‘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.” Continue reading…