Gary Oldman’s decision to stage this work at York Theatre Royal is infused with sentimentality. It is, he explains in the programme, where he made his professional stage debut in 1979. The return, from a lifetime of film work (though with a TV role very much still in play with Slow Horses), carries the sense of an older man in conversation with his younger self.
Just as in Samuel Beckett’s 1958 one-act play – a monologue which becomes an existential encounter with past selves and the many voices we incorporate within us across a lifetime. So Beckett’s crabby writer ritualistically sits down on his 69th birthday to tape-record all that has come to be over his past year, as he does annually, and then begins listening to the voice of his younger self – or selves – first with haughty judgment of the romantic he once was and then the yearning, regret and desolation slowly creeps in.
