The Dresser
Playwright: Ronald Harwood Director: Sean Foley Duke of York’s Theatre, London WC2 (0845-505 8500) Until 14 January, then at the Chichester Festival Theatre Running time: 2hrs 35mins (including interval)
Thirty-six years after its first production, Ronald Harwood’s tragicomic evocation of the theatrical life has lost none of its appeal, said Susannah Clapp in The Observer. You might have thought a play featuring a decrepit “old ham” touring his Lear and Richard III around tatty provincial theatres would feel a bit “indulgent and limited”. Not a bit of it! The Dresser is a “terrific play about the theatre”, but you don’t need to be a theatre fan to “respond to the central relationship” between the ageing thespian (“Sir”) and his dresser, Norman. “Any wife, mistress, selfconscious egotist, overlooked pal” will recognise the pair’s pained codependency. Their relationship is “supportive, bullying, jealous, encouraging, constantly shifting. No sex but infinite withheld romance.”
Watching the play again, what struck me most was Harwood’s ambivalence towards his characters and the world he portrays, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. The playwright, who as a young man spent five years on tour with Sir Donald Wolfit, paints a “chillingly authentic picture of cold suppers in cheerless digs and of endless travel on Sunday trains”. His play is “less a love letter to theatre” than a reminder of the grot behind the greasepaint. The irony, said Jane Edwardes in The Sunday Times, is that in penning this classic, Harwood “ensured that Wolfit would be remembered for far longer” than most of his contemporaries.
I don’t suppose the masterly double act of Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay in the 1983 film version will ever be bettered, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Yet Ken Stott and Reece Shearsmith come “within a whisker” of equalling them. Stott, as Sir, is as “magnificent” as ever. However, the revelatory performance comes from Shearsmith as Norman. “There’s simply not a line mistimed [nor] a movement misjudged.” But what really lifts it is the way that The League of Gentleman star takes us “from entertaining, surface-polished camp mannerism, lots of limp wrists and arch, waspish asides, to a place of psychological perturbation no less harrowing or stirring than the madness that afflicts” his master. What “a treat”.
The week’s other opening
Oil Almeida, London N1 (020-7359 4404). Until 26 November Ella Hickson’s drama lurches from a Cornish farm in 1889 to its fusion-powered equivalent in 2051 via Iran, Iraq and Hampstead. Ambitious, yes, but it ultimately fails to engage (Telegraph).