Gary Oldman: Hollywood megastar performing at York Theatre Royal meets Nick Ahad

The ‘why’ of it is persistent.

Why has it taken 40 years for him to return to the stage? Why here? Why this play?

It turns out for Oldman, it’s personal.

“The conversation of theatre is never very far away. Over the years I’ve flirted with it, made little lists, looked at things and thought ‘that might be interesting to do’,” says Oldman.

“I got kidnapped by films. You look around and you go ‘it’s five years since I did a play’, then ten years since I was on stage, then 15 and 20 and then you start to wonder if you would ever go back.”

Watching his career, there’s little wonder. Since his film debut as Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy in 1986, the actor has turned in career-defining roles consistently. Every time you think he’s scaled a movie peak, he climbs higher. Lee Harvey Oswald in Oliver Stone’s JFK, the title role for Francis Ford Coppolla in Dracula, Luc Besson’s Leon all belong to the early period when he was associated with the Brit Pack that assailed Hollywood in the late 80’s.

He followed those early years with Sirius in Harry Potter and Commissioner Gordon for Christopher Nolan in the Batman series before earning a first Oscar nod for George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and then winning the statuette in 2017 for his role as Churchill in The Darkest Hour.

All the while Oldman still heard the call of the stage.

“My son was getting married a couple of years ago to a local girl just outside of York. We flew all the kids in, didn’t we,” says Oldman to his wife and constant companion Gisele Schmidt.

“Our kids are American and I said to them ‘you can’t come all this way and not see York, this most beautiful town’. I took them on a tour around and then I asked if they wanted to see where I started my career and have a little tour of the theatre.

“I’d not been back since.”

Oldman leans back on his sofa, remembering the moment he returned.

“And. Wow.”

Wearing orange Converse trainers and a nehru-necked black shirt, his grey long hair tied back in a ponytail and long grey beard at once bushy yet styled, Oldman sits on a large sofa in a little room at York Theatre Royal, tastefully decorated and given to the actor to use as a sort of living room to receive the many guests heading to York to witness his performance in Beckett’s play this month – Sting was in last night. Two hours later the hair will hang loose and the beard will look much more unkempt and Oldman, crucially, will look about a decade older as he shuffles onto stage to play 69-year-old Krapp, a man who listens to tapes of his younger self in an attic room, alone.

For now though, Oldman recalls that first time back on the York stage since his debut season.

Wife Gisele, sitting on an opposite sofa, says: “All the stories started flooding back. We stood on the stage for like an hour and he was reliving it, revisiting it. It was lovely to see.”

Oldman picks up: “It was the first time I’d revisited it all with the kids. The anecdotes, the actors, the performances. Paul (Crewes, York Theatre Royal’s chief executive) asked me if I ever thought about going back on stage.”

Oldman pauses. He does a lot of pausing while he appears to almost find himself reliving the memories he’s sharing.

“A little later I emailed Paul and suggested Krapp’s Last Tape. He emailed back ‘perfect’.”

Oldman returned to the theatre to make sure the place where he began working in rep in 1979 was the right place for this project.

“We stood on the stage and talked about how Krapp looks back at himself as a younger man and it mirrored what I was doing. It was harmonic; the older man revisiting his younger self and an older man coming back to his younger self.

“I’m 67 now. It seems crazy. I’m two year’s shy of the Beckett character. It catches up with you.”

He tells a story - he tells a lot of stories - about Ian Holm ‘lovely man, beautiful actor’, who was cursed with stage fright so bad that he was curled up in a ball in the dressing room. Oldman wondered if the same curse might befall him.

“You build up a bit of a monster in your head. You think ‘it’s been such a long time, how am I going to feel?’. Excited, terrified, I’m all those things. I got here and I got into rehearsal, met the gang and…I was in a rehearsal room. It was familiar, it was fantastic. On movies ‘rehearsal’ is sitting around reading a script. They think blocking a scene is rehearsal. It isn’t. It was great to be back in a rehearsal room.”

We circle around and end up back at why here in York. It can’t just be nostalgia? They have rehearsal rooms in London, in New York. Gary Oldman’s first stage role in 40 years could have been booked anywhere.

Maria, who’s selling T-shirts in the foyer, tells me that she had punters last night from America’s West Coast, East Coast and Middle America. “Tonight there was a chap in from New York,” she tells me. Oldman is a big draw.

“Beginnings are very important. It’s a very special thing that Michael Winter (former YTR artistic director) did for me. He gave me an Equity card and he gave me my beginning, gave me my start. I came straight from drama school, i actually left early, didn’t do the third year final show. The other students were all envious - but I hunkered down and did the work.”

He also knows it’s good business for York.

“It’s made some money. I’d rather give that money to York Theatre Royal than the Haymarket,” says Oldman.

There’s another why. Why is he directing himself?

“‘Cos I’ve directed myself for 50 years,” he says, before breaking into a raspy, slightly maniacal laugh that fans of Slow Horses, and Oldman’s character Jackson Lamb will recognise.

Directed himself for 50 years? Does Christopher Nolan know this I wonder?

“Oh yeah, he’s very aware of it. They all are!”

That laugh again.

“I say it jokingly, but it’s kind of true. You don’t get rehearsals (in film) you have to come ready to burn from the first bar, it’s like rock and roll, let’s go. You come, you block, (he clicks his fingers) we’re shooting. You’ve got to be ready, you’ve got to have done it in your kitchen, in the bedroom because you don’t have time to do it on set, not to create a character. I’ve done that my entire career.”

Oldman asks himself once again why.

“A kid might come and say ‘I want to see that Gary Oldman from Harry Potter and they see this and maybe the lightning bolt will hit them and they’ll say ‘I want more of that’ or even ‘I want to do that’,” he says.

“I could go to the West End sure, but why here in York? Why not?.”

Quite.