The Dresser: Malvern Festival Theatres
with Julian Clary and Matthew Kelly
A play about plays in which fear flickers perpetually at the edges
Whether or not Harwood’s opinion of the critical fraternity accords with that of his character’s (“Hate the critics?” says Sir. “I have nothing but compassion for them. How can one hate the crippled, the mentally deficient, and the dead?”), The Dresser has always been well regarded and stands as a classic within his oeuvre. It was captured on celluloid in 1983 with Albert Finney and Edward Fox, later in a televised version with Anthony Hopkins and Ian McKellen (2015), while theatrical reprisals have involved some interesting pairings too, including Reece Shearsmith opposite Ken Stott (2016) and Nicholas Lyndhurst opposite Julian Glover (2005).
Set in wartime London, as the bombs are dropping around them, the play depicts the decline of one of the remaining great actor-managers of the day, desperately propped up by Norman, his long-time dresser and devotee. The principle actor, known only as Sir, a grandee of the fading repertory tradition, is in the grip of a lachrymose breakdown, with less than an hour to go before the curtain goes up. He can’t remember his lines, even as he applies his make-up. Norman, his fey and affectionate defender of twenty years, must disentangle his scrambled Shakespeare and urge him to remove his black face paint, for tonight he is playing, not Othello as he had assumed, but King Lear.
There is a sense of mildew and decay to Tim Shortall’s set design: the dressing room captures sharply the Learesque theme of decline – of repertory theatre, of the actor-manager tradition, of the ageing man himself, as well as, of course, the old social structures of the twentieth century.
Matthew Kelly is excellent as Sir, the crumbling, narcissistic thespian ‘tottering between confusion and chaos’. At various times he is slumped motionless on his chaise longue, at others he is fully erect and gesturing towards the heavens, vacillating as he does between moribund despair and theatrical grandiosity. Despite the shakiest of starts (his entrance his painfully mistimed), Sir comes through in the end. His spirits are high and he launches a bombastic rant at the crew for not generating a loud enough storm during the famous tempest scene. Norman – long inured to these off-stage outbursts – punctures his pomposity with the sarcastic putdown: ‘I’m pleased that you're pleased.’
Julian Clary’s dresser is likeable, vulnerable, catty and loquacious. He has a habit of proffering anecdotes about his various male friends, who we imagine might have been more than simply his friends. To Madge (Rebecca Charles), the starch stiff, buttoned up, stage manager who has long held a flame for the decaying actor, he says tartly: “We all have our little sorrows, ducky, you’re not the only one. The littler you are, the larger the sorrow. You think you loved him? What about me?”
For Julian Clary, Norman’s veiled sexuality is a departure from the unapologetic exuberance of his popular onscreen persona – for this is the 1940s after all, and imprisonment a real possibility. Clary may be an accomplished performer, and as you would expect he tickles the laughter out of the play’s lacerating humour, but he doesn’t quite flex the full emotional range of his character, or tap into the terrible poignancy of the plays closing moments.
The show must go on, as the old adage goes, even in the midst of war, even in the midst of a nervous breakdown, even as the city is blitzed. But what happens when the lights come down and the performance comes to an end?
'For the first time in my life', confides Sir, 'the future is hidden from me. I am frightened of what is to come.' This is the fear flickering at the edges of a play that is ultimately about endings and the uncertainly that lies beyond.
January 18th - January 22nd
Directed by Terry Johnson
Written by Ronald Harwood
Cast includes Emma Amos, Stephen Cavanagh, Samuel Holmes.