Synopsis Drawn loosely from life, Kean is a pretender of the highest order, as Sartre described him, 'the actor who never ceased acting.' His private life is a public performance, a tragic-comedy about a man with an insatiable appetite for romantic adventure, an ego as big as a stage and an inability to rescue himself from jeopardy. This cross-century collaboration is an unmissable portrait, redolent with greasepaint and overflowing with the life of the theatre. Sartre's play is a passionate, sexy, funny, full-blooded experience for anyone who loves Shakespeare, the theatre and great adventure.
Adrian Noble’s new production of Kean starring Antony Sher as “the actor who never ceased acting” opened last night (30 May 2007, previews from 24 May) at the West End’s Apollo Theatre (See Today’s WOS TV News).
Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1954 tragi-comedy, translated by Frank Hauser, is based on Alexandre Dumas pere’s original, written in 1826 shortly after Edmund Kean had died. Born in 1787, Kean made his Theatre Royal Drury Lane debut in 1814, his performance as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice rousing the enthusiastic crowds to near rioting. His many other Shakespearean roles at the same address – including Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear - were renowned, fuelling the actor’s massive ego.
However, Kean’s private life of drinking, gambling and womanising took its toll on his talent. His last stage appearance, at Covent Garden, was on 25 March 1833, playing Othello to his son Charles Kean’s Iago. He broke down during the third act, crying “O God, I am dying” and passed away two months later.
While most overnight critics felt that Sher, one of his generation’s leading Shakespearean actors, is ideal casting for the legendary 19th-century tragedian, they were in disagreement over just how well he and director Adrian Noble rose to the challenge of reviving both Kean’s spirit and Sartre’s play – and indeed whether the play even deserves reviving. The romantic melodrama is described as an “intriguing curiosity rather than a neglected masterpiece” at best and “unalloyed displeasure” at worst.
Sher is joined in the cast by Sam Kelly, Joanne Pearce and Alex Avery, several of whom attract some favourable critical mentions for their performances. Kean continues its limited season at the Apollo until 18 August.
Michael Coveney for Whatsonstage.com (three stars) – “Sher scuttles about like a wounded tomcat, topping and tailing the play with direct reference to his own hilariously brilliant Richard III and psychotically mesmerising Macbeth for the RSC. His gleam is manic, his physical presence a cunning amalgam of Kean’s pictorial gestures and absurd bombast. What he lacks, perhaps, is the killer charisma of the sexual predator – preying on women and audience alike – that certainly characterised Olivier’s Othello. All Kean’s roles have rolled into one, so that his jealous rows with the callow Prince of Wales (an assured West End debut by Alex Avery) echo the Falstaff rejection scenes with Prince Hal, and his seductive juggling of the Danish Ambassador’s frisky wife (a husky, Ingrid Bergman-esque Joanne Pearce) and a smitten apprentice actress (Jane Murphy, a cool and pretty colleen) implies an actor muddling the Windsor version of Falstaff with an over-aged Hamlet dashing between Gertrude and Ophelia. Mark Thompson’s design creates a gilded proscenium within the Apollo’s stage, and a lovely dissonance between the New Look frocks and evening suits and the mucky, romantic backstage world of lightbulbs and panic. Here, Sam Kelly’s jaunty dresser, peeping round doors, and Oliver Beamish’s camp wig master, fluffing up curls, keep the show on the road even as Kean is hurtling off the rails.”
Benedict Nightingale in The Times (three stars) – “If anyone was born to impersonate the 19th-century actor Edmund Kean, it was surely Antony Sher. He has the figure, which is small, and the energy, which is big. He can be fierce and feral and everything that made the great Edmund idolised as an actor and detested as a man. Yet I must admit that, when I saw him in Sartre’s updating of Dumas’ Kean, Sher wasn’t as forcefully magnetic as I expected. I’ve seen this more hilariously staged. But let me not suggest that Sher isn’t largely the mix of imp, poseur, ironist and confused thespian that Sartre created. He’s wry enough when he admits to not knowing when he’s acting and when he’s not, or when he wonders if “true feelings aren’t just bad acting”. He’s successful enough when he adopts a joke accent or launches into love charades with Elena. But why has the stage become a tiny prosc-arch affair, presumably a shrunken Drury Lane? It seems incongruous, given the modern costumes, and doesn’t bring the intensity that, when I saw it, the production needed.”
Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph - “In yesterday's Telegraph, Antony Sher confessed that stage fright almost ended his career. Watching this deadly revival of Jean Paul Sartre's 1954 play about the great 19th-century actor Edmund Kean, one wishes the condition had lasted a little longer. If it had, we might have been spared a ghastly evening of tedium and pretentiousness. It takes a certain skill to make Kean's roistering life seem dull, but Sartre, adapting an earlier 19th-century melodrama by Alexandre Dumas père, triumphantly pulled off the tricky feat. Among a cast who seem almost as stupefied with boredom as the audience, there's a touching cameo from the ever-reliable Sam Kelly as Kean's devoted dresser. But even he can't save the show single-handedly. Optimistically described in a programme note as ‘a cerebral farce whose glittering surface looks back to Wilde and forward to Stoppard’, Kean actually proves the dreariest of dramatic dead-ends. Early baths all round, I fear.”
Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard (two stars) – “Nothing but Sir Antony Sher's desire to portray the famous 19th-century actor and philanderer Edmund Kean can explain the decision to resuscitate Jean-Paul Sartre's grimly unamusing version of Alexandre Dumas' romantic melodrama. In Adrian Noble's misjudged production the play is confusingly staged both in the 1950s, when Sartre's adaptation was premiered, and in Kean's own time - though in either period most actors, Sher excepted, adopt a burlesque style of heightened insincerity and affectation. No comic or satirical points are scored by this device. Here, in unenergised and glum form, a dull voice either a throaty rasp or rising to mannered, high notes, Sher never conveys what a thrilling Shakespearean, seductive lover and exuberant character Kean must have been, or how different acting styles must have been then. It is an evening of unalloyed displeasure.”
Paul Taylor in the Independent (four stars) – “Antony Sher has never fought shy of being larger-than-life as a performer, so he's able to generate just the right sense of inordinate on-and-off stage appetite and reckless, verging-on-the-ridiculous bravura needed to play the version of the great 19th-century actor, Edmund Kean, that Sartre serves up in his 1953 play. Revived now in a breezily entertaining production by Adrian Noble, the piece comes across as an intriguing curiosity rather than a neglected masterpiece. The handling of the potentially ridiculous crescendo of coincidences and reunions in the final scene is quite masterly. At each turn, we see people struggling to adjust to bewildering new realities and the mood at the end is expertly mixed, allowing a sense that some things cannot be resolved to complicate the atmosphere of wonder and spiritual transcendence.”
When I saw Laurence Olivier play Othello, his epileptic fit was so real, and so terrifying, that I had to rush from my two shilling standing place at the back of the Old Vic stalls and vomit in the restroom. No other actor in my experience has summoned this fury at the outer limit of emotion, or the ability to convey it, but Edmund Kean, by all accounts, was a worthy precursor in the early 19th century.
To see him act, said Coleridge, was to read Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. And the programme at the Apollo quotes Fanny Burney: “If he was irregular and unartistlike in his performance, so is Niagara compared with the waterworks of Versailles.”
Something unusual, tumultuous and “modern” was going on. In the biographical play Kean, Antony Sher, in a performance of dedicated oddness, crude vanity and sweatiness, suggests that acting ancestor was a social outcast with his roots in the vaudeville of the day – he is performing the last act of Othello as a charity for the much-loved, impecunious tumblers of his youth - who blurred the edges of his stage and social personalities with booze and sexual rapacity.
Jean-Paul Sartre is the unlikely author of this meta-theatrical 1953 backstage farce, bludgeoned into adapting Dumas pere’s 1836 pot-boiler by an actor whom Sartre wanted for a more serious piece. Adrian Noble’s skilful production uses Frank Hauser’s prickly-sharp translation, first despatched with scornful, puffed up bravura by the late, great Alan Badel in 1971. Derek Jacobi followed in more gracious, matinee idol mode in a Sam Mendes production in 1990.
Sher scuttles about like a wounded tomcat, topping and tailing the play with direct reference to his own hilariously brilliant Richard III and psychotically mesmerising Macbeth for the RSC. His gleam is manic, his physical presence a cunning amalgam of Kean’s pictorial gestures and absurd bombast. What he lacks, perhaps, is the killer charisma of the sexual predator – preying on women and audience alike – that certainly characterised Olivier’s Othello.
