Ronald Harwood thinks it is a mistake for a woman to play King Lear: “It’s a very tough part. It demands huge energy and masculine strength.” I think he is wrong about that. I also think he is mistaken in banning women – he has written it into his will – from taking the main parts in The Dresser.
Nevertheless, I applaud his play. You might think that 36 years after its first production this tragicomedy would have faded. After all, it features an old ham rolling through the regions during the second world war, “giving” his Lear and Richard III. It could so easily seem indulgent and limited. Far from it. Of course, this is a terrific play about the theatre. But you don’t have ever to have sat in the stalls to respond to the central relationship. Any wife, mistress, self-conscious egotist, overlooked pal will recognise the truth in the co-dependency of “Sir” and his dresser, Norman: supportive, bullying, jealous, encouraging, constantly shifting. No sex but infinite withheld romance.
Freddie Jones (father of Toby) and Tom Courtenay evidently made this galvanising in the first production. As did Albert Finney and Courtenay on film. Last Christmas, Anthony Hopkins and Ian McKellen smouldered in a depth-charge Richard Eyre television production. Now Ken Stott and Reece Shearsmith are making it differently compelling. Stott arrives booming and blubbing. Red in the face. Terrified hair. When he leans on the doorframe he looks as if he could destroy it simply by breathing. He floats into witlessness – and yet remains wily. He is riveting. Shearsmith begins so far up in camp that only a dog could hear him: he is all moue, tut, bended wrist and sidling shoulder. Yet he settles down into true Norman: twisting sourness and sycophancy, real affection and fake display.
Sean Foley’s production settles too. It starts by looking nervously for slamming-door farce. It moves into boldly projecting Harwood’s very funny chaos scenes. When characters have to improvise for a no-show actor: “Methought I saw the king.” When Norman has to make a front-of-curtain announcement: “Was I all right?” Harwood was himself a dresser: to fruity-voiced Donald Wolfit, most famous for his Lear. He knows every beat of a production. He knows, too, how costume can change a character. His play is brilliantly fuelled by theatrical manners and by Shakespearean quotes and references. “Sir” is losing his wits. His decline is, like Lear’s, acted to the accompaniment of a mighty storm: the stage-quaking sounds of German bombardment. And who is the Dresser but Lear’s Fool: witty, melancholy – and with a life that is going to be written out.
Anyone who has worshipped Selina Cadell as the surgical-collared, stalking pharmacist in Doc Martin will not be surprised to find her in command here as a stage manager. In a play in which “spinster” is used as if it were a definition of character, she makes a cardigan look like a badge of honour.
• At the Duke of York’s, London until 14 January, then at the Chichester Festival theatre, 25 January to 4 February
