Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✩✩
by William Luce, directed by Gene Saks
Barrymore Entertainment Limited, Elgin Theatre, Toronto
January 30-March 9, 2011
If you have always wanted to see Christopher Plummer on stage, now is the time to do it. He’s 81 and in a remount of the show Barrymore, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Actor in 1997. The play itself is a piece of fluff and Plummer’s performance, while always amiable, is hardly profound. Still, seeing Barrymore is the easiest way yet for you to check “See Plummer live” off your cultural bucket list.
The subject of the play is actor John Barrymore (1882-1942), best-known now as the grandfather of movie actress Drew, but once acclaimed as America’s greatest Shakespearean actor. Fans of classic films will know him from his roles in Grand Hotel (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933) and Twentieth Century (1934). Yet, he was lamented in his own lifetime for allowing alcoholism to destroy his talent. From 1934 onwards he had to rely on cue cards to help him remember his lines.
Though William Luce acknowledges this in his play, his fictional premise is ludicrous. He has Barrymore in 1942 planning to revive Shakespeare’s Richard III, the actor’s major triumph in 1920. If the great man can’t memorize lines for the short takes in movies, how can he possibly memorize the entire central role of a play? To answer this, Luce has Barrymore use a prompter Frank (John Plumpis), unseen throughout the play, to feed him lines. It rapidly becomes clear that while Barrymore can reminisce at length about his relatives and four ex-wives, he can barely remember a line after he gets it. Frank’s foolishly sentimental belief that since Barrymore was once great he can be so again seems to stem from an extraordinary lack of observation.
Of course, the play’s real function is not to inform us about John Barrymore--what we learn is trivial--rather, to serve as a star vehicle for Plummer. It gives him the chance to sing a few songs, do some dance steps, tell dirty limericks, shoot off one-liners, relate anecdotes and, now and then, to recite famous passages of Shakespeare in a spotlight. Luce does allow Barrymore to slip into self-doubt, but never so deeply that quick joke won’t pull him out of it.
It’s possible that under a different director, Plummer would allow these more serious moments to build inwardly and colour the vapid light-heartedness of most of the show, to let us see the darkness beneath his cruel wit. But Plummer does not. He simply switches Barrymore’s happy face on and off like a light bulb, repeatedly missing his best opportunities to demonstrate acting of greater complexity. While it’s a pleasure to see Plummer still nimble and a master of timing, it’s a pity he doesn’t rise above the superficiality of Luce’s play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2011-01-31.
Photo: Christopher Plummer as John Barrymore. ©Michael Cooper.
2011-01-31
Barrymore