Gary Oldman is sublime as the old man brooding over recordings of his younger self in Samuel Beckett’s one-acter – not that it’d really matter if he wasn’t. The prodigal screen star’s sold-out return to the stage with this self-directed and self-designed show is a cultural event pregnant with resonance as much as a piece of living, breathing theatre.
He opened it last year at York Theatre Royal, where he made his professional debut in 1979. Now it’s part of the 70th anniversary season of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court, where he last trod the boards in 1987. This is also where Krapp’s Last Tape premiered in 1958, seven months after Oldman was born.
Back then, the play was an appetizer for Beckett’s meatier Endgame. Now it’s the main event, generously but weirdly paired with its own curtain raiser: Godot’s To-Do List, a comic spoof of Beckett’s most famous work by young writer Leo Simpe-Asante.
Set all that aside though, and Oldman’s Krapp (the scatology is deliberate) is a layered, nuanced investigation of Beckett’s low-key miniature. He mines pathos and comedy from a softening of the eyes or a tightening of the mouth as much as from the scanty text. He is 68, a year short of Krapp’s rheumy and reflective 69. He has a peerless back catalogue of roles, an Oscar (for the wrong part, but never mind), a knighthood and has conquered the streaming world with his loathsome Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses. There’s a sense of a man with little to prove taking control and taking stock.
He emerges, seedy and Lamb-like, through the floor of a cobwebbed attic stuffed with dusty tea chests and painted biscuit tins, lit by a frilly glass lampshade. This is where Krapp secretly communes with his past, in the shape of reel-to-reel recordings he made each birthday. The one from his 39th recalls the death of his mother and his urgent, doomed sexual energy, but not the literary ambitions which – the older Krapp reveals – came to nothing.
It used to be said of excellent actors that they could make the reading of a telephone directory dramatic. Well, watching Oldman eat a banana is mesmerising. The first thing Krapp does is devour two of them, deliberately and with relish. Emotions chase each other across his face: greed, melancholy, guilt. Krapp also has a bowel complaint. He lays a third banana on his desk, like a potential suicide’s weapon.
In these early moments, it seems as if his Godot – unkempt, straggle-haired, bushy-bearded – might have dementia. It makes sense. This is a play about memory, about the dominance the past can have over the present. (Actor Peter Marinker, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, will play Krapp at the Cockpit in September, using recordings he made when he last played the part in 1983.)
But while Oldman’s Krapp has sudden rages, studded with a pithy “bugger” and “bollocks”, he also has a beady self-knowledge. He is surprised by words like “viduity” but not really by the matter in the old recordings. Listening to them is clearly a ritual act of masochism, reminding himself of the hopes and aspirations he has lost.
This Krapp feels like a real man – and a pretty nasty, misanthropic one at that – rather than the existential clown he is sometimes portrayed as. There’s no hint he will slip on his discarded banana skin. The ending, when Oldman stares ahead as the light dwindles on the quietly turning tape spools before him, is magnificent.
By contrast, Godot’s To-Do list is all larky undergraduate sarkiness, written when Simpe-Asante was a musical theatre student. It imagines the never-appearing title character of Beckett’s 1956 breakthrough Waiting for Godot was detained by a higher force demanding he perform tasks ranging from the basic to the humiliating to the existentially challenging (a metaphor for our voluntary enslavement to phones, I think).
Shakeel Hakim performs it with perspiring brio, cajoled by the honeyed voice of Flora Ashton, in front of a dried-up pot-plant evoking Waiting for Godot’s lonely tree. One of his challenges is to come up with an interesting fact, so here’s one of my favourites: musician Gary Numan is 13 days older than Gary Oldman.
To 30 May, royalcourttheatre.com.
