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EXCLUSIVE: Slow Horses star Gary Oldman is stepping back on stage in April 2025 for the first time after an absence of nearly four decades to star in Samuel Beckett’s celebrated one-man play Krapp’s Last Tape for a limited season at the British theatre where the actor began his professional career in 1979.
Oldman, who won an Oscar for Darkest Hour, is in London shooting season 6 of the acclaimed Apple TV+ spy drama Slow Horses. He will play Beckett’s famous old-timer, struggling to listen to a tape he recorded 39 years ago, at York Theatre Royal in North Yorkshire from April 14 through May 17.
There are no plans to transfer the production to London’s West End or Broadway, Douglas Urbanski, the actor’s longtime business partner and manager, told me when I tracked him down in the early hours of Wednesday in London.
In performing Beckett’s 1958 classic, Oldman retraces his steps to York Theatre Royal, where he made his mark in 1979 upon graduating from Rose Bruford College, a respected performing arts campus just outside central London in Sidcup.
The young Oldman’s first job took him to York, where he played a series of roles in a real variety of shows, from Oliver Goldsmith’s Restoration comedy She Stoops To Conquer to Peter Nichols’ Privates on Parade, but nothing topped his Cat in the pantomime Dick Whittington.
Oldman revisited York Theatre Royal at the beginning of the year. He then began exploring the possibility of treading the boards there again.
York Theatre Royal chief executive officer Paul Crewe says in a statement that they realized Krapp’s Last Tape “was the perfect project. I am very happy that audiences will have this unique opportunity to see Gary Oldman return to our stage in this brand-new production.”
Oldman’s last performance in a theatre was in Caryl Churchill’s 1987 satirical play Serious Money at the London Royal Court with an ensemble that included Meera Syal, Alfred Molina, Alan Corduner, and his then-wife, Lesley Manville.
“Gary and I both come from the theatre, he was over here and I was over there in America, and we’ve been talking and talking and talking about him doing theatre ever since,” says Urbanski, who has been the architect of Oldman’s career for close to 40 years, “I don’t have the date to hand.”
Before Serious Money, Oldman played in a string of plays at the Royal Court and with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
His first and last appearance in the West End proper saw him star opposite Glenda Jackson and Georgina. Hale in Robert David MacDonald’s dull drama, Summit Conference at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue in 1982.
Over the years, Oldman has told me and others that he was never comfortable with the idea of playing the West End “after that one.”
He prefers an intimate space like the Royal Court or the Almeida Theatre.
The director of Krapp’s Last Stand hasn’t been announced but my understanding is that Oldman will direct himself.
Meanwhile, Oldman’s been in Jackson Lamb guise filming season 6 of Slow Horses in and around London since the middle of September. Shooting will continue until the end of February.
The shows are based on Mick Herron’s novels about the British secret intelligence misfits at Slough House, overseen by Oldman’s unkempt rogue, the brilliant Jackson Lamb. More Herron novels are in the pipeline, which means seasons 7 and 8 are pretty much a certainty.
By my reckoning, seasons 7 and 8 of Slow Horses will shoot between September and October 2025.
I was lucky enough to have caught several of Oldman’s performances for the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company. But with his career in movies taking off thanks to the phenomenal portraits he created in Sid and Nancy and Prick Up Your Ears, I had a sense that it would take a while before the stage could reclaim him.
That time has come.
