About six years ago Bill Hayes, the producing artistic director started talking about doing a 20th year anniversary production of The Dresser by Ronald Harwood.
Remember The Dresser? – 1983 film with Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney following huge success in London and New York.
TV film 2015 with Ian McKellen and Anthony Hopkins.
A love letter to the British backstage in the early years of the Second World War when all the able-bodied had left to fight. – Not for the first time …
“And leave your England, as dead midnight still, Guarded with grandsires, babies and old women …”
Henry V, Act III prologue – Shakespeare.
What with the pandemic interfering, there will now be a 25th year anniversary production, and in a few weeks rehearsals will begin.
That’s Bill Hayes as Norman (The Dresser) placing the crown on the hairy guy (Me) who is getting ready to play King Lear.
The Dresser by Ronald Harwood, opens December 18th 2024 at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Florida
There are parallels between the practice of theatre and the practice of astrology.
“Oh yeah?” I hear you cry. “How does a planet or the stars in the sky correspond to the life of some out of work actor?”
Image courtesy of Unsplash
This is a valid question.
Consider: an actor gets a role. The parameters of the role are defined by the script. The expression of the role is guided, sometimes obstructed, but certainly shaped by a director. Within those limits the actor is free to make choices, to interpret.
My Lear will be different from your Lear. (well, one hopes).
AI generated image courtesy of Pixabay
Consider: We come into incarnation – a fancy way of saying we get born. And the mystery begins. Because: where have we come from?
Plato has it that the natural habitat of each human soul is one of the stars above and that we pass through each of the planetary spheres acquiring the qualities of that particular planet and its placement in the zodiac at that moment. We take on the costume for this incarnation and the script as written in the interplanetary potentials.
And in the play of life, with its exits and entrances, we can choose how we play the part. We don’t have ham it up.
And according to Robert Frost, Wordsworth, and particularly Shakespeare, we have all signed up for a round trip. The mighty seven ages speech from As You Like It exactly describes the progress of a life and the return. But return to what?
J B Priestly’s character Henry Ormonroyd put all of the above a lot more succinctly when he said (in When We Are Married)
“We all come here and we don’t know why. We all go in our turn and we don’t know where…”
Your blogger as Henry Ormonroyd, Guthrie Theatre 2008
My friend and sometime fellow student Maggie once said to me, “When I heard you’d become an astrologer I thought – Oh he’s lost it. … But then later I thought, oh no, he’s fond an angle.”
I have indeed lost it in the pre-Enlightenment mystery of the endless study that is astrology.
As for the angle, yes that too, Maggie was right. Though not in the sense she meant. The angle or rather the angles plural, are the horizons over which the stars rise and fall on a daily basis and which contain the clues to the weird and whacky interplay of pre-destiny and free will.
Still with me?
As part of my research into how to establish an astrological practice, I joined a networking group of holistic practitioners I’m here to tell you there is more woo-woo per square inch in Westchester, N.Y. than is commonly. suspected.
I have met some lovely people. Unsurprisingly perhaps in such a group every member is an empath – it’s almost like being with a bunch of actors.
But the point is I have been exchanging services with these people. I give them an astro reading and they give me – whatever it is they do. For brief accounts and testimonials go here.
And talking of Lear …
I have an up coming gig in West Palm Beach, Florida. I will go there in November to rehearse and then play ‘Sir’ in The Dresser. For those who don’t know the play, ‘Sir’ is a bombastic, self-obsessed old ham of an actor … and for some extraordinary reason they’ve come to me …???
In the manner of the late great Barry Humphries who proclaimed his “first farewell tour”, I’m intending this to be my last one for various reasons.
So if the stars should align, come to West Palm Beach. We open December 18th. Palmbeachdramaworks.org for details.
Have you ever read a book that made you wonder how ever did you miss something important because there it was in plain sight all the time?
A few years ago I came across this amazing volume:
I am delighted to announce that Priscilla and I will be jointly presenting on this subject. It will be online, hosted by The Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred on Tuesday July 16th 2024 at 6:30pm UK time. Here’s the link.
