Gin and lime-light
Richard Shone Edmund Kean: Fire from Heaven Raymund FitzSimons (Hamish Hamilton £5.25) He was obviously intolerable—`a copperlaced, twopenny tearmouth, rendered mad by conceit and success' was how Scott described Kean. He bullied his fellow actors unmercifully, was violent and moody, broke contracts, muddled his business and surrounded himself with useless sycophants Who only encouraged his excessive drinking and whoring. Slight injuries grew briskly into monstrous hurts, and the energy which went into his roles as Richard III or Othello was frittered away on absurd rivalries and managerial quarrels. But Kean was the greatest actor of his day, instituting a new kind of acting which, though too personal to establish a school, is still influential.
What overwhelmed his audiences at Drury Lane was the physicality of his performances in Shakespeare. Compared with Kean, the fastidious Kemble with his declamatory stillness seemed to Hazlitt 'an icicle upon the bust of tragedy.' Kemble was as much a dodo after Kean as was Bernhardt after Duse. One of the merits of this book is the author's vivid reconstructions of Kean on stage. There is usually nothing so unilluminating as the retelling Of old theatrical successes with their vacant vvonderfuls' and `greats'—to hear one line from Sarah Siddons would banish reams of sPeculation. But Kean comes alive from these pages and nowhere more brilliantly than in the description of his first London season in 1814.
.After several years at the top of the bill, Widely lionised and with an eminent alderman's wife as his mistress—enjoying another kind of act between those of Shakespeare, in his dressing room—Kean's fall was catastrophic. His health was broken by alcohol and venereal disease, his arrogance had become manic and the discovery of his affair with Mrs Cox brought him into the courts and general, savage contempt. Mr FitzSimons narrates all this objectively and sympathetically and leaves us with a picture of Kean's last performances, groaning and tottering through ill-remembered parts, gulping hot brandy in the wings. To Kean's eternal fame, his last collapse was on stage playing Othello to his son's Iago. He was forty-five years old.
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