'Wicked sense of humour': John Minihan on photographing Gary Oldman in Krapp's Last Tape
'There is no Memory in Beckett. Even Krapp's Last Tape has no memory in the usual sense of associated recall, but rather, a mechanical process set in motion by a jar or vibration: the closing of or opening of a door.' - William S Burroughs, The Adding Machine
Samuel Beckett knew the essence of theatre is that an actor is present in the flesh on the stage in a way in which he is not on the screen. Academy award winner Gary Oldman returned to the UK stage after a 37-year hiatus in April of this year to perform Samuel Beckett's one-act play, Krapp's Last Tape, at the York Theatre Royal.
For over 50 years I have been photographing Beckett plays: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days and Krapp's Last Tape. All played with an array of actors from Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Billie Whitelaw, John Hurt, Michael Gambon, Max Wall, Pierre Chabert, Barry McGovern, Stephen Rea and Robert Wilson.
They all bring their own exuberance to the roles they play. Trying to define Krapps Last Tape is like well trying to define the overall dramatic works of Samuel Beckett - it's complex yet simple, ever evolving and wildly addictive.
Gary Oldman in Krapp's Last Tape. Picture: John Minihan
When I heard last November that Oldman was doing Krapp's Last Tape, I knew that I wanted to see and photograph him. He's an actor with a wicked sense of humour. I knew he would bring something special to the part in a work that's Beckett's most approachable stage play and my favourite to photograph.
Krapp is a sentimental 69-year-old listening to his 30-something voice on a spool from his archive, looking back regretfully upon a life lived in which he sacrificed love to artistic ambition. We see Krapp onstage in an old white collarless shirt, and black waistcoat in which he keeps his pocket-watch and a banana.
I told Gary about the time I photographed Max Wall who played Krapp at the Riverside Studios in London in 1987, bringing his own brand of music-hall humour and relishing the word 'spool'. 'Spoool,' he crooned.
I was in the dressing room with Max where he started eating the banana; staff were dispatched to get another banana before the show could start. Music-hall humour is strewn through the world of Samuel Beckett, and the plays often benefit in performance from a less reverent attitude than is usually the case.
It's becoming harder to photograph plays in the West End of London. I was invited to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London in 2024 to see Waiting for Godot. The producers could not have been more helpful, but they had their own photographer doing the stills for newspaper publicity and reviews.
Back in the day there was always a photo call for the main theatre photographers in London. I knew Douglas H Jeffrey, the doyen of theatre photographers who I first met when I was an apprentice in the Daily Mail darkroom in 1962.
Douglas supplied Fleet Street's newspapers with beautiful black and white photographs of shows in the London's West End. He loved theatre, always wore a beret and an artist smock with pockets to hold film and lense.
He was never interested in being interviewed about his work. I remember he photographed the playwright Joe Orton in 1967 only months before he was murdered in Islington by his partner Kenneth Halliwell. Gary Oldman played Orton in the film, Prick Up Your Ears, in 1987.
My friend Adrian Dunbar, who has directed Beckett in Ireland, London and Paris, was in York for nearly a week supporting Gary in rehearsals of Krapp's Last Tape. I met Gary with Adrian, and the pair were happy, laughing and joking. They go back as actors to the early 1970s to the Royal Court in London and the RSC. Listening to them, it could have been a scene from Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot.
John Minihan's image of John Hurt in Krapps Last Tape in 1998.
I was also relishing the opportunity to go back to the beautiful city of York which hosted its first Beckett Festival in June 2011. I had an exhibition of my Beckett photographs at York University together with a range of world-class writers like the Nobel laureate JM Coetzee, who I photographed outside the door of York Minister.
The event also featured a performance by the renowned Gare St Lazare players with Cork actor Conor Lovett performing his arresting adaptions of Samuel Beckett's short stories, First Love and The End.
