Gary Oldman in Samuel Beckett’s one-act drama [Jack English]

KRAPP’S LAST TAPE
Royal Court Theatre
☆☆☆

Samuel Beckett’s one-act drama Krapp’s Last Tape follows the musings of a 69-year-old man looking back on his life. Krapp (Gary Oldman) selects “box three, spool five,” a recording he made 30 years earlier.

His taped voice reveals a certain pomposity as he enjoys elaborate words and over-indulgent description. This is a pivotal time for Krapp: the year his mother died, and the moment he threw away his one “chance of happiness” for a literary life that ultimately proves a failure.

The always watchable Oldman, known for his screen acting, favours long pauses over action. In this production, which originated at Theatre Royal York last year, there’s no clowning or slapstick – the banana skins, the squeaky boots – to leaven the mood. Instead, Krapp’s eating of bananas becomes a flat ritual drained of tension or humour, leaving little to soften us towards him.

When Oldman drops his voice, he’s at times barely audible. Beckett’s miniature play is timeless, but Oldman keeps us at a distance so we don’t fully feel the devastation of Krapp’s reminiscences or his dawning realisation that he never amounted to much.

While Oldman, also director and designer, brilliantly captures the contrasting voices of Krapp’s older and younger selves, his physicality doesn’t suggest a man ravaged by time, drink and regret.

The curtain raiser is a Beckett-inspired 20-minute play by Leo Simpe-Asante, winner of the 2025 inaugural Royal Court Young Playwrights Award. Godot’s To-Do List is an existential farce, directed by Aneesha Srinivasan, in which Godot (Shakeel Haakim) yearns to meet his friends but must pass a series of tests set by a disembodied voice (Flora Ashton).

It’s hard not to think of the influence of AI, which chimes perfectly with Krapp’s fractured world, where technology allows him to revisit the past, exposing the erosion of identity.

Until May 30
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