Kean

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.

Our Review:

31 May 2007

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

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Latest User Review

Gary Millard - 26 June 2007:

Tears of laughter at Sher's performance. He was Frankie Howard, Olivier and Sid James rolled into one....

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