Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Jackson Lamb would surely approve. Gary Oldman has delighted millions as the outrageously flatulent anti-hero of Apple’s streaming series Slow Horses. He now returns to the UK stage as another irascible old codger of questionable personal hygiene and diet: Krapp, created in 1958 by Samuel Beckett who, like Lamb, had a wicked affection for an earthy gag.
For Oldman, the role doesn’t bring much of a costume upgrade — his Krapp is seediness personified, his hair sitting lank on his shoulders, his shirt rumpled. Nor does it offer an improvement in decor. The lair where Krapp undertakes his bizarre birthday ritual — recording a new tape and listening to an earlier one — is spectacular in its decrepitude, piled high with boxes, books and broken furniture, all shrouded in a canopy of dust that renders it more desolate than a moonscape. Lamb would feel right at home.
But it’s not just dodgy grooming and grumbling bowels that link Oldman’s dissolute spy and Krapp. Both characters are shipwrecked by time and past errors, assailed by memories and shadowed by death. Oldman brings to Beckett’s masterpiece a beautifully weighted mix of quizzical humour and deep melancholy. The bustling purposefulness with which he initially rummages in his desk for the correct tape gives way to stillness, and a bone-deep weariness gradually envelopes his character as he listens repeatedly to a critical moment from his past.
Of all the great double acts Beckett created, this is surely one of the bleakest: a haunting image of loss and regret. Here an elderly man duets with his lost self, listening with contempt to his pompous younger voice as it opines on events he can’t remember, or bewilderment, as the word “viduity” sends him scrabbling for a dusty dictionary. There’s a playful theatricality to it all and a mischievous streak of physical comedy. It opens with Krapp solemnly eating his way through several bananas, a task Oldman executes with keen comic timing.
But Beckett balances the ridiculous with the profound. Krapp is confronted by the moment, 30 years earlier, when he rejected love to pursue a writing career that has clearly come to nothing. The tape technology might be dated, but that shock of encountering a forgotten former self is all too familiar. Meanwhile, the comic routine of winding and rewinding tapes reflects the effort of recall, creating a moving meditation on memory, ageing and loneliness. Beckett offers a stark image of the human condition: a man, talking to himself, adrift in the accumulated detritus of his life, surrounded by a black void.
There are further poignant layers. Oldman has chosen to return to the stage at the York Theatre Royal, the regional venue where he made his professional debut in 1979. And his reel-to-reel tape recorder was previously used by Michael Gambon and John Hurt in the same role. Both actors are now gone, as is Beckett himself.
Gambon’s Krapp resembled an ancient tortoise recently woken from hibernation. Oldman is nimbler, bringing a deft touch to the humour and mesmerising stillness to the listening. He also directs, and there are moments that might have landed more strongly with an outside eye. But he makes intensely eloquent use of silence, his features shifting subtly to reflect his growing desolation. And he builds to an achingly moving conclusion. As the light slowly dims, he fades into the background until he becomes indistinguishable from the rubble around him, leaving just the tape recorder illuminated as it spins on in silence.
★★★★☆
To May 17, yorktheatreroyal.co.uk
Read the full article here