The York Theatre Royal has to be up there as one of the best theatre exteriors in the UK, it's like a theatre's been stuck behind Dracula's castle (first and last Gary Oldman reference) - just pipped for me by the very exterior exteriors of the Minack Theatre. As a Beckett nerd whose University city was York, I jumped at the chance to hop on the train and catch Gary Oldman perform Samuel Beckett’s haunting memory play, Krapp’s Last Tape.
At just fifty-five minutes and a nine-page script, Samuel Beckett’s marmite monologue is a difficult one to keep spinning. Krapp, celebrating his 69th birthday, shuffles around his den: drinking, eating bananas and listening to tapes of his own voice from birthdays gone by. Box three, spool five is the tape he wants. We hear him speaking at his thirty-ninth; there’s love, death, sex, literature, dogs, days out on the lake, but now all he has is his tapes, recounting memories he struggles to hold and understand. To be crass, in a statement that I'm sure would make many any English Literature student cry - think Black Mirror if it were written in 1958.
In our current world, with videos, photos and your Facebook friends from secondary school, memory is a changing concept - like Krapp - it is not something that will disappear entirely, fragments of everything will always exist to remind you of the life you lived. And that is terrifying.
There is an inescapable whiff of vanity project hanging around the production, being performed, directed and designed by Gary Oldman. Given the chance, I think he might have a pop at scanning the tickets on the way in as well. But as the play begins, it is clear that watching a Gary Oldman spectacular is by no means a bad thing. With an epic stage and screen career under his belt, he is regarded as one of Britain's finest, and he again proves here to be an endlessly versatile performer.
Oldman completely transforms into Krapp, the shuffling drunkard with a love for bananas. On the expansive stage, littered with books, boxes crammed with junk and dust, Oldman finds a home amongst the darkness and grime. He commands the York Theatre Royal with just his eyes or the slight move of a finger. His expert voice work on the tapes carries the piece; it is rich, soothing and captures the sadness in his thirty-ninth year, a tipping point for Krapp.
His performance is delicate, thoughtful, and my eyes and heart were fixed on him for the whole thing. Beckett’s one-act play feels like a ritual, where each year, the ageing Krapp sits with his tape machine, listens to distant memories, and records a tape for the year that has been. If the play is the ritual, then the tape machine is god - it is in fact, the same machine used by both John Hurt and Michael Gambon in their previous performances of Krapp.
Through Oldman and the etchings on the machine, they speak to us. Krapp's Last Tape is expected to be, like a ritual, performed the same way each time, like Hurt and Gambon before. With Samuel Beckett's plays, I struggle to decide whether the performance I watched was a captivating piece of theatre or an academic exercise, albeit one I found interesting.
Strangely, Oldman has chosen to deviate from Beckett’s notoriously rigid script, telling an actor down to the very second how long to leave the stage for and drink, alone in the dark. Rather, Oldman stays seated; he also emits most of the comedy from the piece, with an early Charlie Chaplin banana peel-based gag being cut. Don’t get me wrong, do what you want with Beckett, I hate that productions (in many famous cases, have a Google) are legally required to stick to the letter of Beckett's writing, but the choice to cut the small glimmers of light and air in an otherwise dense play feels misguided.
I worry how easy it is to get wrapped up in the grandeur of this production. A seminal actor in a seminal play, which, I would wager, a few hundred University dissertations have been written on. For all its nuance and intelligent ponderings on life and memory, sometimes it’s just a bit dull. Sorry.
Should it have footage of Subway Surfers playing on a loop underneath to keep Gen Z theatre students entertained? No. It just seemed to lack the spark, something to make you really feel alive. Did I love it like I wanted to? I was unmoved, but it was by no means a pile of Krapp.
Krapp’s Last Tape is playing at the York Theatre Royal until 17th May. Reviews are coming in from national theatre critics for this revival of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape at the Theatre Royal in York. Multi-award-winning British screen and stage star Gary Oldman has returned to York Theatre Royal, where his career first began, in a new production of this acclaimed one-act play.
Oldman has directed, designed and is starring in the show. The creative team also includes lighting design by Malcolm Rippeth, costume design by Guy Speranza, and sound design by Tom Smith. Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe winning actor Gary Oldman has a career spanning over 30 years, appearing in both blockbusters and award-winning films, including Darkest Hour, Harry Potter, the Batman films, Mank, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Fifth Element and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
In Krapp’s Last Tape, each year on his birthday, Krapp records a new tape reflecting on the year gone by. Then 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.
York Theatre Royal is where Gary Oldman first began his career in 1979. A central prop in the play is the tape recorder on which Krapp listens to his younger self, and in a nice nod to the past, the recorder is the same one used by Michael Gambon and John Hurt in previous productions of the play.
Gary Oldman’s arresting one-man Beckett is a startling piece of theatre, as he gives an emotional encounter with his past selves while single-handedly directing, set-designing and performing this existential monologue. His decision to stage this work at York Theatre Royal is infused with sentimentality.
As spectacle, there’s not much on offer — although directing and designing the show ensures he’s surrounded by an impressively packed attic junkyard. Oldman brings deft humour and mesmerising stillness to Krapp’s Last Tape, and while it might not be a revelatory staging, it is loyal and attentive to the particulars of Beckett’s text.
Gary Oldman is a devastatingly stoic Krapp in his own production of the Beckett classic, and as he stares out at us, completely still, the light falls around him until only a spotlight remains on the still-turning tape – leaving us with a powerful sense of the ageing Krapp’s wish that he could now rewind, get the time back, do things differently. But time, of course, turns only one way.
