You have to assume that this Gary Oldman designed, directed and (of course) starring production of Samuel Beckett’s high concept elegy for youthful ambition Krapp’s Last Tape would have run at Theatre Royal York earlier in 2025 regeardless of the Royal Court’s 2026 seventieth anniversary season.
But here it is, gaining a new London life at the Court. And it’s a doubly appropriate piece of programming for the seventieth birthday season. Beckett’s play about an old man listening back with mounting horror to the megalomaniacal tapes he recorded on his birthday in his younger years had its debut at the Court in 1958, and was revived again for its fiftieth birthday with no less than Harold Pinter in the title role.
And it’s a homecoming of sorts for Oldman, who was a prolific theatre actor and Royal Court regular in the ’80s before he drifted off into film (his last stage role was in Caryl Churchill’s 1987 masterpiece Serious Money).
Curiously for such a landmark play, Krapp’s Last Tape started life as a ‘curtain raiser’, the secondary event before a production of Beckett’s longer Aftermath. In that spirit, Oldman’s performance will have a curtain raiser of its own in the form of Godot’s To Do List, a short Beckett-inspired play from young writer Leo Simpe-Asante.
