Passion's Cue

By T.E. Kalem

THE DRESSER

By Ronald Harwood

The god of the theater is the theater, a faith taken on faith, a seraphic dream from which none of the participants ever fully awaken. The motive power of The Dresser is that passion.

Two quite different men are in thrall to it in this tragicomic drama and bonded to each other in something resembling a love-hate relationship. Sir (Paul Rogers), who is called only that, is the last of a dying breed of British actor-managers who tour the provinces paying flawed but fervent fealty to Shakespeare. The time is 1942 in bomb-blasted England, and the war has depleted Sir's resources to an extremely tatty troupe: "I'm reduced to old men, cripples and Nancy-boys. Herr Hitler has made it very difficult for Shakespearean companies."

For 16 years, Sir's dresser Norman (Tom Courtenay) has shielded him from difficulties and the truths that sear. Playing loyal serf to imperious sovereign, he has bolstered Sir's morale, salved his ego, washed his underpants, suffered his diatribes and basked in the reflected glory of his occasional triumphs upon the stage. Norman is nimble-witted, mocking, tartly observant, yet given to foggily elusive reminiscence. His most trusted friend seems to be the half-bottle of Scotch in his back pocket. Norman is a homosexual, but his love for Sir is protective, albeit possessive, and achingly platonic.

The dimensions of that love are tested and proved in the course of the play. On the eve of appearing in King Lear, Sir has abdicated the realm of sanity, gone mad before his cue. In the aftermath of an air raid, he has fled into the center of town and shredded his clothes in a driving rain. Hospitalized, he releases himself and bombards his way into his own dressing room. What Norman is confronted with is a shuddering, sobbing hulk of a man who cannot remember the first lines of a play he has performed 426 times. Sir's wife (Rachel Gurney) and his longtime stage manager (Marge Redmond) are all for canceling the performance, but Norman adamantly invokes the theater's sacrosanct commandment without actually uttering it--the show must go on. Norman pleads with Sir, he prods, he cajoles, he utters the hypnotizing words ("a full house"), catapulting the fragile tyrant out of a trance and onto the stage.

Apart from its affectionate snapshots of theatrical mechanics, backstage bitchiness, superstitious rituals and votive dedication, The Dresser's compounded impact comes from its being a Lear within a Lear. Norman is Shakespeare's Fool as much as he is Sir's. The storm-ravaged heath is Britain under the lightning bolts of the Luftwaffe, and Sir's stunted wartime company resembles the decimated retinue of soldiery left to Lear's command. In his foray into town, shivering, soaked, his mind cast adrift from its moorings, Sir could be Lear's naked "unaccommodated man" shorn of all sense, vanity and power.

What the play owes to its two leading actors is incalculable. Rogers' Sir is a white-maned lion who roars formidably against his self-sought fate. He is a ham to his hocks, but he serves Shakespeare with feudal valor ("We've done it, Will, we've done it"). As for Courtenay's Norman, as his voice echoes sepulchers and his hands etch the air with images of touching vulnerability, he opens the book of acting to a previously uncut page. --By T.E. Kalem

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