Krapp’s Last Tape (Theatre Royal, York)

Verdict: Makes perfect sense

Gary Oldman’s surprise appearance at York’s Theatre Royal actually makes perfect sense. The Hollywood star has chosen to make his stage comeback — after 37 years — in Samuel Beckett’s 50-minute monologue about a rueful old git, surveying the paltry wreckage of his life.

The character is a perfect foil for the dishevelment of Oldman’s other rueful old git, Jackson Lamb, in Apple TV’s Slow Horses.

Just like Lamb, the significantly named Krapp is a man who has given up on personal appearances and raised a solitary finger to decorum, with his smelly feet, greasy hair and unguarded flatulence.

But there’s more. York’s Theatre Royal is where Oldman began his career in 1979 — including winning the coveted role of the cat in the theatre’s annual pantomime, alongside the city’s legendary dame Berwick Kaler.

And even after a successful career in Hollywood, at the age of 67 he must have some regrets — just like 69-year-old Krapp.

Beckett’s old codger recalls the pain of lost loves, a taste for one tipple too many, and professional disappointments. Oldman — married nearly as often as Henry VIII and a self-confessed former louche — can surely relate to some of that.

Gary Oldman’s surprise appearance at York’s Theatre Royal actually makes perfect sense. The Hollywood star has chosen to make his stage comeback — after 37 years — in Samuel Beckett’s 50-minute monologue about a rueful old git

The character is a perfect foil for the dishevelment of Oldman’s other rueful old git, Jackson Lamb, in Apple TV’s Slow Horses

As spectacle, there’s not much on offer — although directing and designing the show, as well as acting in it, the star ensures he’s surrounded by an impressively packed attic junkyard.

Wearing the waistcoat and collarless shirt of a music hall clown, his real-life paunch means he’s oven-ready for the part — even if his actorly jog off stage belies his character’s heavy, breathless entry up a flight of stairs.

And he uses his A-lister magic to transform the normal running time of 30 minutes into a stately 55. That’s almost doubling the length of the show, thanks to some faintly camp pigeon-like cooing, much staring into space, some rifling through boxes of tapes, and vividly munching a number of bananas.

Always one to push boundaries and innovate, Oldman tackles his bananas from the bottom up, peeling from the end. Astonishing. And there’s me wrenching at the stalk all these years. My relationship with the fruit will never be the same.

At one point, he stands suddenly to look up the word ‘viduity’ (the state of being a widow). But otherwise, his role is almost entirely sedentary and, in all honesty, unchallenging.

As spectacle, there’s not much on offer — although directing and designing the show, as well as acting in it, the star ensures he’s surrounded by an impressively packed attic junkyard

He spends much of the time listening to himself on his tapes. The height of drama comes at the end when he issues a contemptuous snort after hearing his younger self lament ‘my best years are gone… but I wouldn’t want them back’.

Even so, he manages what seems like a damp eye at recollections of time spent with a lover on a boat in the sun — a tenderness that is not easily transmitted in the huge Victorian cavern of the Theatre Royal.

The play’s brevity makes his enterprise low risk, too. He’ll surely be in bed by nine.

So what’s in it for Oldman? Nearly four decades since he last took to the stage, after cutting his teeth in London’s Royal Court Theatre and at the Royal Shakespeare Company, could it be that playing Beckett’s derelict old geezer is, in fact, a dry run for another derelict old geezer — Shakespeare’s Jack Falstaff? Or even Jackson Falstaff? Producers would fight for that.

■ Runs until May 17.