In 1979, a young actor straight out of drama school began his professional career at York Theatre Royal. That actor was a certain Gary Oldman and now, after decades of screen work that have seen him garlanded with Oscars, BAFTAS and Golden Globe awards, Oldman returns to the stage for the first time in 37 years.
Any venue in the world would surely have snapped him up, so immense credit to the man for choosing to head back to York, giving a precious fillip of publicity and income to regional theatre in these perilously straitened times.
No-one could accuse Oldman of shirking – or unnecessarily inflating the wage bill – as not only does he star, but also designs and directs. Yet as Kenneth Branagh has proven repeatedly in recent years, it is rarely a good idea for an actor to direct himself and thus it goes again here, as Oldman fails sufficiently to illuminate Samuel Beckett’s already dauntingly austere 1958 text for a solo actor. This is one of the least suitable pieces for an imposing proscenium arch theatre (although next week sees Stephen Rea perform the same work in the cavernous Barbican) and not every line can be heard with clarity.
Gary Oldman in Krapp’s Last Tape at York Theatre Royal. Credit: Gisele Schmidt. Provided by [email protected]Onto a set piled high with boxes and clutter, Krapp emerges wheezing in true Jackson Lamb-style, Newman’s ramshackle lead character in the hit Apple TV series Slow Horses. He sits at a long wooden table and proceeds to peel a banana; in fact, a good ten per cent of the 50-minute running time is taken up by Oldman silently, yet charismatically, eating fruit.
Krapp lifts a cumbersome reel-to-reel tape machine onto the table and proceeds in the yearly ritual he enacts on his birthday. He listens to a past recording of himself and makes a fresh one and this process of looking back in disappointment is an ever more forlorn endeavour, as years and loneliness mount.
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The 39-year-old Krapp recounts the end of a love affair and we join the older man in rueful reflection about how our younger selves could be so cavalier when it came to opportunity and happiness, erroneously expecting that there would be an endless supply of both commodities. ‘Perhaps my best years are gone,’ he says bleakly, as part of the new offering.
Although this is not a play of abundant words – much of the ‘action’ involves Oldman sitting stock still and listening – that bulletin from 30 years previously is actually a clever palimpsest of Krapp peering even further back into his past and this key fact is not conveyed clearly enough.
Exciting as it is to have Oldman back on stage, this is an inescapably under-optimum choice of work and I suspect that a great many audience members will have to engage in some diligent post-show research to try to make sense of what they have just seen.
To 17 May (01904 623568, yorktheatreroyal.co.uk)
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