Beckett was surely having fun when he conceived of Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). He christened his titular character with a disastrously scatological name, gave him an anxious compulsion to eat bananas, and made the sole confidant of his old age a tape recorder which futilely recalls an irretrievable past. Appropriately for Krapp, who never refuses a trip down memory lane, the Royal Court have brought the old codger back sixty-eight years after Beckett’s play premiered for the theatre’s seventieth anniversary celebrations. This time around veteran screen star Gary Oldman, who has been off the boards for forty years, slips with ease into Krapp’s weary old shoes, directing and designing the set too.
Before a single word of the show is uttered, a maudlin musical prelude is played on the speakers, ‘My Echo, My Shadow and Me’. This sets the tone for Krapp’s nostalgic reveries and solipsistic absorption. Like Beckett’s characters, the audience are made to wait, trapped in a prolonged blackout until Krapp climbs up a set of stairs into his gloom-filled, claustrophobic ‘den’. Around him has grown a jungle of boxes, files and discarded tapes, pointing to Krapp’s obsessive, albeit disorganised, hoarding of the past. He finds his way to a battered desk illuminated by a sole light, where Krapp once wrote and sought to get known for his literary talents (alas, this amounted to little more than the sale of seventeen books). Now, it is the prime place for his birthday ritual of listening to old tape recordings recalling lost love, thwarted ambitions, and the spots of time that came to define his emotional life.
Although there is tragicomedy in Krapp’s failure to live a fulfilling existence, Oldman refuses to portray him as a music hall clown. The pratfall induced by a banana skin is cut (Beckett, a stickler for textual fidelity, would surely have been niggled by this). The actor instead invests Krapp with intense physical and mental weariness. With every bodily exertion he puffs and sighs, making the audience convinced that this really might be the last tape he listens to. Humour, when it does surface, is grimly ironic. For instance, when on the tape the middle-aged Krapp laughs at his youthful resolves to ‘drink less’ we feel Krapp’s present impotence as a bottle of whisky sits enticingly on his desk. Even the banana-eating scenes lack the usual farcical impact. Oldman handles them almost philosophically, peeling back the yellow skins and hoping that each sweet bite might unveil the long-awaited moment of existential revelation. His schoolboyish amusement at the long vowels of the word ‘spools’ is also less comic than pitiful, pointing to the onset of senility and his compulsion to prolong and savour.
But there is another character to consider, that of the tape recorder. The machine Oldman selected for the production has its own backstory: it was used by John Hurt and Michael Gambon when they performed the play in London many years ago. That is to say, it is truly a repository for past hauntings. Throughout Oldman’s production Krapp’s solitude is delusively appeased by its presence. It becomes his companion because it provides him with the illusion of sharing his memories and providing a bridge to the inaccessible past. In reality, the machine is a narcissistic extension of the self, dramatizing how Krapp’s all-consuming introspection will never get him closer to a true, objective understanding of who he is and where his life went wrong. Beckett was remarkably prescient in foreseeing technology’s fallacious intimacies and illusory consolations.
It’s been a few years since I’ve watched Krapp’s Last Tape, and returning to it again, it seemed to me as if it could have been written by Philip Larkin. Here was a man poring half-sentimentally, half-frustratedly over the past, confronting his personal failures with a sharp, splenetic tongue, and expressing wearied resignation as to how it all panned out because any other response would be ineffectual. When Oldman listened to the last few moments of the tape—’perhaps my best years are gone, but I wouldn’t want them back, not with the fire in me now’—its false ring of optimism that the tide was changing unleashed a wave of desolation and pathos in the auditorium. Indeed, the sixty-nine-year-old Krapp stared enervated into the darkness and silence, as if he were not even able to cling to the hope of dreams because one felt he’d lived long enough to see they don’t come true. Beckett once called it a ‘nicely sad and sentimental’ play, another example of past voices mocking us, perhaps.
By Samuel Beckett
Director: Gary Oldman
Cast includes: Gary Oldman
Until: Saturday 30th May 2026
Running Time: 50 minutes
Review by Olivia Hurton