Critical Comment for Feb 07
Who wants to follow a star? Once it was considered madness to take over a leading role on which an Olivier or Ashcroft had left their unique imprint. Now, however, we have seen an astonishing cultural shift. The West End is positively bulging with shows that prove there is no longer a stigma to going in second or third. Think of Stephen Moore in The History Boys.
Or Simon Russell Beale in Spamalot. Or Emma Fielding and David Calder in Rock ‘N’ Roll. Felicity Kendal has even had the courage to reprise a role associated with Judi Dench in Amy’s View. This is not merely a major turnaround. I think there is sometimes a positive advantage to assuming a role that another actor has created.
My own fascination with takeovers goes back to my youth. As a student, I came tripping down from Oxford to see My Fair Lady at Drury Lane. Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews had long gone to be replaced by Alec Clunes and Anne Rogers. But any sense of second-best was instantly dispelled by the magisterial, silver-haired Clunes. He possessed one of the most mellifluous voices on the English stage; and the moment when he bid Eliza remember that “your native language is the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible” stays with me still. Of course, I saw Harrison in the movie; but, for all his irascibility, he was no match for Clunes in terms of vocal beauty or cardiganed elegance.
Graduating to the role of critic, I was soon a natural Moon. And as a second-string, shadowing Irving Wardle on The Times, I probably felt a sense of empathy with actors following in other people’s footsteps. But I soon began to realise that a new actor could bring something fresh to an existing role. Alan Bates, as we all know, was the supreme Simon Gray actor. But, watching the dapper precision of Alec McCowen in Butley or the melancholy irony of Michael Gambon in Otherwise Engaged when they took over, I discovered that one test of a good play is that it is susceptible to multiple possibilities.
I’d go even further. The greater the play, the more easily it can bear the impression of new personalities. I’ve no wish to belittle David Storey’s Home but I can never banish the memory of the musical interplay between Richardson and Gielgud in Lindsay Anderson’s original production.
But, although these same two actors played Hirst and Spooner in Pinter’s No Man Land, I don’t think they were irreplaceable. In fact, when Corin Redgrave and John Wood played the same roles at the National in 2001, I made new discoveries: not least that Spooner is a charlatan whose claim to be a poet is almost certainly bogus. And that is a measure of both Wood’s comic inventiveness and Pinter’s multi-facetedness.
Which brings me up to the West End today. One of the joys of seeing The History Boys at Wyndham’s for the first time since 2004 was that of watching Stephen Moore as Hector. How, one first thought, could anyone possibly replace Richard Griffiths? With his imposing physicality and feathery voice, Griffiths seemed to have made the role his personal possession. But Bennett’s play is so richly hospitable that it allows Moore to bring his own unique gifts to the role.
Moore has a vulnerability that instantly attracts sympathy. That is one reason why he was brilliant casting as the child-abusing patriarch in Festen (another role he inherited). You felt that, however despicable his actions, the man was not a Satanic monster. And although Hector, to a lesser extent, abuses his position, Moore always makes you feel that the character is a born loner whose only real joy comes from transmitting his enthusiasms. Perhaps the key moment comes when Hector tells the pushy Irwin that “diffidence is surely to be encouraged”. Moore’s quiet delivery of that line suddenly made me re-assess the whole play as Bennett’s tribute to English reserve.
Moore, of course, is taking over a part in an existing production.
Felicity Kendal has the equally daunting task of re-inventing the character of Esme in David Hare’s Amy’s View. And how, you might ask, does anyone follow Judi Dench who has a genius for investing everything she does with a bruised sadness? To be perfectly honest, I can’t quite forget the sight of Dench staring wanly into her dressing-room mirror in the play’s final
scene: Kendal, at the same moment, simply looks too unbreakably pretty.
Otherwise this is a triumphant performance by a scandalously under-rated actress. Remember her in Happy Days? And here she gives us all of Esme’s Arkadina-like vanity, her possessive motherliness and, above all, her raw pain when Amy finally abandons her. Sitting upstage with her back to the audience, Kendal at this points lets out a cry of suffering that seems to come from the very marrow of her being. Even the great Dame didn’t move me as much. Which only goes to show that Hare’s play has more emotional resonance than one at first suspected. But also that there is no such thing as a “definitive” performance. All actors worth their salt re-create a role in their own terms. And it may be even better to take a later bite at a cherished part when a play has been absorbed into the public consciousness.
“All things,” said Wordsworth in The Prelude, “have second birth”; and it’s a truth borne out by theatre, with its endless capacity for renewal, every single day of the year.
