Image source, Stagefright Films Image caption, Peter Marinker, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease two years ago, began dress rehearsals for the Beckett play Krapp's Last Tape in June
For four days running, Peter Marinker had arrived at rehearsals that were not even taking place. Dementia had muddled the dates in his mind.
Yet he is now preparing to do something most actors would find daunting even with perfect recall: performing a much-loved Samuel Beckett play alone on a London stage.
Marinker, 85, is best known for his voice work: from radio plays and video games to big-budget films like Labyrinth and Paddington in Peru.
On camera he was the adviser to the US president in Love Actually and one of the airline passengers in the drama United 93.
In 2023 he was playing Gandalf in a stage version of Lord of the Rings when he felt himself "switching off" and an understudy had to take over for the rest of the run.
MRI scans and other health checks followed. Then two years ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
"I just had to accept it," he says. "It explained why I kept losing things and I started laughing at myself, at all the other silly things I do again and again."
Image source, Stagefright Films Image caption, Dave Wybrow, the director of the Cockpit Theatre, approached Peter Marinker earlier this year about performing the play
At that point, some actors may have stepped back from the pressure of performing in front of a live audience.
But "out of the blue" a call came in from someone Marinker had worked with closely in the past - Dave Wybrow, the director of the Cockpit Theatre in London.
The idea was to put on Krapp's Last Tape, an intense one-man play in which an ageing writer listens back to recordings of his younger self, remembering a lifetime of regrets and missed opportunities.
"It's a dynamite show and a dynamite piece of writing," says Wybrow, whose mother also lived with memory problems at the end of her life.
Rehearsals have been running since the end of June to give Marinker extra time to practise, and a whole team assembled to make the play happen.
A stage manager will stand next to the set throughout the performances, autocue screens will be dotted around the theatre, and Marinker will be wearing a tiny earpiece so he can be quickly prompted if he forgets his lines.
Wybrow is adamant this is not about "covering up" Marinker's illness, but showing that collaborative, creative work is still more than possible after a dementia diagnosis.
From day one, Marinker says he did not have any concerns.
"Dave asked would I like to do it, and I was just 'Yes. Oh yes, yes, yes, yes!'" he says.
"I'll still get nerves [on the first night] but I know how to deal with them – that's just the adrenalin."
This is not the first time Marinker has performed the play. He first took on the same role in 1983.
The production team unearthed reel-to-reel recordings of that performance more than 40 years ago, and they will be woven into the new production as his character listens back to echoes of his younger self.
One of the striking things about Alzheimer's is that memory loss can be selective rather than uniform.
Early in the disease, regions around the hippocampus, deep within the brain's temporal lobes, are among the first to be affected.
That area plays a key role in forming and retrieving what scientists call episodic memories: memories of specifi…