I loved being back in York with Adrian and meeting Gary and his photographer wife Giselle and their children. The show is dedicated to John Hurt and Michael Gambon. The production team even used the same recorder that those great actors used for their shows at Dublin's Gate Theatre.
Samuel Beckett would, I believe, have given the nod to Gary Oldman who seemed to have found his perfect home.
Dublin-born photographer John Minihan has been based in West Cork for many years. As well as capturing famous images of the likes of Princess Diana, Edna O'Brien, and Francis Bacon, he also took several photographs of Samuel Beckett
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Irish Examiner
4 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Cork couple do their bit for Samuel Beckett
No one familiar with Gare St Lazare Ireland's body of work will have been surprised by the success of what the Hollywood Reporter hailed as their 'authentically powerful' production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Geffen Theatre in Los Angeles late last year. Gare St Lazare is run by Cork couple Judy Hegarty Lovett, who directed the production, and her partner Conor Lovett, who played Pozzo. They launched the company in 1996, when Hegarty Lovett first directed Lovett in their acclaimed adaptation of Beckett's novel Molloy at the Battersea Arts Centre in London, and they have since presented the Nobel Laureate's work to rapt audiences all over the world. In Los Angeles, more than 26,000 people saw their Godot, which also starred Rainn Wilson of NBC's The Office as Vladimir and Aasif Mandvi of The Daily Show as Estragon, over its seven-week run. For much of their career, Hegarty Lovett and Lovett have been based in Méricourt — a village on the River Seine an hour northwest of Paris. Méricourt is where they reared their family of three, Louis, Ruby and Lux, and they don't foresee ever leaving. If anything, they're digging in. In 2023, in a gesture that acknowledges their devotion to both Beckett and Méricourt, Hegarty Lovett and Lovett established Atelier Samuel Beckett, an artist's residency in a house next door to their own. 'We're at that stage where we felt we should be giving something back and the residency seemed the best way of doing it. Méricourt is a small community of 380 people, and we're part of its fabric. We're very pleased that our neighbours have been so open to the idea, and are very happy with it. They all came to walk through the house and offer help and furniture. They've been very generous. You don't want to parachute in with an idea like this. You want to integrate it into the community, 'says Hegarty Lovett. Hegarty Lovett and Lovett first got to know Méricourt through the late Bob Meyer, a theatre producer from Chicago they'd worked with in Paris. 'Bob had a place in Méricourt where we'd come and stay,' says Lovett. 'He mentioned that an American couple had a summer house nearby, and they might let us move in when they were not around. So we approached them, and they let us have it. 'After a year we tried to formalise the arrangement; we already had one child, our son Louis, and another on the way. But they didn't want rent, they were just happy to have us in the house. When they came over for the summer, we might be out on tour, or we'd go back to Cork. It worked out fine. It gave us a great start, having the place for so long. We had the same arrangement for six or seven years until we managed to buy another house in the village, where we still live today.' Samuel Beckett Hegarty Lovett's ground-breaking work as a director and Lovett's achievements as an actor have ensured that Gare St Lazare is one of the most dynamic Irish theatre companies at work today. Growing up, however, neither was initially drawn to the stage. Hegarty Lovett attended the Crawford College of Art and Design, while Lovett did a bilingual secretarial course. 'My French teacher on that course was Roisin Crowley, who decided that we should do an end-of-year show, The Lesson by Ionesco,' says Lovett, who lived in the Ballinlough building that also housed his parents' restaurant. 'I'd never been on stage before, but I suddenly thought, 'oh my God, this is where I'm supposed to be'. I went on to study Stagecraft at Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa on Tramore Road, and after that, I started acting with the Dram Soc at UCC.' Hegarty Lovett, from Monkstown, became interested in performance art in her final year at the Crawford, which led onto working in the theatre, and completing a post-graduate degree in Dramatherapy at University of Hertfordshire in Britain. When she and Lovett started working together, 'we went into it without fully identifying what it was or what our titles were,' she says. 