After decades away from the theatre, Gary Oldman will return to the Yorkshire theater where he once played a pantomime cat. The Oscar winner, currently returning to TV screens with Gradual Horses, will perform Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Final Tape monologue at the York Theater Royal next spring.
It is a long-awaited return to the stage for the star, who began his acting career performing in York and Glasgow's Residents Theater before moving on to London's Royal Courtroom and the Royal Shakespeare Firm.
First performed by Patrick Magee in 1958, Beckett's play is about a melancholic 69-year-old man who plays recordings he made decades earlier and reflects on lost love between bites of his beloved bananas. A tragicomic reckoning between ambition and failure, it has been played by actors such as John Harm, Stephen Rea, Albert Finney and Harold Pinter.
Paul Crewes, chief executive of the York Theater Royal, said Oldman had visited him earlier in the year. “It was fascinating to hear him tell stories from his time as a young man, in his first professional role on stage at York Theater Royal,” he said. “In that context, when we started exploring concepts, we realized that Krapp's Final Tape was the perfect project.”
Production begins previews on April 14 and runs through May 17. No more dates are planned. Tickets go on sale to the general public on November 16.
Oldman, who grew up in London, studied acting at the Rose Bruford School. He graduated in 1979 and began performing in York that year. There he had roles in Privates on Parade, Cabaret and Dick Whittington playing the cat.
“Gary has become one of our best screen actors, but I'm afraid he was a bit of a lightweight when it came to pantomime,” Berwick Kaler, the theater's veteran pantomist, recalled in 2018. the costume On at least three occasions I had to turn to the audience and say, 'My God, boys and girls, I think the poor kitty has gone to sleep!'”
In 1987, Oldman starred in Caryl Churchill's Critical Cash at the Royal Courtroom alongside Lesley Manville, with whom he had a brief marriage. After prominent roles in The Current Court and the RSC in the 1980s, he concentrated on a film career that included portrayals of Lee Harvey Oswald, Dracula and Beethoven in the early 1990s. In 2012 he was nominated for an Oscar for playing John le Carré's George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He won the Oscar for best actor for Darkest Hour, in which he played Winston Churchill.