“The Dresser” is the backstage tale of a broken-down old Shakespearean actor making his final performance as “King Lear.”
It’s the kind of play you rarely see staged locally because of a dearth of skilled actors both old enough – and, frankly, hale enough – to pull it off.
The highest compliment one can make about Jonathan Farwell’s portrayal of the blustery, ravaged actor known only as “Sir” is that audiences likely then would give anything to see him actually play the decrepit Lear himself.
That’s saying something considering this moving and melancholy tale is just as much about the man’s loyal dresser, Norman. In Farwell, who is 74, and Leonard E. Barrett Jr., director Laura Jones has paired two actors at the top of their form in Fort Collins.
Ronald Harwood’s script, which was made into an Oscar-nominated 1983 film starring Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, is based in part on his five years as a dresser for Sir Donald Wolfit.
The time is 1942 and German bombs are raining down, but the show goes on in England’s lower provinces. Sir leads a ragtag, war-depleted Shakespeare rep company made up of “old men, cripples and nancy boys.” Sir is now as infirm and exhausted as he is arrogant and paranoid. The madness that swallows Lear whole now encroaches on the quixotic actor who no longer can recall lines he’s recited 227 times before.
A trio of ladies frets over Sir – the “wife” he’s selfishly never married (Wendy Ishii) because it would disqualify him from a knighthood that’s never coming; his pining old stage manager Madge (Shela Jennings); and his ripe and horizontally mobile ingénue Irene (played by a terrific young Molly McGuire, who holds her ground with gusto in a company of accomplished veterans).
But the driving love story here is the platonic affair between the obliviously dependent Sir and the gay dresser who has tended him for 16 loving and stormy years.
Farwell’s Sir is as bellowing as one might expect in portraying a pre-eminent English actor. It would be easy to get lost in his hand-quivering, mesmerizing depiction of a paranoid old man losing his battle with mortality. But Barrett’s Norman is formidable too, played so big and beyond the role’s clichéd flamboyance, it seems Norman is as much of an actor as Sir.
In an interesting nod to Barrett’s being a black actor, the ethnicity of Norman has been changed for this staging to Jamaican.
Though the plot is centered on whether Sir will be well enough to perform that night, Harwood offers a loving window into the eccentricities of backstage life with telling insights, such as “actors are remembered only in the minds of others.”
One of Jones’ daring conceits is an element of intentional artifice. Once the play-within-the-
play finally begins, Jones has her actors perform “King Lear” to the theater’s back wall before an implied audience. That shifts the real onlookers into an unfamiliar perspective.
We see the actors, but the “Lear” lines they speak are prerecorded, amplified and slightly distorted, as if piped back to where we are now – backstage. All of this is a discombobulating disconnect that brings us that much closer to the dementia within Sir’s mind.
The women in Jones’ cast are three of Fort Collins’ best. But if there is a weakness here, it is in the nagging suspicion that this staging might have been better off with Jennings and Ishii flopping roles. As Sir’s hardened “wife,” the dour Ishii (also Bas Bleu’s artistic director) has played so many similar uptight women with stiff upper lips, she could likely iron off hers.
There are few local actors in Ishii’s class, but I’m guessing her subscribers at Bas Bleu would appreciate seeing her take on more variety in her roles, specifically one that might show off her comic potential.
But no matter – this night belongs to Farwell. When the old man finally explodes backstage with, “I am the storm!” he may as well be bellowing in rage and sadness for Sir, for Lear and for the actor himself.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“The Dresser” | *** 1/2 RATING
DRAMA|Bas Bleu Theatre Company, 401 Pine St., Fort Collins|THROUGH OCT. 21|7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays|2 hours, 30 minutes| $10-$19|970-498-8949 or basbleu.org
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$7 (free Oct. 7; 303-321-5925). |John Moore