'It's only in the past few years that I've started thinking of myself as a director.' Their interest in adapting Molloy for the stage led to a meeting with Beckett's publisher, John Calder. 'Because Molloy is a prose work, John was the point of contact for permissions. He was very supportive. He brought Edward Beckett, Samuel's nephew, to see us in London, and thankfully, he liked what we were doing as well. Edward manages the Beckett estate, and from then on we dealt directly with him. We've always maintained a really good relationship.' After Molloy, they went on to adapt Malone Dies and The Unnamable, the other novels in the trilogy Beckett produced after the war, around the same time he composed Waiting for Godot. Later, they also adapted two of his novellas, First Love and The End. Eventually, they branched out into producing larger Beckett productions, beginning with Godot, with Lovett playing the role of Vladimir, which they presented at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2013 and toured to Shanghai, Boston and New York. Actor Stephen Dillane and director Conor Lovett at The Everyman, Cork in 2018. Picture: Darragh Kane They've worked with other writers as well. Hegarty Lovett has directed Lovett in Conor McPherson's The Good Thief, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, and Will Eno's Title and Deed, which they premiered at Kilkenny Arts Festival in 2011. Hegarty Lovett's work on another Eno play, The Realistic Joneses, won her the Best Director award at the 2022 Irish Times Theatre Awards. Lovett has also worked with other theatre companies, in roles such as Lucky in Walter Asmus' 50th anniversary Godot production at the Gate in Dublin; The Old Man In His Coffin in Michael Keegan Dolan's The Bull for Fabulous Beast; and David in Lucy Caldwell's Leaves, directed by Garry Hynes for a Druid/Royal Court co-production in Galway and London. He has also acted in films such as Moll Flanders, Intermission, De Gaulle and Ritornello, and on television in Father Ted, Charlie, Versailles and Belgravia. The couple's primary interest, however, has always been in finding new ways to bring Beckett to the stage. In 2015, they began work on an adaptation of his 1961 novel How It Is, which became the basis of the PhD, on the staging of Beckett's prose, that Hegarty Lovett completed six years later through the University of Reading. Even by Beckett's standards, How It Is is bleak, featuring a narrator lying in a pool of mud in the dark who repeats the story of his life as he hears it recounted by a voice inside him. ' How It Is is often seen as being one of Beckett's more inaccessible or impenetrable works, but we think it's a masterpiece,' says Hegarty Lovett. 'We presented our adaptation in three parts over three years from 2018, on a residency at the Everyman Theatre in Cork, working with people like the tenor Mark Padmore and the Irish Gamelan Orchestra. Edward Beckett came to each of the premieres, and he couldn't believe what we'd done with it. We eventually filmed the whole thing as well, during the COVID pandemic. The film is six hours 17 minutes long.' Gare St Lazare has had many supporters, in Ireland and elsewhere, but it was an American couple who helped bring the Atelier Samuel Beckett project to fruition. 'Paul Ralston and Deb Gwinn from Vermont have been patrons for years,' says Hegarty Lovett. 'When they were selling up their coffee business to retire, they approached us and said 'look, we'd like to do something substantial for the company, and make sure you're secure going forward'. When they asked what we'd like to do, we said 'let's create an artist residency in Méricourt'. They thought it was a brilliant idea. They said '100% let's go for it'.' The Beckett Atelier Lovett adds: 'And at the same time the woman who used to own the house next to ours approached us and said 'I'm thinking of selling, and I thought you guys might be interested'. Which was the weirdest thing, as we hadn't put anything out about it. So we bought and renovated the house. We asked Edward Beckett if we could name it the Atelier Samuel Beckett, and he was delighted. That's a huge branding. But it's also a huge endorsement for us as artists, that the Beckett Estate would give us that permission. Edward is a patron of the project, along with the actor Ciarán Hinds, who's based in Paris.' 'Currently it's the only Beckett destination building in the world,' says Hegarty Lovett. 