The Dresser at the Duke of York Theatre: a savage but loving tribute to ham theatre
Dementia, Shakespeare and the Blitz collide gloriously in Ronald Harwood’s tragicomedy The Dresser. Set in wartime 1940s, it tells the tale of a deteriorating actor known as “Sir” and the theatre’s dresser, Norman, whose job it is to coax and bully the ailing grandee through his 227th rendition of King Lear.
A reflection on Harwood's own time with legendary ham performer Donald Wolfit, the play is also a deft rewrite of Lear's tortuous relationship with his Fool.
Ken Stott is the glorious engine that drives the play, bringing out the pathos and absurdity of Sir with aplomb, blubbing at his mirror only to snap into focus at the thought of his detested rival Arthur Palgrove. Reece Shearsmith makes a brilliantly vicious lieutenant, by turns flattering, snide, splenetic and devoted. Initially a little too stagey, his manner curdles plausibly into tipsy viperishness.
The rest of the cast are strong – Selina Cadell is the picture of buttoned-up Englishness as Sir's stage manager, while Simon Rouse is an amusingly befuddled stand-in Fool.
The first act is almost Stoppardian in its angst, with Sir unable to remember his opening lines while bombs explode off-stage in echo of Lear's thought-executing fires. The second starts out brilliantly, with Sir's threadbare retinue forced to improvise (“methinks I saw the King?”) as the master squats sullenly in the wings, lost among his demons.
It plateaus a bit towards the finish – Sir's reckoning-of-sorts with Harriet Thorpe's long-suffering leading lady is too neat after so fractured an introduction – but the moral of the story, that art can be at once a solace and a prison, is gracefully achieved.
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