Gary Oldman's Tribute to the Royal Court

“I suppose I mean those things worth having when all the dust has . . . when all my dust has settled. I close my eyes and try and imagine them. “

Krapp

This production is all about theatre history. The Royal Court is celebrating 70 years of groundbreaking plays. Gary Oldman is celebrating an acting career post graduation at Rose Bruford College in Sidcup, where the Theatre Royal York gave him his first acting job and where this production of Krapp’s Last Tape opened last year. British Theatre is acknowledging the impact of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s cataclysmic play Waiting For Godot in 1955 at the Arts Theatre Club directed by Sir Peter Hall. Krapp’s Last Tape was first produced in the UK in 1958 here at the Royal Court Theatre with the Irish actor Patrick McGee in the role of this one-man play. Doesn’t that feel special?

Krapp’s Last Tape is the most personal of Samuel Beckett’s canon of Absurdist plays. It is about a man who has recorded his diary on tape, listening to his younger voice and revisiting his own history. For the first 15 minutes there are no words, just an older man played by Gary Oldman, sitting under a bright light with a curved hanging lampshade, at an old desk in a room full of long forgotten possessions, piled up.

Krapp eases himself stiffly into the chair looking closely at a small object, examining it, maybe a ring? He unpeels half a banana and eats it slowly, unpeels it further and throws the peel away. Laughter in the audience. He produces another banana and eats it eccentrically. He finds a handkerchief, we are thinking he may be producing a third banana, but not yet. He drops the hanky, retrieves and unfolds it and we notice how much rubbish there is on the stage. Then, his first words, “Box Three, Spool Five.” He plays with pronouncing the word “Spool” lengthening the vowel sound.

We are already feeling his isolation, his loneliness, no-one to tidy up for. He starts to find a collection of old sweetie tins looking for Box Three. He finds, 2, 4, 9, 7 before chancing on Box Three and finding Spool 5. He threads up the tape recorder and plays, “Mother at rest at last . . . a memorable Equinox.” He was aged 39 when he made this tape, 30 years ago. He recalls, “a girl in a shabby green coat on a railway station platform.” He looks through empty bottles until he finds one two-thirds empty, pours a drink. He finds a dictionary to look up a word he has used about his mother “viduity”, a rare synonym for widowhood.

This digression is setting up regret, and bleak memories of his mother’s death. Then as a younger man, a more lyrical memory with a woman on a lake in a punt, his “face in her breasts”, an erotic memory but after he has suggested that they should part. It feels like self sabotage but he chooses to play this extract again. He says he wouldn’t want these memories back but I was not convinced.

A final tribute to the past is the tape recorder at the close of the play has a special bright light on the darkened stage which slowly dims to close. This tape recorder is the very one used by John Hurt in 2000 and Michael Gambon in 2010.

This play can be summed up with the description of the irises broken by the movement of the punt, “We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem!” Beautiful, tragic and full of regret.