Taking Shakespeare to a New Stage

...He nowhere calls himself an actor, but like many actors he displays a personal warmth...

...He describes the ironic looks conferred on this poor soul: very pretty features, golden hair, and at times radiant expressions, while she remained victimized by loss of control over her bodily functions, her "bizarre, palsied gait" and "beautiful long thin pale hands, twisted grotesquely around each other and held high just under her chin...

...On occasion he performed...

...It was Fritz Weaver, one of our finest classical exponents of the 1950s and 1960s, a model speaker of verse on a par with such contemporaries as Christopher Plummer, Zoë Caldwell and James Earl Jones...

...The old folk called him Mr...

...Apart from an occasional explosion, usually under understandable stress, actors frequently manage to carry over some (or all) of the warmth from their work to their off-duty hours...

...In 1958 he took a job on the technical staff of the Shakespeare theater company founded there in the early '50s as an artistic counterpart to Britain's and Canada's Stratford theaters...

...Despite his title, Bob has almost nothing to say about his costuming and other chores for the Hamlet who inducted him into the theater at Stratford...

...He quit school and left home, but not his hometown of Stratford, Connecticut...

...His mother, a Catholic from a large family, "felt that she'd done something that destroyed my sister's brain and body" and she "sent my [non-Catholic] father away...

...Hamlet's Dresser serves up so many celebrated quotations from Shakespeare that they sound like material lifted from books on how to shine as a public speaker...

...Reviewed by Albert Bermel Author, "Shakespeare at the Moment: Playing the Comedies" Bob Smith closes his pages with an artless statement: "My name is Bob—Bob Smith, Robert William John Smith, a plain American name...

...In spite of a certain hurt or disquiet, which he will never quite shed, Bob Smith has redeemed himself with an act of nobility toward his pupils, the older folk whose age he now shares...

...Almost every day for as long as I can remember, someone has jokingly asked, 'Is that your real name...

...unseen, unheard, unnoticed...

...He takes into account, too, not merely what the lines literally say but, frequently more significant, who speaks them and under what circumstances...

...Born several years after him, she is severely disabled and could never learn to speak, to understand others' speech, to walk, or even to stand without distorting her body...

...He tells us that, as a youngster, he felt miserable enough more than once to drive himself most of the way to suicide...

...He discovered that he could hold the interest of audiences as he spoke about a single play or a selectionofthem.Overtheyears elderly people, especially those who were theater buffs when they could afford tickets and now felt like the neglected of the earth, piled into his lecture discussions...

...His familiarity with the words of his god, Shakespeare, works as an anodyne...

...She "thought she was to blame" for her daughter's plight...

...Doing this was not only a matter of meeting their taste and their affection for Shakespeare head-on but also of making them feel welcome...

...Tom Courtenay, as Wolfit's menial, took scrupulous care that the great man would appear on the boards on time, and kept him sober enough to make it through the evening without disgracing himself in front of his wife, Rosalind Iden—who appeared in each production's significant woman's role...

...The film adaptation featured Albert Finney lightly disguised as Donald Wolfit, a British actor who once toured the provinces with his company and played Shakespeare's leading men...

...It fell to Bob to contend with the "neurotic tasks" required to keep his sister and whatever she came in contact with obsessively clean...

...Come on, what is it really?' It's been a steady, goodnatured, lifelong tease and in its small way has helped me to feel invisible...

...And for most of my life I've honored the contract...

...But does anyone write a book in order to "feel invisible...

...Smith pays the apology to his sister, although she will not be able to comprehend it...

...In his late teens Bob could no longer cope with living an unrelenting self-reproach...

...Less a memoir than a confession, Hamlet's Dresser builds to a dramatic peak: After many years of not having seen Carolyn, Bob goes to visit her in a home for retarded persons...

...For John Houseman and Jack Landau, who ran the troupe, having an understudy on tap who could quickly "get up" pretty much any part in practically every tragedy or comedy or history (or poetry reading) in the Shakespeare canon must have been a rare blessing...

...He doesn't claim to be a conventional scholar, yet he does know his Will...

...We look again at him...

...Here we see the justification for Bob's gently assertive boast about his familiarity with Shakespeare...

...Bob is perhaps playing a more studiously modest role, a more disingenuous one than he admits...

...He came to know the texts by heart, as well as the sonnets, which he had read with devotion, rather than overheard...

...The title of Smith's book seems to hark back to Ronald Harwood's play The Dresser (1980), which opened in London and then moved to Broadway...

...I've seen my ordinary name as a promise to be unseen, unheard, unnoticed...

...I thought I was...

...Bob peered through slits and other openings in the scenery to observe the impact of his contributions to the costumes, makeup, stage design and other visual and audible effects, while he listened over and over to the imaginary worlds conjured up from three and a half centuries before...

...Bob took his Shakespeareana a stage further...

...he doesn't even mention the actor's name...

...Bob's account of himself gives us a sensitive, kindhearted man who made friends easily and kept them...

...He is surely far from the only person rescued from a doomed ending by steeping himself in the aptness and intoxication of Shakespeare's language...

...She doesn't recognize him, if she ever really did...

...Senior moviegoers may recall Wolfit's rousing performance in one of the few films where he had a notable part, as the father of the bride in Room at the Top...

...Hamlet's Dresser is a curious stirring together of an apology and a boast about the author's accomplishments in the theater...

...He sprinkles lines and passages freely in an all-purpose dispersion of wisdom and consolation...

...We still have little notion of what she felt and wanted...

...His memorizing the complete works may serve to lighten his guilt, his belief that he's never done enough for his sister, Carolyn, no matter how hard he tried...

...Bob does, however, devote a substantial segment of one chapter to his association with Bert Lahr, whose luminous professional career, with and without dressers, so far as I can discover never included the part of Hamlet...

...Some of them, often the indigent, he would visit to follow up on thorny topics developed during his group sessions...

...Bob exclaims anumberof times along the way, "God, how I love old people...

...For after all, he seems to have addressed these final words to himself, not only to readers, as if to reassure his conscience that he did not mean to play tricks, only to retreat to the "promise" of his "ordinary name...

...Wolfit (eventually Sir Donald) gave audiences more than a plentiful helping of his furious talents: He generally took his bows holding onto the curtain, giving the impression that he had managed to end the proceedings just before being overcome by wear and tear...