Here, forty-six years ago, Gary Oldman made his professional stage debut. Not far away, thirty years after that, I sat watching one of the first productions I reviewed for British Theatre Guide, Krapp’s Last Tape.
Earlier today, I was looking back over notes I’d scribbled in a playtext not long after that. Floods of memory at the person I once was, or expected to be. But also bafflement, some of my notes—seemingly crucial to record at the time—long since made obscure. Now, here, classical music drifts over the auditorium of the York Theatre Royal as I peer at the programme, bringing it closer to my deteriorating eyes to try to make out the small text in the dim house lights. Oldman is about to emerge. Time respools.
All of these echoes of experience are captured uncannily in the weave of Beckett’s masterpiece-in-miniature. Oldman is returning to the stage, and to the scene of his first professional engagement, with a poignantly apt piece ruminating on the melancholy losses and bitter self-recriminations of ageing. Confronted with his past self in recorded form, Krapp is disdainful, disappointed.
This is, to be sure, a more heartfelt and humanising take on the play than many more austere renditions. Oldman’s Krapp is surrounded by detritus, the attic-like space cramped by boxes, cupboards and other hoarded memorabilia. It’s a nice touch that his precious spools of tape-recorded memory are stored in a hotch-potch of assorted tins, rather than a carefully curated set of archival boxes.
Another echo: the reel-to-reel machine is apparently one used by both John Hurt and Michael Gambon in their own takes on this monumental piece—both now no longer with us. And the programme reproduces Oldman’s 1979 biography alongside his more garlanded, storied present-day one.
Forty-six years back, Oldman described his interests as including ‘Theatre Design’, and this production’s direction and design are both his work. It makes for a coherent whole, along with Oldman’s captivating but minimalist performance. Oldman’s charisma and career has brought legions to the Theatre Royal, but this is a Krapp almost entirely in stasis. Seated at his desk, he rarely moves, except to check the meaning of a long-forgotten word. For this, he effortfully stirs himself and digs among the gloom of the shelves upstage.
Oldman gives the piece space and time to usher its audience into the meditative state that best befits Beckett’s chiselled text. He plays the production’s slow tempos and stillness with conviction, the audience rapt as Krapp gathers himself wordlessly for the awful occasion of his birthday. Not for him the pacing to and fro, the near-pratfalls prescribed in Beckett’s opening stage directions. Krapp’s beloved bananas are produced, unexpectedly, from his waistcoat pockets, punctuating the long, concentrated silence of this opening with moments of humour.
Hosting a screen star of Oldman’s calibre is of course a great event in a regional theatre’s life. The run has been all but sold out for months, but there are returns available at a few scattered shows. The prices are steep, and the play, of course, short at less than sixty minutes. But you should not be disappointed if you’re keen to experience a truthful, wistful, resonant production of Beckett’s brilliant rumination.
Who was I, then, sixteen years ago, with my strings of adverbs, my clumsy commentary on Beckett’s clowning? Who was I, that youngster, to comment on this portrait of the passage of time, of the reinvention and rejection of past selves? Who am I to do so now? ‘Time respools’? ‘Beckett’s chiselled text’? What will my future self make of this all?