A remarkable revival
Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, the haunting 1958 one-man play about regret and isolation, is enjoying a remarkable resurgence. Stephen Rea recently took the piece on an international tour; Gary Oldman returned to the stage after decades away to deliver the tragicomic performance; and this summer Stockard Channing will direct a production at the Edinburgh fringe, with David Westhead as Krapp. Now a new staging at The Cockpit theatre in London, starring the 84-year-old actor Peter Marinker, is adding a deeply personal dimension to the revival.
A personal journey with memory
Marinker first played Krapp half a lifetime ago, and for this production he is reusing the tapes he recorded in 1983. “I thought of redoing them – it could have been better,” he says, a judgment that echoes the self-laceration of Beckett’s character. He quotes Dennis Potter’s notion of considering the past with “tender contempt” and adds, with a wry smile, “That rang a bell.”
At 84, Marinker is older than Beckett’s Krapp, who is typically 69, and his portrayal is further coloured by his own symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, diagnosed two years ago. The decision to stage Krapp’s Last Tape with Marinker was made in direct response to that diagnosis, with the production aiming to explore themes of memory, ageing and selfhood. Marinker has said he hopes performing the play will help him navigate the condition, describing his brain as taking him on a journey with “more of the right side of my brain than the left” – focusing on instinct and feeling over calculation. The Cockpit’s director, Dave Wybrow, who suggested the revival, sees it partly as a chance to revisit themes from Waiting for Godot, which they had previously worked on together. “All the way through Godot, there’s the misremembered and half-remembered,” Wybrow says. “Godot means something completely different if you’ve known people with Alzheimer’s.”
Marinker’s own experience of memory loss began when he was playing Gandalf in a musical version of The Lord of the Rings at the Watermill theatre. “I would have these little dropouts on stage and I’d just pause and then carry on,” he recalls. As the lapses continued, an understudy eventually took over. “At least I got to take my wife and see the play,” he says with a smile. “I didn’t know it was Alzheimer’s, but then I had an MRI.” He later secured a role in the Netflix series Death by Lightning – about the assassination of US President James Garfield, which premiered in November 2025 – and managed to learn the lines, though it was “quite a challenge”. For Krapp’s Last Tape he will receive in-ear prompts if required, and proceeds from the run will be donated to the Alzheimer’s Society.
Marinker’s long association with Beckett’s work began after he saw the playwright’s own German-language production of Waiting for Godot at the Royal Court in 1976. “I didn’t get it,” he admits, “but I started finding any bits of Beckett that I could.” Raised in the Canadian Prairies, he made his school acting debut in a role that oddly foreshadowed Beckett’s 1980 play Rockaby. “I went to a boarding school with an English teacher who had been an actor and I think that was the seed. My first performance was as a grandmother. It was a boys’ school, and the curtain went up, and I was knitting in a rocking chair. And the howl of laughter of the boys!” In the early 2000s, he co-founded the Godot Company with Beckett’s publisher John Calder to stage the playwright’s works as intended. Edward Beckett, the playwright’s nephew and executor of his estate, “likes what Peter does”, according to Wybrow, and has given his blessing for modifications to Krapp’s traditional costume of too-short trousers, waistcoat and “surprising” boots. Marinker will instead wear “my wife’s dressing gown”, and asked whether he could be barefoot. Wybrow replied: “The only thing is you’ve got to slip on the banana skin.”
That banana-skin moment is key: Krapp, shown to be an addict in several ways, cannot resist his beloved bananas. In a play with heavily detailed stage directions, he strokes, peels and munches them with as much curiosity as when he pronounces “spooool”, enjoying the taste of language too. Wybrow describes such moments as “a childish level of engagement with the world”. The costume is his wife’s, but the Irish accent Marinker uses on stage is “my mother’s voice”, because she read to him when he was young. His performance will also draw on his own Krapp-like study at home, “filled with chaos and recordings of all the things I’ve done”, and on his recent interest in biologist Jeremy Griffith’s research into intellect and instinct – a theme that chimes with Krapp’s inner conflict.
Reflections from a lifetime on stage
Marinker clearly relishes returning to fringe theatre, a passion subsidised by his colourful work on video game franchises including Dark Souls, in which he voiced the serpent Darkstalker Kaathe. His voice acting was honed on BBC radio – “I did a lot of Poetry Please, Words and Music” – and recording books for the Royal National Institute of Blind People. He even appears in Paddington in Peru. “I thought I’d be doing Paddington,” he says mischievously. “But no, I was an old bear.” Over his career he has been heard more than seen. “What is good is that you’re invisible.” Working with Pierce Brosnan on The Tailor of Panama – where he also served as dialogue coach – he saw the Bond star mobbed by crowds. “And I thought, no … You don’t want that.”
Amid such recollections, Marinker peppers our conversation with lines from Beckett. When his memory fails, he refers to Beckett’s searching poem What Is the Word, written after the playwright’s late symptoms of aphasia. And, with a voice full of curiosity, he closes by reading a recent poem of his own, A Foggy Brain in London Town. It ends:
Well it’s the lost memories
Where? When? Who?
What?
I can’t tell you
I fish without a bait
there’s nothing on the hook
What have I forgotten this time?
I just can’t tell you
But I am telling you,
NOW.
