Seam Stealer

by Toby Zinman

The Dresser Through April 7, Bristol Riverside Theatre, 120 Radcliffe St., Bristol, 215-785-0100

Ronald Harwood’s play (made into a much-admired film with Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney in 1983) is about an aging Shakespearean actor in a second- or maybe third-rate provincial touring company in England during WWII. The air raids are just another reason that the show must go on. The show in this case is King Lear, and “Sir” is at the end of his frayed rope; his devoted dresser, Norman, is trying to cajole and flatter and spur him into a performance that is nearly beyond his much-dwindled powers.

This is a play for theater-lovers. We watch backstage sound effects, dressing room scenes, the putting on of makeup, wigs, costumes: The whole illusion is created before our eyes. If that illusion is, in this production, fairly slow and static, and rather short on magic, well -- they mean well. The danger is, of course, that we might feel we're watching a second- or third-rate company perform The Dresser. Bristol is, after all, the provinces. Edward Keith Baker's direction picks up the tempo considerably in Act 2, and the admirable set, designed by Nels Anderson, serves the production very well.

Douglas Campbell is a famous actor associated with Canada's Stratford Festival, known for his King Lear; he is now nearly 80 years old and of very considerable girth. Thus his playing an aged actor of very considerable girth playing the aged King Lear adds layers the production wouldn't have with a younger actor with no lifelong Shakespearean reputation in the role. Add another layer: The playwright, Ronald Harwood, was the dresser to British Shakespearean actor Donald Wolfit during WWII.

Lenny Haas does a fine job as the fussy, never-despairing valet, the ultimate fan who knows every line, every gesture of his master's career. That this Fool is finally treated even less well than Lear's Fool rests on the fact that Sir comes to no tragic realization, and Harwood's play is, in fact, the dresser's tragedy.

It wasn't until the play was nearly over that I realized that what I'd thought was wrong with the production was the rightest thing about it: Sir never once actually looks at his dresser, although they are constantly talking to each other. This very lack of connection, of affection, the lopsidedness of this symbiotic relationship, Sir's profound, egomaniacal refusal to actually see the man who has been the mainstay of his career for 16 years, is the play's punch. It could be argued that we should have felt this all along, that the nasty surprise should have been Norman's and not ours, but, nevertheless, it works. It is also amusing that at the curtain call, Douglas Campbell takes the center spotlight, assuming he is the star, apparently forgetting that the show is called The Dresser, and that Lenny Haas has knocked himself out playing the title role.