'The Dresser' Review
Venue: Richmond Theatre, Richmond, TW9 1QJ
Dates: Tuesday 26th – Saturday 30th October 2021
OUR VERDICT:
It’s a delight to dress and go to the theatre again after the eighteen-month hiatus of Covid. And appropriate to see again that minor classic The Dresser by Ronald Harwood, which opened at the Richmond Theatre last night.
The shows must go on.
Written forty years ago and set forty years earlier in wartime Britain, the play has plodded happily through the decades, pleasing audiences by showing them the passions and pettiness, the squabbling, the humour and mundane tragedy, the private life behind the scenes of a famous actor’s public personality.
The play depicts the last night of his life.
This once great actor, now old and doddering, senile and foolish, escapes from his hospital bed to appear one last time as Lear, a tragic role he has played in 226 previous performances but now barely remembers.
Here is his tragic finale. But he is supported by a second tragic figure, his assistant and dresser, Norman.
The story explores the curious, co-dependent relationship between the giant star, “Sir,” a monstrous egotist, and his self-sacrificing, intimate attendant, the subservient but indispensable Norman, who manages the master’s every whim and tenderly directs him from below.
Norman has become the true star, the power behind the throne.
Much of the enduring appeal of The Dresser is because it provides a perfect vehicle for experienced actors to show off their talent.
There are ample opportunities for the two leads to turn on a sixpence from the pathos of mortality to ludicrous comedy, from the bellow to the whisper, the cruel to the compassionate.
It is for each audience to appreciate – and judge - how well the real-life famous actors playing Sir and Norman prepared then despaired.
In this production, the two principals are Julian Clary and Matthew Kelly both better known for the transient pleasures of light ent, but both in fact very experienced stage performers who play their parts with sufficient conviction that the audience can almost forget their fame.
They are supported, believe it or not, by another ten actors who appear suddenly at the curtain call.
Where were they for the last two hours? - They were very minor satellites of the twin stars, necessary but merely an eccentric asteroid belt.
One of the most interesting aspects of Sir’s dressing-room performance is that this type of person no longer exists.
For more than a thousand years before vanishing almost overnight in the late 1940s, “the theatre” was not so much a building but comprised troupes and companies of actors who travelled the length and breadth of the land from town to town, each evening assuming the roles of daring heroes and romantic princesses whilst in the daytime living in the strains of poverty.
Each of these roving bands was commanded by an actor-manager, Sir. Kenneth Branagh is our closest survival of the type. Anthony Quayle was one.
The last of the great actor-managers was Sir Donald Wolfit; his dresser, fresh from RADA, was Ronald Harwood, the author of this play.
Harwood always denied that Norman was a self-portrait or Sir was Wolfit. He insisted, fairly enough, that his youthful experience only provided the founding notion of the play.
A poignant shadow is added to this production by Ronald Harwood’s death in September last year, aged 85, after a glittering play- and screenwriting career.
