gAlly Oldman’s decision to perform the film at York Theatre Royal has been infused with sentimentality. He explained in the program and made his professional stage debut in 1979. The return of the film’s work from lifetime (playing with horses whose TV roles are still slow) carries the feeling of an older man talking to his younger self.
Just like Samuel Beckett’s One Act Play in 1958, this is an existential encounter with his past self and a monologue that is the many voices we have incorporated within us throughout our lifetimes. So Beckett’s club beewriter sits on his 69th birthday and starts listening to his younger self’s voice, as he does every year.
This is not only a single play, but it’s like a project by one of the Old Man, who will direct on his own, design sets and performances, and co-produce the show. What could have been a tragic vanity project is an amazing theatre, arrested and emotional, it is there in the best krapps of modern times.
He is surrounded by his past accumulations, books, files, boxes, and more. He climbs the triangular mountain of Brick a Black and arrives at his desk and begins to eat bananas. The set design is slightly similar to Winnie’s “heap” in Happy Days (written three years later), and here conveys the same feeling of being trapped in the wreckage of his life.
Oldman doesn’t descend the vaudeville route with tragic elements of the play, such as eating bananas. He’s funny, but not a clown. The opening silence opens a hole in the creaks of the desk instead of the old joints of the crap, and the cry of the word “spool” (is he pleased with the words or dodges the lonely tranquility around him?) as the audience leans against all his sounds and movements.
Oldman becomes more vulnerable with inches. We listen to his character and listen to us. It is worth noting that building intimacy in a large auditorium-like space, but the beautifully focused lighting by Malcolm Lippes is useful along with Tom Smith’s crisp sound design. Heartbroken, the production features the same tape recorder that Michael Gambon and John used in the turn, just like Krapp. It lights up at the end, as if alive. This is the only part of the Krapp that remains essential with the fatal fade year after year.
Oldman’s voice (or voice) is rich, adjusting his tone and streaming in the recordings to make him sound younger, and a hypnotic lyrical lyricism in his past lover’s descriptions. You feel the alienation of Clap from this “other” man whose voice emanates from the tape – active, sensory, still hopeful. But he is also fascinated by him.
“The Earth may be unmanned,” says the poetic young Krapp, and the older man reveals emotions much more harshly, and without poetry.
This play becomes a negative kind of epiphany. Clap mortality rate. The fact that Oldman is also an encounter with the past gives this exquisite show even more punch.
