The fire in him

The return of Sir Gary Oldman to the London stage, after an absence of nearly forty years, is an extraordinary coup for the Royal Court. Of all the leading actors of his generation, only Daniel Day-Lewis continues to remain a theatrical refusenik, and given he’s hardly seen on screen either, this is wholly understandable. But Oldman turned his back on a fascinating career on stage to make big bucks from cinema, where he has excelled. Now he is in his British phase again, appearing to great acclaim as the odorous spymaster Jackson Lamb in the excellent Slow Horses. He is using his time off between filming seasons of the show to play Krapp in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape: a role he first played, to thunderous acclaim, in York last year. 

Before Oldman can take to the Royal Court stage, however, there is a curtain-raiser in the form of Leo Simpe-Asante’s Godot’s To-Do List. Many might regret the absence of another Beckett short play such as Rockaby or Not I, which are rarely performed and would play to an appreciative audience during this sold-out run. However, Simpe-Asante’s brief divertissement is far from painful. It revolves around a bewildered-looking man, who might or might not be Godot (Shakeel Haakim) who is receiving increasingly bizarre instructions from an off-stage voice (Flora Ashton). Only when he has completed the tasks he is set will he be allowed to see his “friends” — we are allowed to infer that these are Vladimir and Estragon, still very much waiting for Godot — but cruelty and frustration are the order of the day. Haakim has a fine line in frustrated comic timing, Ashton is a dryly amusing unseen foil and Aneesha Srinivisan’s minimal staging captivates for the twenty or so minutes that this vignette lasts. 

It is not, however, what the audience are here for, and one feels a sense of anticipation when Haakim departs and Oldman’s Krapp slowly looms into view. The play, although a relatively brief one-acter, is rightly regarded as one of Beckett’s masterpieces, along with Godot, Endgame and Happy Day, and has been catnip to some of British and Irish theatre’s greatest actors, from Patrick Magee and Stephen Rea to John Hurt and Michael Gambon. Although it is far from an easy piece of drama, its central idea — an old man listening, with infinite regret, to recordings of his younger self talking about his life and ambitions for his future — is an affecting and universal one that, unintentionally, finds its own echoes in our social media era. It is all too easy to gaze back on pictures and videos of ourselves in our youthful, excitable past and feel the same sense of regret at the disappointing present that Krapp does. 

Beckett knew that he was writing something more accessible than his usual material, which perhaps accounts for the regularity with which the play is revived. (It helps that it’s brief — 45 minutes or so — and only requires one actor on stage.) He described it as “nicely sad and sentimental. People will say: good gracious, there’s blood circulating in the old man’s veins after all; one would never have believed it; he must be getting old.” (Beckett was in his early fifties when he wrote Krapp.) In any case, it is a play that stands or falls on its lead performance, but which, in truth, is difficult for a competent actor to mess up, let alone a great one. Effectively it offers its lead two separate roles to play; the jaded, aged figure who squats at his desk, surrounded by debris and the memories of his past, and the younger, pompous and more optimistic character, only heard on the “spools” that Krapp takes masochistic relish in tormenting himself with. 

Beckett’s lifelong interest in clowning and deadpan humour is in evidence. Oldman-Krapp begins the evening by devouring banana after banana and in saying the word “spool” with almost exaggerated relish. Once the excitement at seeing the actor return to the stage has worn off, these early moments can be hard work; the audience laughed more in appreciation than because they found it especially funny. Yet when the play eventually allows the interplay between past and present to begin, it gives Oldman an extraordinarily rich role to play with all the dexterity and skill that he has demonstrated in his cinematic career.

This is a tour-de-force from the actor — although, given his continued popularity, it seems highly unlikely that he will be forced to tour. Not only does he star, but he also directs and has even designed the set, in which mouldering piles of rubbish symbolically compliment the debris of Krapp’s increasingly festering existence. And after a near-lifetime of hearing him mainly do various American accents in his career, what a great pleasure it is to hear him adopt two different, wholly varied vocal registers: strong, resonant and confident RP for the younger Krapp, and quavering, pathetic sibilance for the aged man. 

It is easy to see what attracted this great performer back to the stage

The play has some excellent jokes — my favourite being, of Krapp reflecting on his youthful literary ambitions, “Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas. Getting known”, all of which is horribly close to the bone for any author — but it also has an overwhelming sense of regret and loss at its heart. When Oldman chooses to end his production with a slow fade of Malcolm Rippeth’s lighting design, leaving Krapp’s expression lingering somewhere between shock and horror, it’s an extraordinarily powerful and memorable image. 

I was reminded, gazing on Oldman’s sexagenarian features, of how, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he played both the aged vampire and the Byronic count, and how he did so superbly. Now, he is firmly in his twilight days as an actor, and as Krapp closes the play by remarking “Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn’t want them back. Not with the fire in me now” it is easy to see what attracted this great performer back to the stage. We can only hope that he will be back — whether in more Beckett, the classics or even new theatre — before very long. He has been sorely missed.