A Kean Without Daring
SAUVAGE, LEO
On Stage A KEAN WITHOUT DARING BY LEO SAUVAGE Edmund Kean died on May 15, 1833, less than two months after his last appearance at Covent Garden in Othello . That swan song won a place in theater...
...The worst aspect of this production, though, is Raymund FitzSimons' monotonous text, made all the more deadly by his decision to leave Kean alone on the stage...
...Ben Kingsley makes his American stage debut shortly after becoming famous as the Mahatma Gandhi in Richard Attenborough's Academy Award-winning biographical film...
...Brasseur, and presumably Lemaitre, were able to play themselves as they played Kean not because they happened to iden-tify with his way of life, but because, to judge by everything we know about Kean, they were capable of making his manner their own and conveying the same sort of stage presence...
...Gandhi does not seem to have too much in common with Kean, yet that is not the point...
...If disorder and genius indeed cohabited inside him, and the accumulation of the one finally shut out the other, it must have been because his excesses represented a desperate attempt to break through the fourth wall...
...Kingsley may lack the daring to fully reflect this theatrical way of being human...
...The Playbill fails to name a designer, but not, one suspects, because the producers are aware they have nothing to boast about...
...Afterward, yearning to portray Kean on stage, he convinced Jean-Paul Sartre to write a new version of Dumas...
...Frederick Lemaitre and Pierre Brasseur were given the necessary foils...
...Actors are liars and good actors are great liars...
...But on the other side he found another realm of illusion, different only insofar as it was more cruel, more ruinous...
...Now, in a limited engagement, Ben Kingsley has brought yet another Edmund Kean from the Harrogate Festival and London's West End to Broadway's Brooks Atkinson Theater...
...Within three years, Alexandre Dumas had prepared a play called Aeon, or Disorder and Genius for Frederick Lemaitre, who by virtue of his own adventures in life as well as on stage could be thought of as a French variation of the subject...
...A talented actor could express Kean's disorders without necessarily having lived through any of them...
...Kean never stopped acting whether the curtain was up or down, for he faced life as if he were looking into a mirror...
...All the many stories of Kean's life that have come down to us indicate he knew he was somebody and didn't allow anybody to forget it...
...Over a century later, Pierre Brasseur, a performer who followed fairly closely in the footsteps of both 19th-century greats, played Lemaitre on screen in Jacques Prevert and Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise...
...Kingsley shows that he can perform Richard III the way Kean probably did...
...What made the part exceptional for Brasseur, Sartre added, was that he could be, for this evening, "an actor whose role consisted in impersonating himself...
...At the same time, he felt his prestige, drawn as it was from the illusions he created, lacked in substance...
...If Sartre was neither, he nevertheless was inspired by Dumas and Brasseur...
...The changes are unsophisticated^ abrupt, yet Watt does display considerable intelligence in providing the proper lighting for each of the Bard's scenes that the reminiscing actor animates once more...
...No such compensation is to be had in the case of the amazingly inappropriate, repetitive and dull costumes...
...John Watt's lighting serves mainly to separate the body of the narrative from the Shakespearean interludes that for a few minutes at a stretch allow Kean / Kingsley to give the impression of commanding a stage, rather than sitting in a primitive dressing corner...
...He dreamed of being recognized as a great national personality in addition to a famous actor...
...And the author of The Three Musketeers seldom neglected to spice things up with a few sonorous personal touches...
...Set designer Martin Tilley, by choosing as his sole location the kind of third-class provincial theater Kean started out in, arbitrarily lends the whole evening an unfittingly downcast ambience...
...Kingsley's difficulties in re-enacting this journey are not alleviated by the production...
...It opened November 14,1953, at the big theater in the center of Paris that had for a short time resumed the name of Sarah Bernhardt...
...One can also imagine a play about Kean written by the Edmond Rostand of Cyrano deBergerac, or still more by the Victor Hugo of Ruy Bias...
...Sutcliffe's direction is devoid of any unifying idea that is discern-ible from the audience...
...in fact, one gets the impression he might be more exciting in Shakespeare's play than FitzSimons...
...For they don't hesitate to credit Cleone Rive as the "choreographer" of the few clumsy steps Kingsley "dances" while complaining about his years of wandering through the British countryside playing Harlequin...
...Wisely, he followed Dumas' lead and surrounded the hero with a large supporting cast...
...The script was sharp, witty and dramatic-technically perhaps the most clever of Sartre's theatrical undertakings...
...Even when Kean was parodying himself, he could not have been such a wretched Harlequin...
...Sartre, in a Foreword entitled "Concerning Kean" that was printed in the program of the 1953 production, said he hoped for a miracle that would leave the audience wondering " whether Brasseur is playing Kean or Kean is playing Brasseur...
...The "New Play," however, written by Ray-mund FitzSimons and directed by the star's wife, Alison Sutcliffe, turns out to be no more than a monologue, and a rather tedious one at that...
...Just before the close of Act III, Kean's body, eroded by alcohol, became incapable of sustaining him any longer...
...Brasseur's performance was magnificent...
...On Stage A KEAN WITHOUT DARING BY LEO SAUVAGE Edmund Kean died on May 15, 1833, less than two months after his last appearance at Covent Garden in Othello . That swan song won a place in theater history because it made such a fitting end to the actor's tumultuous career...
...Despite Kingsley's British training, his sincerity interferes with Kean's shifting, ambiguous, torn-If not indeed split-personality...
...Dumas pere may have commissioned a ghostwriter for his 1836 work, but the anonymous scribe was well chosen...
...Although short excerpts from Shakespeare pick up the pace from time to time, their insertion is obviously artificial, a few flashy numbers borrowed from outside sources to bolster an otherwise unpromising one-man show...
...the audience saw the Moor of Venice collapse into the arms of Iago, played by Charles Kean, Edmund's son...
...Ben Kingsley, among his other problems, has no such luck...
...To come alive, Edmund Kean needs people to talk to, instead of talk about...
Vol. 66 • October 1983 • No. 19