'Beckett's apartment in Paris is still in the family, and he left his retreat in the village of Ussy-sur-Marne to the local farmers who used to look after it for him. But there's no Beckett museum, and no other Beckett residency.' The Atelier in Méricourt has two en suite bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, and a study, which houses the Beckett Library, with books donated by Edward Beckett, John Calder's widow Sheila Colvin Calder and the Lovetts themselves. The house overlooks the River Seine, and there are a number of caves on the property they hope to develop as studio spaces. 'Méricourt is a beautiful place to stay in,' says Lovett. 'Paris is 40 minutes by train, Claude Monet's house in Giverny is a 10-minute drive away, and La Roche-Guyon, another nearby village, has a massive chateau that's well worth a visit. We make our second car available to our residents. As long as you're licensed, we have a fully comprehensive insurance that will cover you.' Edward Beckett and Hinds have both stayed at the Atelier, as have writers Kevin Barry and John Dunlea; composers Benedict Schelpper-Connolly, David Stalling and Anthony Kelly; and actors Faline England, Sorcha Fox and Ally Ní Chiaráin, among many others. 'Galway Culture Company has sponsored two residencies, and we're hoping to come to a similar arrangement with Cork County Council and the National Sculpture Factory,' says Hegarty Lovett. The couple have also just announced a three-year collaboration with the National Latinx Theatre in Los Angeles, awarding three-week residencies to the Chicano playwright Luis Alfaro in 2026, the Uruguayan Gracia Rogelia in 2027, and the Venezolana Rebeca Aleman in 2028. Along with the space for artists to stay and work in, residencies at the Atelier come with the option of mentorship. 'When we started the Atelier, it was obvious to us that it should provide access to the artistic directors of Gare St Lazare,' says Lovett. 'We feel we have something to offer, all this Beckett knowledge we've built up over the years that we're happy to impart to others.' 'We also have access to the greater Beckett community,' says Hegarty Lovett. 'We know we can call on these people to give mentorship, workshops or whatever. And all of that can be tailored to whoever's coming through and whatever their specific needs are. We're not suggesting that everyone who stays here must work on a Beckett project, of course. The only prerequisite, really, is that they be curious about Beckett and want to learn more.' Hegarty Lovett and Lovett currently run the Atelier themselves, but longterm they'd like to get somebody else in to run it. They have two new Gare St Lazare productions in development. 'One is another collaboration with Will Ono, which we're developing with the Gate Theatre in Dublin,' says Hegarty Lovett. 'The other is a new version of a Marcel Mihalovici chamber opera based on Beckett's one-man play, Krapp's Last Tape. We hope to launch that in Ireland next year, and then tour it internationally.' Their family is equally busy. 'All three live in Paris,' says Lovett. 'Louis is a filmmaker, Ruby works at Art for Human Rights, and Lux is studying interior design, though she also acts. She worked with us on Shades Through a Shade at the Samuel Beckett Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival last year.' Looking back, they're sometimes surprised at just how rich their journey has been. Hegarty Lovett says: 'In those early years in Méricourt, we created the body of work we're still bringing out around the world today, It has sustained us hugely.' SAMUEL BECKETT 1906-1989 Samuel Beckett was born and reared in Dublin, but settled in Paris in 1937. For all that he found Ireland too conservative a place to live in, he still took a certain pride in his background. Once, when asked if he was English, he replied: 'Au contraire.' Beckett published a short story collection, More Pricks Than Kicks, in 1934, and went on to produce a series of novels that included Murphy (1938), Watt (1934), Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1958). However, he is better-known for his plays, including Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Happy Days (1961). Beckett is associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. His works for the stage are renowned for their bleak sense of humour. In Waiting for Godot, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, pass the time in idle banter. When Estragon embarks on an eloquent description of the Dead Sea, Vladimir remarks: 'You should have been a poet.' Estragon gestures at his rags and replies 'I was. Isn't that obvious?' Beckett did not enjoy the limelight. When he won the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, his wife Suzanne Dechevaux- Dumesnil called it 'a catastrophe,' knowing the prize money might bring them financial stability, but it would be at the cost of their privacy. Suzanne died in July 1989 and Beckett in December. They are buried in Montparnasse, under a headstone that Beckett insisted could be 'any colour, as long as it's grey.' Read More Michael Quane and Johanna Connor: Cork husband and wife artists unite for joint exhibition
