Cinema
On the boards
Peter Ackroyd
The Dresser (PG', Odeon Haymarket) rr here was a time when actors simply
played the role of hero but now, it seems, they themselves can be heroes as well: thus The Dresser, a film which does for the theatrical profession what The Front Page did for journalism. In other words, it renders it much more interesting than it actually is. The story must by now be sufficiently well known: an actor- manager of a very old school (Albert Fin- ney) prepares for what will be his last per- formance. He is not aware of that fact, however, and although this film is set dur- ing the last war the concept of austerity is clearly foreign to him. Age has been kind to him, principally because he has refused to recognise its existence, but he is suffering from an obscure mental condition which, I suspect, is terminal narcissism: 'I don't want to go on painting my face night after night,' he exclaims, although without paint his face has the pallor and immobility of a mausoleum. And so his dresser (Tom Courtenay) has alternately to cajole and flatter him onto the stage. As soon as he adopts the make-up and physiognomy of Lear, all his old magniloquence and malice return; when he takes off the mask, he dies. The idea is a good one, although it is one which can only be elaborated rather than developed; once the initial mood and situa- tion have been established, the major point of the exercise lies in maintaining them.
Here the actors come into their own. Albert Finney is a wonderful ham; with a voice like a battering ram, he storms the fortress of Shakespeare's Collected Works. As he staggers towards the footlights, he raises his eyes to the Gods, rather than the 'gods', to see if they are still watching him. Finney is in some ways too spectacular — his performance as Lear, which is seen to bring tears to the eyes of the audience on screen, only moves the audience in front of the screen to laughter. His character is bas- ed upon the late Donald Wolfit, or so everyone keeps on saying, but the quaver- ing voice and the slightly creepy humility bear unmistakable traces of at least one ac- tor who is still with us. This cult of the 'great actor' as monstre sacre would not in other circumstances be a peculiarly in- teresting one, of course: one had only to watch the British Academy awards this week to realise that actors tend to be either soporifically bland or painfully empty- headed, with about as much character as a tube of old make-up. And only those fan- tasists with an incurable love for 'the theatre' will be able to suspend disbelief at the sight of this old man behaving like a
cross between Captain Ahab and Moses. But Finney does manage to invest the part with a certain power — he creates the illu- sion of emptiness, so that he can sound all the more resonant.
Tom Courtenay, the factotum, hops around 'Sir' in the manner of those small birds which peck the insects off the skin of elephants. He flutters, he shakes, moving effortlessly from wheedling flattery to distraught self-assertion: 'Inadequate, yes,' he says of himself, 'but never, never despairing.' He is a homosexual stereotype — which is not to say that he is not convinc- ing — with limp wrist, limp elbow, limp everything, but all the time displaying a frantic optimism in the face of impossible odds. It is an old story — the servant who enters a form of marriage with the master, only to discover that he was really being ex- ploited like everyone else.
His role confirms the nature of a film which derives its comedy from the manipulation of types; both 'Sir' and dresser are the embodiments of one domi- nant characteristic, almost as if they were possessed by a 'humour' in the 17th-century sense, and as a result The Dresser is capable only of pathos rather than tragedy, of sen- timental wryness rather than comic inven- tiveness. The performances of Finney and Courtenay are excellent, but they are con- ceived within so narrow and yet so exag- gerated a range that they cannot break free of the stereotypical personalities with which they have been invested. In fact all of the characters exist essentially in two dimen- sions, and on those few occasions when a third is introduced the results tend to be em- barrassing. Perhaps this is an oblique com- mentary on the theatrical world, in which everything is meant to be 'marvellous' and everyone is 'a poppet', but I suspect that it has more to do with Ronald Harwood's script. It is conceived in too knowing, or at least too deliberate, a manner so that he seems to be viewing his characters from the outside.
But these faults are not debilitating in a film which perhaps does not aspire to being anything other than an entertainment — much of which is extremely funny. 'You must find what light you can,' the actor- manager explains to a member of his bedraggled cast after he has made quite sure that all of the available illumination is ex- pended upon him. And there are a number of good scenes which depend upon the vicarious pleasure of being 'back stage' (it seems that an Alhambra somewhere was renovated for the occasion). The direction, by Peter Yates, is a miracle of unob- trusiveness; The Dresser was originally a stage play and, although the transition from theatre to film is an extremely complicated one, Mr Yates has managed it so well that it would be impossible to guess that the operation had been Performed. This was accomplished by allowing the actors to bring themselves to life. It ought to be thor- oughly stagy, but the most extraordinary thing about The Dresser is that it looks as though it were made for the cinema.
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