In ‘Krapp's Last Tape,' Gary Oldman Hits Rewind

New York Times

28-04-2025

For Gary Oldman, it is a homecoming of sorts. The English actor got his first professional gig at the Theater Royal in York, a small city 210 miles north of London, playing the titular feline in a 1979 pantomime production of 'Dick Whittington and His Wonderful Cat.' He went on, of course, to establish himself as a screen star, achieving global fame through acclaimed performances in movies such as 'J.F.K.,' 'Bram Stoker's Dracula,' and 'Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy.'
Now, almost half a century after his York debut, Oldman — who lives in Palm Springs — has returned to the Theater Royal to direct himself in a revival of Samuel Beckett's 1958 one-man play, 'Krapp's Last Tape.' The run, through May 17, is almost sold out, and the playhouse has gone to town on merch, with signed posters and T-shirts on sale in the lobby.
The story of this production is like an inversion of the play's: Oldman, 67, fondly revisiting a haunt of his youth in the twilight of an illustrious career, plays Krapp, an unsuccessful writer who, on his 69th birthday, looks back at his past self and sees only abject failure.
Krapp emerges onstage, coughing and doddering, into a dusty study and sits down at a desk to rehearse an annual ritual: recording a monologue on a chunky, reel-to-reel tape recorder. First, though, he retrieves an old spool of tape, recorded 30 years earlier, shortly after a romantic breakup, and plays it back, pausing now and then to reflect and ruminate.
The tape suggests a life waylaid by misdirected amorous energies and a penchant for drink. When Krapp finally passes comment, it is to condemn, matter-of-factly, 'the stupid bastard I took myself for 30 years ago.'
The recorded voice has more lines than the flesh-and-blood Krapp; for the actor playing him onstage, the challenge is to achieve the right quality of stillness and silence, and to render the subtle shifts as he listens to the recording.
Oldman, illuminated only by a single lamp above his head, draws us into Krapp's world by slowing down time. He eats a banana with excruciating deliberation, then immediately produces another one. Later, when he hears his younger self use a word whose meaning he has since forgotten, he shuffles slowly to a bookcase and pulls out a dictionary to look it up. During some drawn-out silences, the sporadic coughs of theatergoers in York seemed to converse with Oldman's onstage hacking.
Oldman's face, set in brooding concentration, evokes a pained, vaguely incredulous mortification, which builds to a bitter, almost paralyzing ruefulness. His laconic, weary speech contrasts with the more expansive, and at times mannered, language of the voice on the tapes.
Here is an irony: The younger Krapp was ridiculous but had a kind of self-belief; the older version sees things clearly, but is all out of juice.
He dismisses his latest literary efforts in a single sardonic line, uttered impassively — '17 copies sold' — but the failed romance and subsequent decades of loneliness weigh more heavily. Realizing too late that he had blown his last shot at happiness, Krapp is sickened by his former hubris. The full force of it hits him as he hears his 39-year-old self declare that he wouldn't want his younger years back — 'not with the fire in me now.' Oldman's features gradually freeze into a rictus of despair, and the lights go out.
'Krapp's Last Tape' is, by conventional standards, a forbidding piece: one act, 50 minutes, relatively static and, despite moments of levity, emphatically bleak. Oldman's delicately understated rendering of Krapp heightens the curious dissonance between the play and the buzz around it.
This 'Krapp's Last Tape' doesn't quite transcend the sense of occasion — but so what? A 'star vehicle' play can be useful if it brings high-end drama to a wider public.
Sure, the production is powered by sentiment, and has some of the telltale features of a vanity project. (As well as starring and directing, Oldman also designed the set.) But the upshot is that 750 people packed into a regional playhouse, where they saw an ambitiously subtle performance of a challenging work. They were finished in time for dinner — a little demoralized, perhaps, but enriched all the same.