Gary Oldman returned to the Royal Court on its 70th birthday and took on Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape in a 70-minute evening that folded in Leo Simpe-Asante’s Beckett-inspired short Godot’s To Do List. It was Oldman’s first performance at the theatre since 1987, when he appeared in Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money, and it brought him back to a stage with deep roots in Beckett’s work.
The production was originally mounted by Oldman for the Theatre Royal York last year, but the Royal Court setting gave it a sharper sense of history. Krapp’s Last Tape was first performed there in 1958 by Patrick Magee, and Harold Pinter later performed it in the theatre upstairs twenty years ago. John Hurt once described the play as “an essay in aloneness,” a phrase that still fits the way Beckett’s work lands in the room.
Oldman, best known now for his film roles and for playing Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses, has built his Krapp around that isolation. He appears in a black waistcoat, with a beard and long grey hair falling over his shoulders, on a cluttered stage he designed himself as a dusty loft full of rubbish, papers and books piled around a central table. The effect is cramped and lived-in, with the table becoming the only place where the character can settle.
Krapp is on his 69th birthday in the play, and the action turns on a tape he recorded of himself 30 years earlier. Oldman uses the old man’s own words to expose the distance between memory and regret, most plainly in the line, “I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed without opening her eyes.” The sentence lands like a verdict on the life that has been lived since it was first spoken.
The pairing with Godot’s To Do List added a lighter, more self-aware frame to the evening, but it was Krapp that carried the weight of the Royal Court anniversary. That matters because the theatre’s history with Beckett is not decorative; it is part of the production’s charge. From Magee’s 1958 premiere to Pinter’s performance upstairs, the play has returned to the building whenever its bleak humor and loneliness need a fresh audience. Oldman’s return in 2024, after nearly four decades away from the venue, closes that loop cleanly: the role still fits the house, and the house still fits the role.
