A delirious reminder of theatre’s power to enhance our lives
Sir’s “storm” tirade from The Dresser by Ronald Harwood (1980)
‘Backstage plays never do well,” John Gielgud tactlessly advised Ronald Harwood when the South African-born novelist, screenwriter and playwright told him he had just finished a script about an ageing, ailing actor-manager and his dutiful dresser.
The Dresser was inspired by Harwood’s long stint in the Fifties in that titular role. Joining the touring company of Donald Wolfit (1902-1968) in 1952, initially as an actor, he became the star’s costume-fixer and assistant behind the scenes, a gatekeeper figure eventually entrusted with Wolfit’s business affairs at the age of 23.
Although the play was avowedly the product of his imagination, comparisons to Wolfit were inevitable. Harwood had written a perceptive and appreciative biography in 1971, but held back from dramatising Wolfit’s vanished realm of heavy greasepaint and theatrical grandeur, anxious not to traduce it. Although his widow thought he did, and wept at it, his two-act portrait of a diehard stage animal has helped perpetuate Wolfit’s memory – even salvaging his reputation from such snooty contemporary evaluations as the actress Hermione Gingold’s famous remark about Laurence Olivier’s rise, “Olivier is a tour de force; Wolfit is forced to tour”, through affirming the artistic value of life on the road.
And Gielgud’s prejudgment couldn’t have been proved more wrong. When it premiered at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, in March 1980, directed by Michael Elliott (father of latter-day directorial marvel Marianne), there was – according to Harwood’s biographer, W Sydney Robinson – “a discernible sense in the theatre that evening that history was in the making”. The audience hung on every roaring word of Freddie Jones’s “Sir”, soldiering through the provinces with his long-suffering retinue in 1942, nobly resolved to alleviate wartime privation with thespian riches.
Sir is giving his King Lear for the 227th time, or trying to – the play begins with him weepily unravelling backstage, his lines forgotten, in a breakdown that parallels the psychic storm in Shakespeare. Norman, his prissy, waspishly protective dresser (played at the premiere by Tom Courtenay) attempts, like Lear’s Fool, to tease and taunt, cajole and comfort him back to readiness.
Wittily tragicomic, the play – which transferred to London’s Queen’s Theatre 40 years ago this week – was hailed by the critics, adored by the public and lauded by the profession. Courtenay himself has suggested it “will be performed for as long as actors and theatres continue to exist”.
“I don’t think there’s been a night since it first opened that it hasn’t been performed somewhere in the world,” Harwood says.
The context
Norman has succeeded, with tireless attentiveness, in bringing Sir back to equilibrium and egotism (“It’s going to be a Full House tonight”), a task assisted by a German bombing raid, rousing the Churchillian lion in the old stager (“Each word I speak will be a shield against your savagery!”). The air raid continues into Act Two; we watch the action in the wings as the play hurtles – via snippets, punctuated by blackouts – to Lear’s storm scene, with noises frantically off as the company, led by Norman, rattle the thunder sheet, operate the wind machine and do their utmost to generate the right atmosphere: an “overpowering” sound. But Sir “comes raging into the wings”, furious at what he perceives as a lacklustre effort.
What’s in the speech?
“Where was the storm? I ask for cataracts and hurricanes and I am given trickles and whistles. I demand oak-cleaving thunderbolts and you answer with farting flies. I am the storm! I am the wind and the spit and the fire and the pother and I am fed with nothing but muffled funeral drums. Christ Almighty, God forgive them for they know not what they do. I am driven deaf by whispers. Norman, Norman, you have thwarted me. I was there, within sight, I had only to be spurred upwards and the glory was mine for the plucking and there was nought, zero, silence, a breeze, a shower, a collision of cotton-wool, the flapping of butterfly wings. I want a tempest not a drizzle. Something will have to be done. I demand to know what happened tonight to the storm!”
Why is it so powerful?
This tirade is steeped in Harwood’s own hapless first-hand experience: Wolfit, indignant at the storm scene’s sonic deficiencies, dispatched his underling up inside an empty water tank suspended in the rigging. He had to bash it with a mallet for dear life (“He still didn’t think it was loud enough”). It is gloriously comic in its rip-roaring oratory and tyrannical dissatisfaction, yet musters pathos, too – distilling the borderline insanity and bravura admirability of actorly obsession. In the gap between art and life, intention and accomplishment, and the refusal to accept that gap, Sir becomes a microcosmic embodiment of human futility and striving.
In performance
Jones reprised his performance in a 1993 BBC radio production (available via Youtube), unleashing a barrage of tremulous and fruity outrage. In the West End in 2016, Ken Stott’s Sir fulminated with apoplectic aplomb, Reece Shearsmith’s whey-faced Norman withstanding his torrential abuse like a sturdy oak that has weathered the like oft before. But it’s hard to imagine anything will better the delirious comedy of Peter Yates’s multi-oscar-nominated 1983 film version, with Courtenay going ape as he bangs furiously at the timpani and suffering the wrath of a fright-faced Albert Finney, whose histrionics run from the wings through corridors and into the dressing room, “Sir” disrobing as he goes. Finney had spent hours listening to recordings of Wolfit in his heyday; it shows.
Why it matters now
A play about players can ordinarily risk looking like a self-indulgence. But conjuring a period when – with Wolfit boldly playing Shakespeare as the bombs fell on London – the show really did go on, it speaks today with renewed force. Wolfit represented the last of an actor-manager tradition that had run for 200 years, and Harwood’s affectionate celebration of this dogged theatrical relic now has an added poignancy. With our theatres closed, we see how swiftly one era can pass into the next, how evanescent and mortal the profession is, but also how valiant and life-giving, too.
Extract taken from The Dresser, © Ronald Harwood and reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd