Reviews of Gary Oldman in Krapp’s Last Tape at York Theatre Royal

"Gary Oldman’s arresting one-man Beckett is a startling piece of theatre"

"Oldman gives an emotional encounter with his past selves as he single-handedly directs, set-designs and performs Samuel Beckett’s existential monologue"

"Gary Oldman’s decision to stage this work at York Theatre Royal is infused with sentimentality. It is, he explains in the programme, where he made his professional stage debut in 1979. The return, from a lifetime of film work (though with a TV role very much still in play with Slow Horses), carries the sense of an older man in conversation with his younger self."

"Oldman does not go down the Vaudeville route with the play’s tragicomic elements – such as the banana eating. He is funny but never the clown. "

"Oldman becomes more vulnerable by inches. We listen intently to his character listening to himself. It is remarkable to build such intimacy in a space as big as this auditorium, but the beautiful, focused lighting by Malcolm Rippeth helps, along with crisp sound design by Tom Smith."

"The play makes for a negative kind of epiphany: Krapp’s intimations of mortality. That it is an encounter with the past for Oldman too gives this exquisite show all the more punch."

"Gary Oldman brings deft humour and mesmerising stillness to Krapp’s Last Tape"

"The actor performs Samuel Beckett’s melancholy solo piece at the York Theatre Royal, where he made his professional debut in 1979"

"... 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."

"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."

"Loyal and attentive staging"

"Gary Oldman is a devastatingly stoic Krapp in his own production of the Beckett classic"

"If it takes an actor of a certain stature to attract an audience for this ruminating solo drama, it also takes one with a self-effacing humility to want to play Krapp."

"It is not a revelatory staging, but it is loyal and attentive to the particulars of Beckett’s text. Oldman’s Krapp is stiff-boned and stoic-faced."

"Oldman’s Krapp is particularly emphatic in his declaration that he “wouldn’t want them back”. An ounce of wavering in the final moments might endear us to him more, but his portrayal of a man too proud to fully regret a life that he chose to fade from colour into monochrome is calmly, quietly devastating."

"Gary Oldman's return to the stage after 37 years makes perfect sense"

"The character is a perfect foil for the dishevelment of Oldman’s other rueful old git, Jackson Lamb, in Apple TV’s Slow Horses."

"As spectacle, there’s not much on offer — although directing and designing the show, as well as acting in it, the star ensures he’s surrounded by an impressively packed attic junkyard."

"So what’s in it for Oldman? Nearly four decades since he last took to the stage, after cutting his teeth in London’s Royal Court Theatre and at the Royal Shakespeare Company, could it be that playing Beckett’s derelict old geezer is, in fact, a dry run for another derelict old geezer — Shakespeare’s Jack Falstaff? Or even Jackson Falstaff? Producers would fight for that."

"... one of the joys here is hearing how Oldman contrasts the resonant, confident, even arrogant voice of yore (newly recorded for this production) with Krapp’s weaker strains of today, where his only joy is in how he says the word spool as the bananas make way for sips from a bottle and melancholy suffuses his valedictory audio diary."

"There will be those who wish for a Studio staging, for a closer encounter with Krapp, rather than the bigger canvas of the Theatre Royal’s main house, but its expanse enhances Krapp’s loneliness and Oldman maximises facial expression, the grimaces, the physical tics, the pained bemusement, and his design fills the stage with life’s clutter behind the desk thrust to the front."

"Krapp’s Last Tape: Gary Oldman’s return to the York stage stirs but doesn’t quite shatter"

"Back on the stage where he made his theatre debut in 1979, the Slow Horses star pours everything into Beckett’s bleak masterpiece"

"... in this production... Krapp’s Last Tape is more a wistful chamber piece than a towering symphony."

"... his Krapp has a mournfulness, and a still, haunted stare as he listens back to the tape, but doesn’t quite mine the pits of despair or loneliness hinted at within Beckett’s distilled text. And he can also overdo the physical business of playing an old man: endlessly hacking, coughing and sniffing, waving his handkerchief as if in surrender."

"Oldman stares out at us, completely still, as the light falls around him until only a spotlight remains on the still-turning tape – leaving us with a powerful sense of the ageing Krapp’s wish that he could now rewind, get the time back, do things differently. But time, of course, turns only one way."

"Gary Oldman's Krapp's Last Tape could've been so much more"

"The production marks Oldman's return to the stage after 37 years but ultimately fails to live up to that homecoming"

"... 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."

"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."

"Gary Oldman could dig deeper in stage return"

"For his first theatre performance in 38 years, the Slow Horses and Harry Potter star tackles Beckett’s short one-man play with mixed results"

"Do we expect more fireworks from this 67-year-old, whose rambunctious TV role as dishevelled spy boss Jackson Lamb has given him a late-career highlight to dream of? “I do go for it a bit as an actor, I must admit,” he once told an interviewer. Here, the very lack of going for it is the point."

"Oldman’s readiness to take his time as a 69-year-old listening to his 39-year-old self’s musings on love, ambition and absurdity stays compelling, even when you are not entirely sure what this is all getting at."

"I’d call this a decent rendition of the show rather than a great one. No problems on the charisma front, on the clarity of voice. As the director, though, as well as designer and performer, Oldman could dig deeper, find more variation. He never quite sold me on the emotional wallop of it all until the beautifully bleak final few lines"

"Gary Oldman is extraordinary in Krapp’s Last Tape"

"The Slow Horses star performs in, directs and designs an intimate production of Samuel Beckett’s one-man drama of loss, finely capturing its sense of rage and reverie"

"Krapp holds the audience in a human conversation. As Gary Oldman proves."

"In an extraordinary triple feat – crediting his producing partner, Douglas Urbanski – Oldman is also director and designer, creating a set that is a hoarder’s paradise"

"Oldman, with his gift of explosive containment – think of him as George Smiley, swimming with his specs on, in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – is finely attuned to Krapp’s Last Tape, which needs a strong pulse and a sceptical eye."

"One of the most compelling hours in 20th-century theatre."