Got it taped: Gary Oldman in Krapp’s Last Tape on his return to the York Theatre Royal stage after 45 years. Picture: Gisele Schmidt
HE last entered the York Theatre Royal stage on all fours in a hot, furry cat suit, mittens and nylon whiskers in Dick Whittington And His Wonderful Cat, the pantomime apogee to his debut repertory season of nine shows after graduating from Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama.
Forty-five years later, Gary Oldman re-enters with a cough from a stairway into a loft thick with dust, papers, boxes and tapes, woozy head stuffed with memories, pockets full of bananas. Happy 69th birthday, Krapp, lothario, writer and recorder of fading memories and failing powers. Time to record that last tape, to consign life to the dustbin, like the discarded banana skins. A life that has turned to, well, krapp.
Oldman, now playing an old man, is full of memories too at 67 as he takes to the stage for the first time since 1989. “York, for me, is the completion of a cycle,” he said on announcing his Theatre Royal return in Samuel Beckett’s one-act monodrama of existential despair last October.
“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’.”
His appearance here comes with all the trappings and razzmatazz accorded to an Academy Award, BAFTA, SAG, BIFA and Golden Globe winner. Security on duty; the New York Times among the critics for the week of press shows; Sting and Trudie Styler making a last-minute entry to Tuesday’s audience; Slow Horses writer Mick Herron present too.
Oh, and that much publicised request, proclaimed on signs in gold, white and yellow – to match the Krapp’s Last Tape T-shirts for sale and worn by multiple staff – to “refrain from applauding upon Gary’s entrance. Please hold all applause until the end of the performance.”
An entirely reasonable request, observed impeccably by Wednesday’s full house, not drawn to Broadway ways, even in our age of celebrity adulation. Silence is golden here, just as it was as Ralph Fiennes began T S Eliot’s Four Quartets on this very stage in July 2021.
Let the actor choose the moment to break that silence, to cast the spell, to establish the rhythm, the mien. Or in Oldman’s case, to cough and splutter, to exhale exasperated air.
Rather than applause, ironically, it was audience coughs that threatened to disrupt the ambience. The silence, the feeling of waiting, the inaction, is a disconcerting feeling for an audience, coming to terms in the low light with screen icon Oldman being back on stage, staring blankly, downbeat rather than charismatic, as slouchy, unkempt and sour as Slow Horses’ Jackson Lamb.
All the while, we are unsure whether to laugh or be baffled by Krapp working his way through three bananas, or two and a half, to be precise, as the birthday tape from 30 years ago reminds him that is not so much an errant skin on the floor as an excess of the potassium-heavy fruit that puts his health at risk.
That moment feels like permission has been granted to laugh with confidence, amid that Beckett thing of playing, even toying, with his audience while making serious points, as he does in Waiting For Godot, as the tone turns ever more depressed.
Krapp’s Last Tape is a canny choice for a stage renaissance: a short solo play, played previously by such luminaries as Patrick Magee, Albert Finney, Harold Pinter, John Hurt, Michael Gambon, 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 the Studio in 2009.
It’s on an actor’s To Do list, like Hamlet and Lear, but more compact and certainly more divisive in audience reactions, and there is a sense of a baton being passed on in Oldman using the same reel-to-reel tape recorder that Gambon and Hurt did before him.
He directs himself, having been directed by Stephen Frears, Oliver Stone, Frances Ford Coppola, Luc Besson, Alfonso Curon, Chris Nolan, Tony Scott, Ridley Scott, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, Paulo Sorrentino and…dame Berwick Kaler in that 1979 panto. The result is a performance of precise weight and balance, the dimming of Krapp’s light matched by the gradual fading of Douglas Urbanski’s lighting.
We spend time aplenty watching Oldman’s Krapp stopping and starting the tape machine as he listens back to the Krapp of 30 years ago, and one of the joys here is hearing how Oldman contrasts the resonant, confident, even arrogant voice of yore (newly recorded for this production) with Krapp’s weaker strains of today, where his only joy is in how he says the word spool as the bananas make way for sips from a bottle and melancholy suffuses his valedictory audio diary.
Is a 55-minute exercise in brutal navel gazing, self-loathing and self-recrimination, more than half of it spent watching an exhausted husk of a man listening to the ghost of his former self, worth all the buzz and the fuss?
Judge it as a play, not as event theatre – just as Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter reuniting for Beckett’s Waiting For Godot on Broadway in September will want it to be more than Bill & Ted’s Existential Adventure – and Oldman ekes out all the corners of a study of failed ambitions and foiled hopes that is ultimately far more tragedy than comedy.
There will be those who wish for a Studio staging, for a closer encounter with Krapp, rather than the bigger canvas of the Theatre Royal’s main house, but its expanse enhances Krapp’s loneliness and Oldman maximises facial expression, the grimaces, the physical tics, the pained bemusement, and his design fills the stage with life’s clutter behind the desk thrust to the front.
Krapp’s Last Tape remains a Marmite play; Oldman can’t change that, but more than anything it will provoke debate that goes deeper than whether he peels a banana the right way. Box office for returns: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.