Irish Examiner
26-05-2025
- Irish Examiner
'Wicked sense of humour': John Minihan on photographing Gary Oldman in Krapp's Last Tape
'There is no Memory in Beckett. Even Krapp's Last Tape has no memory in the usual sense of associated recall, but rather, a mechanical process set in motion by a jar or vibration: the closing of or opening of a door.' - William S Burroughs, The Adding Machine Samuel Beckett knew the essence of theatre is that an actor is present in the flesh on the stage in a way in which he is not on the screen. Academy award winner Gary Oldman returned to the UK stage after a 37-year hiatus in April of this year to perform Samuel Beckett's one-act play, Krapp's Last Tape, at the York Theatre Royal. For over 50 years I have been photographing Beckett plays: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days and Krapp's Last Tape. All played with an array of actors from Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Billie Whitelaw, John Hurt, Michael Gambon, Max Wall, Pierre Chabert, Barry McGovern, Stephen Rea and Robert Wilson. They all bring their own exuberance to the roles they play. Trying to define Krapps Last Tape is like well trying to define the overall dramatic works of Samuel Beckett - it's complex yet simple, ever evolving and wildly addictive. Gary Oldman in Krapp's Last Tape. Picture: John Minihan When I heard last November that Oldman was doing Krapp's Last Tape, I knew that I wanted to see and photograph him. He's an actor with a wicked sense of humour. I knew he would bring something special to the part in a work that's Beckett's most approachable stage play and my favourite to photograph. Krapp is a sentimental 69-year-old listening to his 30-something voice on a spool from his archive, looking back regretfully upon a life lived in which he sacrificed love to artistic ambition. We see Krapp onstage in an old white collarless shirt, and black waistcoat in which he keeps his pocket-watch and a banana. I told Gary about the time I photographed Max Wall who played Krapp at the Riverside Studios in London in 1987, bringing his own brand of music-hall humour and relishing the word 'spool'. 'Spoool,' he crooned. I was in the dressing room with Max where he started eating the banana; staff were dispatched to get another banana before the show could start. Music-hall humour is strewn through the world of Samuel Beckett, and the plays often benefit in performance from a less reverent attitude than is usually the case. It's becoming harder to photograph plays in the West End of London. I was invited to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London in 2024 to see Waiting for Godot. The producers could not have been more helpful, but they had their own photographer doing the stills for newspaper publicity and reviews. Back in the day there was always a photo call for the main theatre photographers in London. I knew Douglas H Jeffrey, the doyen of theatre photographers who I first met when I was an apprentice in the Daily Mail darkroom in 1962. Douglas supplied Fleet Street's newspapers with beautiful black and white photographs of shows in the London's West End. He loved theatre, always wore a beret and an artist smock with pockets to hold film and lense. He was never interested in being interviewed about his work. I remember he photographed the playwright Joe Orton in 1967 only months before he was murdered in Islington by his partner Kenneth Halliwell. Gary Oldman played Orton in the film, Prick Up Your Ears, in 1987. My friend Adrian Dunbar, who has directed Beckett in Ireland, London and Paris, was in York for nearly a week supporting Gary in rehearsals of Krapp's Last Tape. I met Gary with Adrian, and the pair were happy, laughing and joking. They go back as actors to the early 1970s to the Royal Court in London and the RSC. Listening to them, it could have been a scene from Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot. John Minihan's image of John Hurt in Krapps Last Tape in 1998. I was also relishing the opportunity to go back to the beautiful