KEAN.
London.
KEAN
by Jean Paul Sartre adapted from Alexandre Dumas translated by Frank Hauser.
Apollo Theatre.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm.
Runs 2hr 15min One interval.
TICKETS: 0870 890 11021/0870 040 0080.
www.nimaxtheatres.com/kean (booking fee by ‘phone or online).
Review: Timothy Ramsden 31 May.
A Kean on which it’s hard to be keen.
Edmund Kean’s acting electrified early 19-th century London. In the mid-century Alexandre Dumas put him centre-stage as a character. A century later Jean Paul Sartre rewrote Dumas’ play as a drama examining the existential: who, more than an actor, makes his characters through their actions? And, what, if anything, is left when the performance is over?
However much philosophy Sartre inserted into the play, it remains a vigorous romance. Amid scandal and adoration the actor who scorns real-life till the bailiffs call finds a sense of being, Peer Gynt-like, through love. But his love is the Danish ambassador’s wife and driven by jealousy against Anne Danby, Kean’s opposite in her purposeful pursuit of him as her intended husband.
Director Adrian Noble damps the play’s fires by setting it in Sartre’s, rather than Kean’s, age. After an opening burst of Richard III, a curtain rises behind the stage-within-a-stage on Mark Thompson’s set, which helpfully focuses action in the several dressing-room scenes, but makes for constriction elsewhere, and loses any sense of early 19th-century Drury Lane’s vastness for the performance of Othello’s final scene which is Kean’s climax.
This rising curtain reveals a stage audience in 1940s evening-dress, and a world very different from the early 19-century Regency, when Victorian morality had not spread its long influence on society in reaction to the court-scented indulgence needed here. The Prince of Wales has a key role in the plot, but Prinny, the later George IV, had no equivalent in his mid-20th-century successors, while talk of treason for an insult to the Prince (with a constable waiting to arrest the actor) sounds ludicrous.
In this inapposite setting, Antony Sher is a fine choice for Kean, the wild actor-genius. Externals fizz in Sher as they apparently did with Kean, creating repeated surprise, marking out moments for their emotional impact, giving a sense of life lived in constant high-tension. Sam Kelly is exactly right as his dresser Salomon, devoted to the actor while providing a necessary sardonic sense of reality. Other acting is adequate, but the play’s impact is muffled by the misplaced relocation of period.
Major Domo/Peter Potts: Barry McCarthy.
Elena: Joanne Pearce.
Amy, Countess of Gosswill: Gemma Page.
Count de Koefeld: Robert East.
Prince of Wales: Alex Avery.
Edmund Kean: Antony Sher.
Salomon: Sam Kelly.
Anne Danby: Jane Murphy.
Lord Nevill: Brendan Hooper.
Sadie: Hanne Steen.
Darius/Flying Fokkersh.
Flying Fokkers: Jeremy Hancock, Amanda Owen, Dodger Phillips.
Director: Adrian Noble.
Designer: Mark Thompson.
Lighting: Oliver Fenwick.
Sound: John Leonard.
Associate director: William Oldroyd.
2007-06-01 11:35:30