The Guardian
Did
Edmund Kean only exist on stage? Michael
Billington on what happens when a great actor
mouths the lines set down by a philosopher.
Theatre about theatre: that seems to be dominating the Old Vic agenda this season. First Corneille’s The Illusion dizzyingly explored the theatrical perspective. Now comes Sartre’s Kean which suggests that all life is make-believe. The big difference is that whereas Cornielle’s play is a masterpiece Sartre’s strikes me as vulgar claptrap.
Dumas pére originally wrote Kean in 1836 as a Romantic drama proving
that stage illusion had a higher reality than life outside.
Sartre re-wrote it in 1953 as a comedy to show, in Eric Bentley’s
words, that the swindle on stage is much the same as the swindle off it.
Thus we see Edmund Kean, drunkard, lecher, liar and great actor,
amorously pursuing the Danish Ambassador’s wife and whipping himself into
ecstasies of jealousy when his friend, the Prince of Wales, pays court to the
same lady. In a scene of ripe
preposterousness Kean, in the midst of playing Othello at Drury Lane, leaps out
of character (or possibly into it) and brandishes his scimitar at the haught-insulting
Regent. But the payoff comes later
when Kean compares himself to his intended mistress and incipient sovereign:
“Beauty, Royalty, Genius—three reflections each believing in the
reality of the other two.” All the world, in fact, is a charade.
Historically the play is nonsense. Kean
is shown preparing to play Romeo at the advanced age of 48:
a remarkable feat since he died at 44.
But this is a minor matter when set against the persistent banality of
Sartre’s ideas. We are told a
dozen times that Kean, the master of passion on stage, has no fixed identity off
it: in awe-struck tones, he reveals
“I have a confession to make—I don’t really exist.”
This both perpetuates one of the great sentimental myths about actors and
falls oddly from the lips of a man whose whole turbulent, off-stage life
(including his notorious affair with a London alderman’s wife) was a rebellion
against the Georgian caste-system. Sartre
grafts his own philosophy about being and nothingness into a histrionic genius
and it doesn’t take.
The tone of the play is also odd. Kean’s
life was a self-destructive tragedy: one
that ended in public vilification, drunken decline and the famous on-stage
collapse in Othello (a scene, I should have thought, no dramatist could resist).
What Sartre gives us is a stagey comedy about dressing-room assignations,
amorous rivalries and attempts by a petit-bourgeois heroine to get Kean to clean
up his act. There is one good
moment when Kean wipes off his black-face make-up to confront the public in all
his vulnerability but even the effect of that is nullified by coming at the end
of a scene straight out of Carry On Thespis.
The main problem in presenting plays about great actors, said Tynan, is
casting. Derek Jacobi is a
marvelous player whose forte is a dazzling vocal control, a strong conceptual
intelligence and an instant likeability; the very antithesis of Kean who was all
thunder and lightening and darting insights as well as being the man audiences
loved to hate. Mr. Jacobi is
undeniably very funny but although Mr. Jacobi duly gives us Kean’s chameleon
uncertainty neither he nor the text, translated by Frank Hauser, persuade us we
are in the presence of genius.
The thing I most enjoyed about Sam Mendes’ production was Jeremy Sams’
wistfully jolly entr’acte music played by a quartet in motley.
There is also good support from Ian McNeice as Kean’s burly prompter,
from Eleanor David as a perfectly-accented Danish diplomat’s wife and from
Sara Woodward as Kean’s would-be saviour.
But although the Old Vic audience lapped it all up, Sartre’e comic-cuts
Kean reminds me of nothing so much as Tony Hancock in The Rebel fatuously
announcing “Actually I’m a bit of an Existentialist myself.”