Peter Marinker on performing Krapp’s Last Tape while living with Alzheimer’s

Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape has found a new audience, and Peter Marinker is preparing to return to the role he first played half a lifetime ago, reusing the tapes he recorded in 1983. He decided not to redo them, feeling they could have been better, a self-judgment that sits neatly with Krapp’s own mixture of anger and anguish.

Marinker recalls Dennis Potter’s notion of treating the past with tender contempt and says that rang a bell. Now 84, older than Beckett’s specified age for Krapp, Marinker’s portrayal will be shaped by an Alzheimer’s diagnosis he received two years ago. While playing Gandalf in a musical version of The Lord of the Rings at the Watermill he experienced little dropouts on stage: he would pause and then carry on until an understudy took over, and an MRI followed.

He later took a role in the Netflix series Death by Lightning and found learning the lines a challenge; for Krapp he will have in-ear prompts if required.

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