Review The Dresser

The Dresser
by Ronald Harwood

On The Chessboard
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/duke-of-yorks/

The King is in his counting house in Ronald Harewood's 1980 play The Dresser,  but his health is failing and mental faculties faltering. Yet he remains literally a man of many roles, running a Shakespearean repertory company during World War II bombing and taking on Shakespeare's King Lear, Richard III and, yes, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in alternate performances.

Played here by Ken Stott, "Sir" the actor/manager inherits the legacy of actors like Edmund Kean in more ways than one.  He maintains a precarious hierarchy, in a manner part galley slave gangmaster, part headmaster, touring the British Isles.

All the while, he's kept on his feet, chivvied, bolstered by and nannied on to the boards by his dresser for 16 years, superstitious yet expedient Norman (Reece Shearsmith).

A comedy, a tragedy and - in the case of Norman - a touch of music hall variety, The Dresser hearks back to a repertory system age when theatre became part of, and was in part bailed out, by the national war effort.   But here the countdown to the production of King Lear, instead of an ordered chessboard,  is as out of sync as the Lear mad scene, mired, we are subtly reminded, in the dangerous politics of the time.

At its centre Stott captivates and repels with his fruity tones and timing as the collapsing, mercurial, selfish Sir.

Sir who is dependent on the lure of the footlights to impress and bring fresh meat to the company yet still determined, however haphazardly, to keep what he sees as "the faith".  

The only male actors available are those not called up - too old or invalided out. Like bespectacled Geoffrey (Simon Rouse), with the air of a civil servant rather than a thespian, unexpectedly elevated to the role of Fool. Or a saturnine Oxenby (Adam Jackson-Smith) who could possibly be a communist or maybe something else, at any rate out for "a new world order", especially if it involves  a play he has written.  

While "Sir" is "sir" to his company, it is his apparent consort who is truly "Her Ladyship" (a Wagneresque Harriet Thorpe), the daughter of a Baronet, although perhaps first brought in like another minor artistocrat's daughter who is mentioned and whose mother invested money in the company.

Also part of the aging thespian's retinue is the efficient stage manager spinster, Madge (Selina Cadell), whom we learn was dazzled at the start of her career by the footlights and "Sir" but has now having given up all hope of that first passion for  him being reciprocated,

Directed by Sean Foley, The Dresser takes place on a handsome, detailed set designed by Michael Taylor. A crossways' dressing room with corridor at the side occupies the first act and a revolving set revealing backstage, the wings and finally full frontal performance in the second, with neat musical transitions by Ben and Max Ringham and lighting from James Farncombe.

Inspired by Ronald Harwood's time as a dresser for Donald Wolfit, there's plenty of kingly pomp, as much as farcical missed entrances, in the play within the play. As well as visceral insight when the lives of the protagonists and the Shakespearean drama superimpose on each other.  Yet this is no sentimental trip down memory lane.

Despite the comedy, The Dresser is a sad, bitter play focussing on a theatrical world which subsists as a perpetually under-funded hierarchy of coercion and exploitation.

With its sporadic, if gentle, hints that performance also underpins violent debt-fuelled politics, it's a green light for this strange, double-edged dissection of a touring company at war.

Review Lawrence After Arabia

Lawrence After Arabia

by Howard Brenton

Arabian Knight 

http://www.hampsteadtheatre.com

 

It's now a few  generations since David Lean, Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif gave us Lawrence of Arabia. Now Howard Brenton nips in with Lawrence After Arabia before the Chichester Festival Theatre's production of a separate much older play by Terence Rattigan, Ross, which was jettisoned after the movie went into production.

So younger readers may have to be instructed on the background (see link),and glamour of T E Lawrence, almost a British Boys' Own equivalent of a sexless Rudolph Valentino sheik. Indeed Lawrence is described so many times in Howard Brenton's new play as "stepping back into the limelight", we wondered whether there should have been an upper case "L" and if Charlie Chaplin was thinking of producing a movie about him many years before the well-known desert epic!

Set in the early 1920s in Bernard  and Charlotte Shaw's luxury Hertfordshire cottage, Lawrence After Arabia covers  the time T E Lawrence enlisted  under a false name in the RAF, apparently trying to escape his fame (and the propaganda) as a derring-do British hero who allied himself with the Arab cause against the failing Ottoman Empire.

We have to confess  a personal interest in this, as a relative married  a Welsh Cambridge don who had also attended Jesus College, Oxford, was in the intelligence corps as an Oriental studies expert at the same time as Lawrence (and also knew his brother Arnold).

While we're no experts and have only done the slightest of research some years ago, it seems Lawrence was not as isolated and his company was much more diverse than many would assume. But this play isn't a close study of Lawrence. 

It actually reminded us a little of Ronald Harewood's An English Tragedy, we've recently seen in an amateur production, although it would of course be misleading to identify Lawrence with the same politics. We should also say, as explained in Lawrence After Arabia, Lawrence turned down a knighthood (never let a fact get in the way of a good headline ;)!)

Curiously while Jack Laskey makes a quietly indiosyncatic and charming Lawrence wracked with guilt at his part in colonial double dealing, the Shaw household has the most punch in this play. The parallels between the myth of a Shavian heroine, in a work then in progress, and the hype surrounding Lawrence make for a convincing parallel as Shaw scholarship has uncovered.

It's a pity then that an aphoristic Shaw (Jeff Rawle) and his secretary Blanche (Rosalind March) are written as rather one note. Even if the suggestion does crop up that the image of Lawrence as portrayed in the play and other literature may itself be a figment of Shaw's socialist and anti-colonial imagination. This begs further questions about Shaw and his cohorts' promotion of  Lawrence, questions which remain unasked in Lawrence After Arabia.  

Shaw's wife, Charlotte, (Geraldine James), a wealthy woman and a powerhouse in her own right, is an intriguing character who deserves exploration. 

However she is given rather disappointingly reductionist motives. Still, James does well to convey sensitive intellect despite some rather clunky dialogue. And hey ho, maybe Charlotte shares the fate of many a woman where biographers, at least in the past,  have more of a stake in the male subject than those they rate as the supporting cast.   

All in all, this feels like the bare bones of something or a pulling together of disparate elements focussing, for the moment, on Lawrence rather than a development of the Lawrence story. 

It's proficiently directed by John Dove and all the actors acquit themselves well and don't bump into the furniture in Shaw's study designed by Michael Taylor! ;) But the switch from the study to the desert feels more like a slickly attractive school primer going over well-worn ground than revelation. An  amber light.