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‘I’d pause then carry on’: Peter Marinker, star of Krapp’s Last Tape, on performing with Alzheimer’s
The 84-year-old actor has spent decades bringing Samuel Beckett’s plays to life. Does his recent diagnosis give him new insights into playing ‘sad clown’ Krapp in a drama about age and the battlefield of memory?
What a lot of Krapp. Pardon my French but Samuel Beckett’s haunting 1958 masterpiece about regret and isolation is having a moment. Stephen Rea recently took Krapp’s Last Tape on an international tour, Gary Oldman returned to the stage after decades away to deliver the tragicomic one-man show and this summer Stockard Channing will direct it at the Edinburgh fringe, with David Westhead as Krapp. Beckett’s eponymous loner, who sits in his dark den and ritually listens to tapes he made as a younger man, is riding a new wave of popularity.
Peter Marinker first played Krapp half a lifetime ago and is preparing to star in a new production, reusing the tapes he recorded in 1983. How does he feel listening back now? “I thought of redoing them – it could have been better,” he says when we meet at the tiny Cockpit theatre in London. That assessment matches the spirit of the self-lacerating Krapp who looks back not just in anger but anguish. Marinker quotes Dennis Potter, who said we should consider our past with “tender contempt”. He adds wryly: “That rang a bell.”