Jacobi – who was Cassio to Olivier’s Othello - evoked the great man’s voice, glistening make-up, reddened inner mouth, splayed hands and leonine amble in the charity show; Sher is not so bold, settling for comic tableaux and – in his best, and most remarkable, sequence – a complete on-stage breakdown: “There’s no one here I don’t really know… the rest is silence.”
All Kean’s roles have rolled into one, so that his jealous rows with the callow Prince of Wales (an assured West End debut by Alex Avery) echo the Falstaff rejection scenes with Prince Hal, and his seductive juggling of the Danish Ambassador’s frisky wife (a husky, Ingrid Bergman-esque Joanne Pearce) and a smitten apprentice actress (Jane Murphy, a cool and pretty colleen) implies an actor muddling the Windsor version of Falstaff with an over-aged Hamlet dashing between Gertrude and Ophelia.
Mark Thompson’s design creates a gilded proscenium within the Apollo’s stage, and a lovely dissonance between the New Look frocks and evening suits and the mucky, romantic backstage world of lightbulbs and panic. Here, Sam Kelly’s jaunty dresser, peeping round doors, and Oliver Beamish’s camp wig master, fluffing up curls, keep the show on the road even as Kean is hurtling off the rails.
Tears of laughter at Sher's performance. He was Frankie Howard, Olivier and Sid James rolled into one. - Gary Millard
26 Jun 07
Tears of laughter at Sher's performance. He was Frankie Howard, Olivier and Sid James rolled into one. - Gary Millard
26 Jun 07
4 BECAUSE OF SHER - ALWAYS RELISHING HIS OBVIOUS ENJOYMENT AMD BRILLIANCE - BUT THE DIRECTION IS UNINSPIRING SLACK FROM NOBLE, THE PLAY IS FLABBY, AND APART FROM MURPHY AND KELLY THE SUPPORT IS WEAK. BUT SHER IS SO MUCH FUN, AND HIS CAMEOS HILARIOUS. - ALEX GREEN
05 Jun 07
What a superb perfomance. Sher is brilliant and a great asset to theatreland!! I have seen is Malvolio and Macbeth for the RSC all played brilliantly. Joanne Pearce is superb as Elena as she was in Adrian Noble's Plantagenets for the RSC in 1988. Sam Kelly as Salomon as the same cheeky comic spirit as seen in his famous role in "Allo Allo". Jane Murphy plays a fine Anne Danby reminisent of perhaps Kean's wife Mary!! Superb!! - Janice Bancroft
04 Jun 07
I was expecting the worst after the reviews i read, but was so glad i trusted my instinct and went anyway. It was so good to see a producer take a risk in the west end. I hope this show runs and runs it deserves to. Fantastic acting from the whole cast. Go and see it. - Delia
03 Jun 07
a fabulous evening. if you're at all curious go and see it. i would highly recommend this beautifully designed, bravely acted and intelligently directed production. a must see in the west end, which has so little quality non musical theatre. - sam
03 Jun 07
I'm afraid I found very little to reccommend here. Don't expect any attempt at biography, or even the witty sophistication of something like "Shakespeare In Love". What we have here seems to fall between Ray Cooney farce and Noel Coward backstage backbiting. Sadly, though all the farcical elements are present and correct (sundry wives, jealous husbands, secret doors, disguises, mistakes, misunderstandings and mistresses, and a dignitary - here, the Prince of Wales) the cast seem to play AGAINST what the script offers them, rather than embrace it. Only Robert East displays the comic timing and suavity which seem appropriate, and his performance hints at what we COULD have here. Instead, we are left with a rather dreary affair which only occasionally raises a smile, and even rarer laughs. The impression I'm left with is that someone had a bold, and perhaps clever idea - and it didn't come off. 2 stars for trying though. - Kev
26 May 07
I didn't know what to expect from this, and it is a bit of a curiosity, but a very enjoyable one. For a start, why is a play about a 19th century character set in the 1950s? This isn't a straight biography, it's a funny, sometimes farcical, portrait of an actor whose life offstage is more dramatic than the roles he plays onstage. Antony Sher gets to show off all his considerable ability and showmanship in the title role. Above all, it's a play about theatre itself and I hope this excellent and well-designed production will appeal to everyone who loves the theatre. - Citycat
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