Kean

Old Vic Theatre, 1990

with...

Derek Jacobi
Eleanor David
Nicholas Farrell
Ian McNeice
Sarah Woodward

Did Edmund Kean only exist on stage?

 Exerpt from  Michael Billington's review of Kean on what happens when a great actor mouths the lines set down by a philosopher.

      Theatre about theatre:  now comes Sartre’s Kean which suggests that all life is make-believe.  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.