city of York which hosted its first Beckett Festival in June 2011. I had an exhibition of my Beckett photographs at York University together with a range of world-class writers like the Nobel laureate JM Coetzee, who I photographed outside the door of York Minister. The event also featured a performance by the renowned Gare St Lazare players with Cork actor Conor Lovett performing his arresting adaptions of Samuel Beckett's short stories, First Love and The End. I loved being back in York with Adrian and meeting Gary and his photographer wife Giselle and their children. The show is dedicated to John Hurt and Michael Gambon. The production team even used the same recorder that those great actors used for their shows at Dublin's Gate Theatre. Samuel Beckett would, I believe, have given the nod to Gary Oldman who seemed to have found his perfect home. Dublin-born photographer John Minihan has been based in West Cork for many years. As well as capturing famous images of the likes of Princess Diana, Edna O'Brien, and Francis Bacon, he also took several photographs of Samuel Beckett Read More Barry Keoghan and Nicola Coughlan provide star power for Fastnet Film Festival in West Cork
The Irish Sun
23-05-2025
- The Irish Sun
‘We are grateful to each other' – U2 make history as first-ever Irish artists to scoop top songwriting honour
U2 have made history as the first Irish artists to receive the highest honour from The Ivors Academy. The legendary Advertisement 2 The Ivors Academy has announced U2 as the latest songwriters to become Academy Fellows 2 The Dublin band have become the first-ever Irish songwriters that the Academy has inducted into Fellowship Credit: Shutterstock Editorial The honour recognises the band's global influence, decades long career and their impact on the craft of songwriting. Formed in Dublin in 1978, U2 is one of the greatest songwriting partnerships and most influential bands of all time. The band's songwriting is marked by an emotional authenticity that has crafted some of the most powerful songs in the history of Advertisement READ MORE ON U2 Having written many of the most enduring and iconic songs and lyrics in modern rock history, U2's songwriting legacy continues to expand and resonate with audiences worldwide. After receiving the award, Bono said: "We were a band before we could play, let alone write songs… In fact it was our inability to play other people's songs that kicked off our own songwriting. "Early musical heroes like The Ramones, Patti Smith, The Clash were our inspiration. There's alchemy at play, turning base metals into gold… your s***e into gold would be another way of putting it." The Edge added: "Songs are kind of magic. The best ones feel like gifts from some other dimension, but to catch them you have to make yourself available. Advertisement Most read in Celebrity Exclusive "I'm not sure songs can change the world but they sure have changed mine." Legendary guitarist Adam Clayton called it a "very special" honour and thanked fans and the team who have supported them through their journey. Fans all go wild as Lady Gaga collabs with Bono at surprise gig The band's drummer Larry Mullen Jnr added: "Making music collectively, as we've done for close to 50 years, has been an incredible experience and privilege for the four of us and I believe it's a testament to a band that values individual creativity and independence of mind. "We are grateful to each other and very grateful to The Ivors Academy for recognising us with this award." Advertisement The Ivors with 'ERA-DEFINING SONGWRITERS' With the award, U2 join an elite list of songwriting legends including Paul McCartney, The Chair of The Ivors Academy, Tom Gray said: "With fearless poetic lyricism always centre-stage in panoramic musical vistas, the sound of U2 has redefined the fabric of popular music. "Their songs are sweeping catalysts: hymnals and rallying cries. U2's induction into Fellowship honours their seminal contributions to music through exceptional songwriting craft.' Advertisement Roberto Neri, CEO of The Ivors Academy added: "We are proud to welcome U2 to Fellowship of The Ivors Academy as era-defining songwriters whose legacy continues to propel musical innovation and inspire social progress. "As U2's politically charged anthems have sparked global change, The Ivors Academy is committed to championing creative integrity with the same unwavering passion. "At a time when AI threatens to undermine human creativity, U2's Fellowship stands as a testament to the irreplaceable role of songwriters and composers in shaping culture and inspiring change."
