Every two or three theatrical seasons a performance comes to the West End that has critics scrabbling for the phrase “tour de force”. And then, once a generation, a performance stands the test of time, its memory handed down in cultural folklore: Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth, Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice in The Entertainer, or Mark Rylance in Jerusalem.
This spring many theatrical pundits agree the name of Denise Gough can be etched up there with the best of them. Last Sunday her harrowing, bravura portrayal of an addict named Emma in Duncan MacMillan’s new play People, Places, Things earned her an Olivier award for best actress. The next night, clearly elated, she brought the trophy on to the stage of Wyndham’s Theatre for her curtain call.
“I wasn’t really going to bring the award out, but I am really proud of the audience for this show. They are the final element,” Gough told the Observer this weekend. “Emma lives every night because people are coming to see it. It is quite an intense thing to sit through. I can hear people reacting. So at the end I wanted to say, I am all right. You are all right.”
But what makes an acting performance qualify as a tour de force? And is it a mixed blessing to be so closely associated with one towering role? “I don’t care what people call it,” said Gough. “That is not my business. I have been doing this role since last year and the play means more to me than normal, because of the people I have met and the people it might be helping. When people write things about the production, that is not me. I am just doing my job. It is only that people are now seeing it. It is all technique and years of experience, not magic.”
Yet a stage performance that unites the critics – all writers with different readerships who often delight in disagreeing with each other – is an uncanny thing. Most would agree an acting tour de force cannot be pulled off in a bad play, but equally a particular performance can cast a long shadow over a fine work. It will be a while, surely, before another actor puts on Rooster Byron’s white vest to play Jez Butterworth’s leading character in Jerusalem on a London stage. The sound of Rylance closing the show with a banging drum still reverberates.
“Actually I don’t think tour de force should be routinely used as a word of praise,” said the Observer critic Susannah Clapp. “Rylance gave an extraordinary performance in a good play, but sometimes a tour de force can just be a ‘turn’ – and when someone is obtrusive, it is not so great for the other actors in a show.”
Like Rylance, Clapp believes, Gough has given audiences something better than a “turn”. “She is one of the best actresses around, but ‘tour de force’ can imply effort rather than quality. And Gough is such a brilliant, self-disguised actress that although I have followed her career I have often had to look her up in the cast list because I haven’t recognised her in a part.”
Clapp is thrilled to see Gough receiving recognition and adds that, while MacMillan’s play is strong, “her performance is the reason for going to it”.
In such a play, a towering central performance can be required for the piece to function at all. In other classic works, say Sophocles’ Electra, the central role is a chance for a showcase that has been grabbed by actresses including Zoë Wanamaker (1998) and Fiona Shaw (1988), all the way back to Peggy Ashcroft in 1951. Similarly, Styne and Sondheim’s musical Gypsy is a perfect vehicle for anyone woman enough to take on Mama Rose, from Ethel Merman, to Angela Lansbury in 1973, and now Imelda Staunton in the Chichester production that took the West End by storm. Certainly Staunton’s “tour de force” was an inspiration for Gough, who contacted the actress for advice.
“Gypsy wouldn’t normally be my kind of show,” said Gough. “But it was great. Imelda only missed something like three shows in eight months. That is why I had to talk to her. That was the one.”
The physical demands on both actresses have been marked. “I have to sleep as much as I can,” said Gough, “although I am finding sleep hard because my adrenal glands are going at 90mph. And I didn’t sleep well last night but I have to be kind to myself.
“Hopefully next week I can go back to my yoga. Imelda suggested I see a physio, and that has been brilliant. I know I shouldn’t be doing anything athletic, I need to save that for the stage. Anything I am doing should be about relaxation. To be honest, I can manage one show, but days with two shows are a killer. I have to go straight to bed and meditate to get over it.”
When it comes to the history of musical barnstormers, Clapp puts Glenn Close’s performance as Norma Desmond in Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard near the top of her list, but she also salutes her great favourite, Eileen Atkins, in a one-woman show as Ellen Terry in which she “graciously” switched from playing Cordelia to Lear in one scene: “She acts everybody off the stage by not acting. She is almost the reverse of a tour de force.”
A remarkable performance from Ralph Fiennes in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman wins Clapp’s accolade for an actor: “The part is most extraordinary. I happen to know he had wanted to do it for a long while, and it was a feat of memory.”
Critics often genuflect at the mention of Derek Jacobi’s Cyrano in 1983, while in 2007 Anne Marie Duff cemented her reputation with a fiery St Joan at the National Theatre. The actor Simon Callow was bowled over by Jonathan Pryce’s “very Celtic Hamlet” in 1980, he said this weekend. “He played Hamlet’s father too, as a vision rather than a ghost. That was quite sensational.”
To justify being hailed as a tour de force, the performer ought to spend a lot of time on view. For those who remember seeing Glenda Jackson in 1964 as the inmate Charlotte Corday in Peter Weiss’s gruelling play Marat/Sade, the experience was gripping. Similarly, Judi Dench put in the hours on stage as Mother Courage at the Barbican in 1984 while Vanessa Redgrave won raves as Lady Torrance in Orpheus Descending in 1989.
When a playwright such as Samuel Beckett throws down the gauntlet, an actor has no alternative but to show endurance; first Billie Whitelaw, and now Lisa Dwan, have risen to that challenge.
Occasionally it works the other way around and a play is created as a showcase for a talent. In Peter Morgan’s The Audience, his play about the Queen’s interactions with successive prime ministers, Helen Mirren was scarcely off-stage and her transformations were the heart of the action.
Finally, of course, a major performance can be met with a standing ovation because it is the happy ending of a traditional theatrical fairy story: that moment when an understudy steps into the limelight at the last minute. So Noma Dumezweni, the actress soon to play Hermione Grainger on stage in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, was applauded last year for slipping into Kim Cattrall’s slingbacks in Penny Skinner’s play Linda.
Gough admits she is now glad to be joining a bigger cast in her next production for the National Theatre: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: “Right now for two and half hours I don’t stop, so I am looking forward to not having to carry it on my own. It will be nice to share it.”
