Backstage as Blasted Heath

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE DRESSER Directed by Peter Yates, Screenplay by Ronald Harwood

"I just want everything to be lovely," says Norman. As credos go it is modest enough, and in normal times it has served him well in his career as dresser and dogsbody to the actor-manager--spoken of only as "Sir"--whose little Shakespearean company is touring the English provinces. The trouble is, the times are out of joint. World War II's air-raid sirens have a way of going off in the middle of the old boy's soliloquies. Worse, the years have taken their toll. As Sir says, anticipating his 227th performance of King Lear, "No one takes you through it; you are put through it, night after night." Simply stated, the combined pressures of external events and spiritual exhaustion have brought Sir to the edge of near terminal madness.

Indeed, Sir has become the thing he plays, a Lear-like creature wandering the blasted heath that is wartime Britain. The women of his company are very rough analogues to Lear's daughters, while Norman is certainly meant to be understood as the Fool. But Ronald Harwood's adaptation of his own play does not force these comparisons too hard. It is perfectly possible to enjoy The Dresser simply as a backstage fable, rich in the full-tilt emotional exaggeration of plays and pictures that try to catch showfolk off guard, offstage. Or as a fairly acute study of the master-servant relationship. Or simply as an excuse to give two splendid actors (Tom Courtenay as the title figure, Albert Finney as Sir) a chance to strut their stuff.

Courtenay, of course, originated the role of Norman in the theater, and offers a perfectly polished version of it to such posterity as the film vaults grant. On its face his is a comic turn, an impersonation of a homosexual impersonating a nanny to a grownup child. But his mincing rage for order has deeper roots; this small and isolated backstage world has offered him, until Sir started disrupting it, an asylum from the larger world he could never manage. Subtle observation and marvelously controlled invention mark Courtenay's work.

Finney is a revelation. His was almost a secondary role in the theater, largely because Sir's performances were observed and discussed by the other characters but never seen by the audience. In adapting play to film, Harwood and the always sensible Peter Yates have chosen to show Sir at work. And Finney has chosen to be as good as he can be as Lear. This redeems Sir from the bombastic egocentricity of his dressing-room self, placing a humanizing glaze on his hamminess. It also makes the ironic point that for many actors a role is the only worthwhile reality, reality a role they never quite learn.

The Dresser cannot fill its noble Shakespearean outline. Harwood would have been well advised to stop short of his last-act fling at tragedy and rest on his strength, which is for comically melodramatic commentary on the vagaries and excesses of the theatrical life. Still, he has wisely turned his original vehicle from a unicycle into a bicycle built for two, and Courtenay and Finney give it a thrilling ride. --By Richard Schickel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.