KEAN
Apollo Theatre, London W1
Opened 30 May, 2007
***
For pity's sake, how much metatheatre can you cram into one evening?
Theatre that uses itself as a metaphor (for what, doesn't much matter)
may seem a recent, postmodernist phenomenon, but that's far from the
case. Shakespeare was fond of it: "All the world's a stage", the
play-within-a-play in Hamlet,
and numerous other references including my favourite, from Twelfth Night, "If this were play'd
upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction." So it's
hardly surprising that one of the great 19th-century Shakespearean
actors, Edmund Kean, should himself be used as an emblem for the human
condition. Even the provenance of this play offers several layers: we
are watching the 2007 revival of the 1971 English translation by Frank
Hauser of the 1953 adaptation by Jean-Paul Sartre of the 1836 play by
Alexandre Dumas père,
whose protagonist was an actor who had died only three years earlier
than that.
You can see what Sartre found to get his existentialist teeth into. His
Kean is a man trying ever more desperately to define himself, and also
to deny himself, both onstage and off. His Drury Lane performances as
Othello, Shylock, Romeo, Lear and so on create one image for his
audience, his drunkenness and womanising another for society and the
media of the time. Neither may be real: he muses, "I sometimes wonder
if 'true feelings' are not, quite simply, bad acting." Here, he both
seeks to evade disaster whilst seducing the wife of the Danish
ambassador, being pursued in turn by an infatuated ingénue and
arousing the jealousy of the Prince of Wales, and also courts it by
provoking fiancés, husbands, suitors etc, until whatever happens
he cannot escape the web. And what does finally happen, happens during
a performance of the last act of Othello.
This combination of untrammelled wildness and calculated artifice would
naturally appeal to a writer such as Sartre in his quest for the core
of our identity. The trouble is that amid the stagecraft and the
Sartrean intellect, the force of nature that was Kean's hallmark gets
rather lost. Can it be restored in performance? Does any contemporary
actor even approach such an impact on our sensibilities? Antony Sher,
here, can portray it, but we know that Sher is a thoughtful actor; he
has long been fascinated by Kean both as an actor and an icon of
celebrity outsiderdom (the gay, Jewish, white South African Sher
identifying with the short, dark, illegitimate former fairground
performer Kean), and certainly what he gives us is portrayal rather
than being the role, as many
commentators described Kean. In fact, the play begins with Kean
performing the opening soliloquy of Richard
III, a part which was also Sher's first great triumph – another
cargo of metatheatre ahoy!
Nor, let's be honest, is Adrian Noble one of the great instinctive,
flamboyant directors. He gives us a considered rendition, with some
more (still more!) self-conscious theatricality, particularly in the
final scene when Kean and his desired Elena – or is it Sher and Joanne
Pearce? – almost step out of their roles for a moment. It can be
immensely intriguing, but not for all tastes: I was becoming engrossed
in the kaleidoscope of self-referentiality just as I know others were
giving up on the whole affair. You may well react to the idea of a play
about players by Jean-Paul Sartre just as Kean does when told, the
morning after a drunken night before, that he has promised to play
Othello's jealous murder of Desdemona, with his young admirer as the
Moor's bride: a weary, sarcastic, "Oh, God, that'll be fun!"
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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