I’ve been in a dozen or so Shakespearean productions and have been a fan since youth. Of course I was aware of the canon being peppered with cosmic and celestial references, what I had not noticed was how certain of the plays are fraught with precise overarching astrological meanings – in the language, in the plot and in the story.
This will be a somewhat more scholarly take than my planned show AstroBard which had to be postponed earlier in the year.
If you have an interest in either Shakespeare or Astrology or ways they combine, please do come along!
NB: if you do decide to splurge on the required 10 quid (ten pounds sterling) when you click the link you’ll get to the listing page – you need the first BUY NOW button the one that is higher on the page not the lower! Thanks!
This notice goes to far flung places. Your blogger understands that you may not be able to make it to Ilmington, UK on the night. Maybe you know someone who would enjoy AstroBard?
As far as we know Shakespeare never wrote a solo. Well there are the poems of course. From time to time some brave actor has a go at the sonnets – an enormous challenge, and there are the narrative poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and the shorter, The Phoenix and the Turtle and A Lover’s Complaint – you seldom see these last named because if they do get an outing it’s usually a semi-desperate actor struggling to come to notice in one of the further-from-town venues at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Of all playwrights Shakespeare is surely the hardest to destroy.
Patrick Page in All The Devils Are Here. Photo by Julieta Cervantes
By which I mean, although it is distressingly easy to act Shakespeare badly, even when poorly done, something of the essence survives and makes the show worth seeing. Well having said that, I can think of at least one stand out exception at a major institutional theatre. Oh, alright more than one – but even in the worst of The Bard, you can close your eyes and forgive any shortcomings in diction, articulation and breath-support and imagine what your favorite actors would have done with it, can’t you? And if you do that, you can get drunk on the language.
Bad Shakespeare is, I admit pretty disturbing. But think of Shaw badly done, or, I will go further, Ibsen, nay, Pinter. When these masters are chopped up by practitioners that never found the rhythm, the result is often narcotic.
But when Shakespeare is well done … ah, that’s the stuff.
All this is a long preamble to me saying kudos to Patrick Page who has brought us a solo titled, “All the Devils are Here”. The show is an amalgam of theatre lore, well-chosen villainous Shakespearean soliloquies, (with a dash of Marlowe as a celebrity guest) and everyday chat nicely sprinkled with humor.
I persuaded Trish to accompany me on a visit to NYC to watch “All the Devils Are Here.”
It was fabulous.
I had been apprehensive. Sir John (Gielgud) has set the bar (his “Seven Ages of Man” solo) at a height to which few of us can aspire. Although his voice in recordings now sounds firmly rooted in its period; for diction, articulation, breath-control and above all, economy of expression, and once you get through all that, for the simplicity and the force of his characterizations, he stands alone.
Sidebar here: I saw “The Motive and the Cue” in London a few months ago. It has now transferred from The National to the West End, and there has been an announcement that it is hoped to bring it to New York.
The play treats on Gielgud directing Burton in Hamlet in 1964 on Broadway. A fabulous mixture of theatre gossip, and two actors divided by a mutual love of language and all that it can do. If the play does make it over here, run don’t walk for tickets.
But a solo Shakespeare? I half expected to have that experience that Peter Brook describes in his book, The Empty Space, that is to say, mouthing the words of the soliloquies that one half remembers, at the same time being mildly bored because of indifferent delivery from the performer on the stage.
Not a bit of it!
Patrick Page, who is a quality Shakespeare veteran was supported by an excellent production in terms of the lighting, set, and direction as well as his own superb skills as an actor, including a lean physique and strong baritone. His phrasing approached Sinatra-like detail and his vocal variety was finely judged. The show came in at 80 minutes which I think is clever. At 60 minutes the audience has fully tuned in and is thinking, “this could go on for a while” but at ninety minutes, the audience starts to look at its watch.
As well as all that, we had the New York City cosmopolitan experience of running into two dear friends, Carol and Bob, one friendly director, Gus Kaikonen, and a friendly actor Walker Jones – so there was theatre schmooze as well.
If you have Bardic leanings, I highly recommend this show, and even if you don’t!
