At the theater with Michael Billington
Do actors exist off stage? Diderot in The Paradox
of Acting wrote that “actors are fit to play all characters because they
have none.” Hazlitt concurred
when he said of actors: “Their
life is a voluntary dream; a studied madness.
Today kings tomorrow beggars, it is only when they are themselves that
they are nothing.” And Jean-Paul
Sartre perpetuates the notion in Kean,
based on an 1836 romantic drama by Alexandre Dumas and now running at the Old
Vic, when he has his legendary hero announce:
“I have a confession to make—I don’t really exist.”
Before dismembering the play, an absurd piece of pseudo-intellectual
bosh, I should like to address the thesis.
In the 19th century, before acting had achieved social
respectability, it may have been true that stage performers were simply romantic
chameleons; although the diaries of William Charles Macready bear ample
testament to his intellect and culture as well as his testy bad temper. But the
most famous actors of our time can hardly be scribed as anonymous ciphers once
they remove the greasepaint. The
late Sir Ralph Richardson, riding his motorbike through the streets of Hampstead
with a parrot on his shoulder, had a piratical eccentricity.
Dame Peggy Ashcroft was once described
as “a born suffragette” and has supported more good causes than almost
anyone in public life. Glenda
Jackson is soon to become a Parliamentary candidate.
And what of Vanessa Redgrave, who will not rest until Jerusalem, or
something like it, is built in England’s green and pleasant land?
I could cite many other examples to demolish the thesis that actors
evaporate into nothingness once they have discarded their stage characters.
Unfortunately, it is a thesis upon which Sartre based his piece of
extravagant hokum. He offers us not
so much a biography of the great actor, Edmund Kean, as a piece of speculative
fiction. He shows us Kean, at the
age of 48, falling in what passes for love with the wife of the Danish
Ambassador. Kean agonizes in his
dressing room as he prepares to go on stage as Romeo.
He lays bets with the Prince of Wales as to whether the desired Elena,
Countess de Koefeld, will appear through the secret door that leads to his
Castle of Otrato-like chamber. He is recklessly pursued by a tradesman’s daughter, Anne
Danby, who wants to go on the stage, as well as to cure Kean of his reckless
dissipation. In a scene that had me
choking with rage and the rest of the audience with laughter, Kean finds himself
torn between playing Othello to Miss Danby’s Desdemona, and uttering jealous
threats to the box where the Prince Regent is playing court to the beloved
Countess.
Analyse Sartre’s play and you find that it is saying two things:
that actors have no essential self and that all the world’s a stage. The first statement is untrue, the second a cliché.
Kean, above all actors, suffered not from a lack of self, but from an
excess of it: his whole life was a cry of rage against the codes and values of
the Georgian caste system (Sir Walter Scott called him “a copper laced,
twopenny tearmouth, rendered mad by conceit and success”).
He was a profligate genius who provoked the English to one of their
periodic fits of morality, rather than the existential self-doubter depicted by
Sartre. But at the end of the play Sartre comes up with the hardly
startling information that life itself is a charade. Contemplating his intended mistress, the Prince Regent and
himself, Kean announces: “beauty,
royalty genius—three reflections each believing in the reality of the other
two.” In other words, we are
role-players all.
What irks me about the play is that it overlays Dumas’s drame
romantique with self-conscious philosophical reflections of doubtful
illumination. It also traduces Kean
by giving us his drunkenness, debauchery and debt-ridden wildness but not the
thing that really matters: his
genius. The scene from Othello, for instance, is pure farce with Kean ranting at the Prince
of Wales in his box and even drawing his sword as if he were about to kill him.
Where in all this is the Kean of whom Hazlitt wrote:
“The tone of voice in which he delivered the beautiful apostrophe,
‘Then, oh farewell struck on the heart and the imagination like the swelling
notes of some divine music”? I
could not help feeling a certain chauvinistic resentment at seeing a great
English actor butchered to make not even a Roman holiday but a French comedy.
The justification, I suppose, for a play like Kean
is that it gives a stage actor a chance to simulate greatness.
Dumas originally wrote the play in 1836 for Frederick Lemaitre.
Sartre rewrote it in 1953 for another famous actor, Pierre Brasseur.
Now our own Derek Jacobi essays it and brings to it a mixture of cockney
vitality, physical restlessness, little-boy lost pathos and chirpy charm.
It is a beguiling performance—I liked the nonchalance with which Mr.
Jacobi tossed a purseful of money out of his dressing-room window—but it had
little to do with the real Edmund Kean; a swart gypsy who was ostentatiously
rebellious rather than simply cheekily defiant.
Mr. Jacobi has some good touches. Brimming
with insecurities about his status, he announces to his prompter-cum-dresser:
“I’m not slipping, but I’m not rising either.” And at the end of the Othello
sequences he wipes off his black make-up and confronts us as the epitome of
vulnerability. Mr. Jacobi is a
princely actor, at his best with a strong director:
witness his superb Benedick and Cyrano for Terry Hand at the RSC.
Here he is directed by the youthful, highly promising Sam Mendes who
seems to have given him too much comic leeway.
Mr. Jacobi charms and engages us as Kean; but of terror and passion,
there is little sign.
The rest of the Old Vic cast is up-to-scratch.
Eleanor David lends the Danish Countess a pleasing beauty that is echt-Copenhagen.
Sarah Woodward is all shy smiles and bright-eyed determination as the
tradesman daughter. Ian McNeice as Kean’s fidus
Achate Solomon, is all Laughtonesque bulk and long-suffering patience.
And Nicholas Farrell as the Prince of Wales is a nice mixture of
kiss-curls , buckled shoes and petulant resentment.
But I couldn’t help comparing Kean
with the last show at the Old Vic, The
Illusion, which also dealt with pretence and reality.
Corneille’s play gave one emotional substance, genuine satire and a
ringing endorsement of theatrical craft. Sartre’s
comedy simply tells us that all life is make-believe, and that make-believe is
make-believed squared. It is a
disappointingly hollow conclusion to come from a pioneering French intellectual.