Review Roundup: KRAPP'S LAST TAPE Starring Gary Oldman

Gary Oldman has returned to York Theatre Royal where he began his career, in Samuel Beckett’s seminal work, Krapp’s Last Tape. The production runs until 17 May 2025.

Each year, on his birthday, Krapp records a new tape reflecting on the year gone by. On his 69th birthday, Krapp, now a lonely man, is ready with a bottle of wine, a banana and his tape recorder. Listening back to a recording he made as a young man, Krapp must face the hopes of his past self. See what the critics are saying...

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: Oldman becomes more vulnerable by inches. We listen intently to his character listening to himself. It is remarkable to build such intimacy in a space as big as this auditorium, but the beautiful, focused lighting by Malcolm Rippeth helps, along with crisp sound design by Tom Smith. Poignantly, the production features the same tape recorder used by Michael Gambon and John Hurt in their turns as Krapp. It lights up at the end, as if alive – the only part of Krapp that remains vital as the mortal fades, year by year.

Houman Barekat, The New York Times: Sure, the production is powered by sentiment, and has some of the telltale features of a vanity project. (As well as starring and directing, Oldman also designed the set.) But the upshot is that 750 people packed into a regional playhouse, where they saw an ambitiously subtle performance of a challenging work. They were finished in time for dinner — a little demoralized, perhaps, but enriched all the same.

Patrick Marmion, The Daily Mail: And he uses his A-lister magic to transform the normal running time of 30 minutes into a stately 55. That’s almost doubling the length of the show, thanks to some faintly camp pigeon-like cooing, much staring into space, some rifling through boxes of tapes, and vividly munching a number of bananas. Always one to push boundaries and innovate, Oldman tackles his bananas from the bottom up, peeling from the end. Astonishing. And there’s me wrenching at the stalk all these years. My relationship with the fruit will never be the same.

Dominic Maxwell, The Times: Oldman’s readiness to take his time as a 69-year-old listening to his 39-year-old self’s musings on love, ambition and absurdity stays compelling, even when you are not entirely sure what this is all getting at. The meat of the words is the recorded younger Krapp looking back ruefully on his own younger self, distancing himself from his fondness for a drink. Oldman, sipping now and then from what looks from the front row of the circle to be a bottle of brandy — this intimate piece, so much about reacting rather than orating, would ideally be in a smaller space — gives a rueful chuckle at that. He lets us read what we will into his face — or, for those in the cheaper seats, his body language — as he contemplates obsolescence.

Charles Hutchinson, York Press:  There will be those who wish for a Studio staging, for a closer encounter with Krapp, rather than the bigger canvas of the Theatre Royal’s main house, but its expanse enhances Krapp’s loneliness and Oldman maximises facial expression, the grimaces, the physical tics, the pained bemusement, and his design fills the stage with life’s clutter behind the desk thrust to the front. Krapp’s Last Tape remains a Marmite play; Oldman can’t change that, but more than anything it will provoke debate that goes deeper than whether he peels a banana the right way.

Dan Sinclair, All That Dazzles: I worry how easy it is to get wrapped up in the grandeur of this production. A seminal actor in a seminal play, which, I would wager, a few hundred University dissertations have been written on. For all its nuance and intelligent ponderings on life and memory, sometimes it’s just a bit dull. Sorry. Should it have footage of Subway Surfers playing on a loop underneath to keep Gen Z theatre students entertained? No. It just seemed to lack the spark, something to make you really feel alive. Did I love it like I wanted to? I was unmoved, but it was by no means a pile of Krapp.