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Jackson Lamb would surely approve. Gary Oldman has delighted millions of people like the scandalously flatulent anti-hero of the Apple streaming series Slow horses. He now returns to the United Kingdom scene as another old irascible codger of personal hygiene and dubious food regime: Krapp, created in 1958 by Samuel Beckett who, like the lamb, had a nasty affection for a earthy gag.
For Oldman, the role does not bring much upgrade – his krapp is personified, his hair seated rancs on his shoulders, his crumpled shirt. Nor does it offer an improvement in decoration. The lain where Krapp undertakes his bizarre birthday ritual – recording a new band and listening to a previous one – is spectacular in his decrepitude, stacked with boxes, books and broken furniture, all wrapped in a canopy of dust which makes it more sorry than a landscape sheltered. The lamb would feel at home.
But it is not only dubious grooming and the intestines that growl that connect the spy and dissolved Krapp from Oldman. The two characters are shipwrecked by time and past errors, besides memories and shaded by death. Oldman brings tockett to the masterpiece a beautifully weighted mixture of interrogator and deep melancholy. The animated determination with which he initially searches in his office for the correct band gives way to immobility, and deep weariness gradually envelops his character while he listens several times to a critical moment in his past.
Of all the big double acts that Beckett has created, it is surely one of the darkest: an obsessive image of loss and regret. Here, an elderly man of the duos with his lost self, listening with contempt to his younger voice, because she affirms the events which he does not remember, or perplexed, because the word “emptyity” sends him to rush for a dusty dictionary. There is a playful theatricality in all of this and a playful sequence of physical comedy. He opens with Krapp solemnly eating his way through several bananas, an Oldman task performs with a lively comic timing.
But Beckett balances the ridiculous with the deep. Krapp was confronted at that time, 30 years earlier, when he rejected love to pursue a career as a writer who has clearly done nothing. Band technology can be dated, but this shock to meet an old forgotten self is too familiar. Meanwhile, the comic routine of winding and rewind records reflects the recall effort, creating moving meditation on memory, aging and loneliness. Beckett offers a striking image of the human condition: a man, speaking to himself, drifting in the accumulated trash of his life, surrounded by a black vacuum.
There are other poignant layers. Oldman has chosen to go back to the York Theater Royal, the regional place where he made his professional debut in 1979. And his reel -coil tape to coil has already been used by Michael Gambon and John Hurt in the same role. The two actors have now left, just like Beckett himself.
The Gambon Krapp looked like an old turtle recently awake from hibernation. Oldman is agile, bringing a clever touch to humor and simulated the silence attentive. He also directs, and there are times that could have landed more strongly with an outside eye. But it makes an intensely eloquent use of silence, its characteristics moving subtly to reflect its increasing desolation. And it relies on a painful conclusion. As the light slowly addresses, it fades in the background until it distinguishes itself from the rubble around it, just leaving the enlightened tape record as it turns in silence.
★★★★ ☆
At May 17, Yorktheatreroyal.co.uk
