This is as fine a production of Krapp’s Last Tape as you are ever likely to see, which is quite a feat when you know it was designed, directed and performed by one person: Gary Oldman.

With this new staging, Oldman has come full circle. He began his career at York Theatre Royal in July 1979, just two months after I started my first job as a director there, running the Young People’s Theatre Company. The venue was a bastion of middle-class York back then, and to see a London skinhead at the bar was a bit of a shock for some punters, used to a more ‘actorly’ crowd. But the moment he walked on stage you couldn’t take your eyes off him.

In those days, regional ‘reps’ could afford to employ a company of ten or so actors who would be used across the season. In York’s case, this ran from July to the following February, something that is unaffordable now. Oldman’s season included Romeo & Juliet, Privates on Parade, She Stoops to Conquer, Deathtrap, Cabaret, and the panto Dick Whittington, where he played the cat. In the expert hands of directors Michael Winter and the late Bob Carlton (of Forbidden Planet fame), he experienced the gamut of theatrical styles and periods, and quietly shone in all of them.

As one former colleague remarked to me recently, Oldman stood out because “he never stopped working”. Once rehearsal is over and the first couple of nights are done, most actors go on, do their best, and head home to prepare for the next production’s rehearsals the following day. That’s how rep works – rehearse the upcoming show during the day and perform the current one at night. Every evening, Oldman came off stage and make notes about how that performance had gone, and what might be done to make it better. It’s an approach he shares with almost every other famous actor I have worked with, and that’s quite a few for BBC Radio 4.

Despite having spent almost all of his career after York in front of a camera, Oldman’s stage presence has not left him. He has a quality of stillness that comes from being in complete command of his material and his performance. In the first ten minutes or so of this play all he does is come on, sit down, and eat a banana. I say ‘all’. He manages to be both riveting and hilarious, although I don’t think this audience were expecting ‘funny’ from the revered Samuel Beckett.

The set is an attic space crowded with boxes, papers and books, not unlike the office of his current TV incarnation Jackson Lamb in the astonishingly good Slow Horses. There is a desk with a light above it, and on it an old fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder. When the play was written in 1958, this kind of machine was a rarity other than in professional broadcasting. Beckett saw one in a BBC studio, and that gave him an idea. The tape recorder is the means by which we have access to Krapp’s thoughts and feelings, without him having to acknowledge the existence of the audience. We are watching him, but he is not watching us.

Every birthday, Krapp sits down to listen to a tape from years before and to record his reflections now. This is Krapp’s 69^th birthday, and the tape is one he recorded 30 years earlier. He listens to a story of a woman with whom he may or may not have had a relationship. He rewinds, listens to a section, comments to himself, rewinds, listens to other sections, rewinds, listens, stops, puts on a fresh spool, and records. Oldman inhabits Krapp perfectly. He is by turns fascinated, angered, and puzzled by his former self and the people he talks about. There is lost love, disappointment, and given that it’s Beckett, what was it all about? The programme says that ‘this then, is a play about failing to seize the moment and having to live with the consequences’. I would say, as a man some seven years older than our protagonist and in exactly that place of considering the past, present and future, that it’s about a great deal more than that. I came away thinking, and I am still thinking.

Krapp’s Last Tape is currently the hottest ticket in British theatre, but there may still be some seats available. I hope Oldman’s performance is being recorded for posterity, but get along if you can, there’s nothing like a live show. And the good news for aficionados of Slow Horses is that there is a new season later this year. If haven’t come across these wonderful adaptations of Mick Herron’s terrific spy stories then, to quote Rod Stewart, I really don’t know where you’ve been.

By Chris Wallis, Theatre Editor

Main image of Gary Oldman by Gisele Schmidt 

 

Krapp’s Last Tape is at York Theatre Royal until May 17, 2025. For more information, click here.