set in motion in March 2024, when Slow Horses star Oldman paid a visit to the St Leonard’s Place theatre , where he met chief executive Paul Crewes.

 “When Gary visited us, it was fascinating hearing him recount stories of his time as a young man, in his first professional role on the York Theatre Royal stage,” says Crewes. “In that context when we started to explore ideas, we realised Krapp’s Last Tape was the perfect project.”

The youngest of three children in a working-class London family, Oldman left school at 16 and began acting in productions with Greenwich and Lewisham Young People’s Theatre.

He applied for RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) but his rejection came with the advice to do something else for a living. Advice that he ignored, instead winning a scholarship to Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, from where he graduated with a BA in acting in 1979.

Pantomime puss: Gary Oldman’s Cat, with Berwick Kaler’s dame, centre, in Dick Whittington And His Wonderful Cat at York Theatre Royal in 1979-80

Whereupon he headed north  to start out in the repertory ranks at York Theatre Royal in 1979 in a repertory season of nine shows, taking in She Stoops To Conquer, Thark, Privates On Parade and Romeo And Juliet, topped off by  playing the Cat in furry suit, mittens and nylon whiskers in Berwick Kaler’s third York pantomime, Dick Whittington And His Wonderful Cat, that Christmas.

Dame Berwick later told the Guardian in an interview in 2018: “Gary has gone on to become one of our greatest screen actors but I’m afraid he was a bit of a lightweight when it came to pantomime.

“He kept fainting inside the costume. On at least three occasions I had to turn to the audience and say, ‘Oh dear, boys and girls, I think the poor pussy cat has gone to sleep’!”

Another actor in the rep company, Michael Simkins, has recalled the “bruising schedule of 50 performances in seven weeks, not to mention the drunken and relentless partying in various digs and rented bed-sits after curtain down”.

Oldman moved on to the Colchester rep and Glasgow Citizens Theatre, where he performed with Rupert Everett. He has called his time there “a coming of age – the work was joyful, bold and exhilarating. In the years that followed no other theatre experience could match it,” he said.

While appearing in Edward Bond’s controversial play Saved at the Palace Theatre, in Westcliff, he was “spotted” by Royal Court Theatre director Max Stafford-Clark.  Or, rather, he had Oldman drawn to his attention – by Oldman himself.

Gary Oldman in the York Theatre Royal dressing rooms. Picture: Gisele Schmidt

Like many young actors, he had written to the director setting out why he wanted to work at the cutting-edge London theatre. Stafford-Clark recalls that “it was a particularly well-argued letter”, so he went to see Saved.

Many of the audience – only about 30-strong – walked out but the director duly cast him in Bond’s The Pope’s Wedding, at the Royal Court. Saved, meanwhile, won him the British Theatre Association Drama Magazine award for 1985 and the Time Out Fringe award as best actor.

Roles ensued with the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the Royal Court in new works by Bond and Caryl Churchill. Harold Pinter was lined up to direct him in his play The Caretaker in the West End.

Oldman’s last stage performance was in 1987 in Churchill’s satirical play Serious Money at the Royal Court. By then, he had appeared in his break-out screen role as damaged punk Sid Vicious in Sid And Nancy, his 1986 alarm call to herald a career in films that have grossed 11 billion dollars. “I never thought I’d get into films in a thousand years,” he once said.

Today, he opens in a theatre show for the first time in 38 years, back in York for his “completion of a cycle”, banana in hand in Krapp’s Last Tape.

Gary Oldman in Krapp’s Last Tape, York Theatre Royal, April 14 to May 17. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

The poster for Gary Oldman’s return to York Theatre Royal after 45 years in Krapp’s Last Tape, performed, directed and designed by the erstwhile pantomime puss