For four consecutive days, Peter Marinker arrived at the Cockpit Theatre in London for rehearsals that were not scheduled to take place. Dementia had quietly rearranged the calendar in his mind, and yet there he was — coat on, lines half-memorised, ready to work. It is, in its strange way, the perfect biographical prelude to the role he is now preparing: an ageing man alone on a stage, sifting through the wreckage and the wonder of a life lived at full tilt. Marinker, who is 85 and whose voice has coloured everything from the Jim Henson fantasy Labyrinth to the animated charm of Paddington in Peru, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease two years ago, following MRI scans ordered after he lost his way inside a stage version of Lord of the Rings in 2023.

The diagnosis, he has said, did not break him — it explained him. "I just had to accept it," he recalls. "It explained why I kept losing things, and I started laughing at myself, at all the other silly things I do again and again." When director Dave Wybrow rang, apparently out of nowhere, to propose Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape — a ferociously interior monologue in which an old writer replays the recordings of his younger self — Marinker's answer was immediate: "Yes.

Oh yes, yes, yes, yes!" Rehearsals began in late June, extended deliberately to give Marinker more time than a conventional production would allow. Autocue screens are positioned around the theatre, a stage manager will remain visible beside the set throughout each performance, and a tiny earpiece will carry a prompt if memory fails. Wybrow, whose own mother lived with dementia in her final years, insists that none of this is concealment.

It is, rather, a demonstration — vivid and rather moving — that creative collaboration does not end where a diagnosis begins. Marinker first performed Krapp's Last Tape in 1983, which means that the play has now shadowed him across four decades and one of medicine's most unsparing verdicts.