Colin McPhillamy as Sir is crowned by William Hayes as Norman in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ The Dresser / Photos by Curtis Brown Photography
By Bill Hirschman
Time’s implacability and theater’s ephemerality seem inherently antithetical.
Yet time is imbued several ways in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ upcoming production this month of the decades-old English backstage drama leavened with wry humor, The Dresser.
Its profound themes mirror far beyond its seeming chain to a time and place. Certainly, it is a behind-the-scenes backstage drama about a third-rate British regional Shakespearean theater troop in the depths of World War II. Their strivings to stage a threadbare production of King Lear has surprising resonances for 21st Century America when both societies are in a struggle for the survival of a culture and a moral compass.
“It’s always good, particularly during times of civil unrest to do any play that’s set during a period where there was civil unrest, and to know of the travesties and casualties and damage that is done,” said William Hayes, the company’s co-founder and producing artistic director as he opens Dramaworks’ 25th season.
Director J. Barry Lewis stresses over and over that playwright Ronald Harwood’s terms “struggle” and “survival” are used repeatedly in the 1980 script. The concepts are infused in the heroes’ bottomless commitment to Shakespeare and theater as a whole. It honors human beings’ ever-challenged drive to preserve what you believe in and what you have built.
“I think struggle and survival is very much attuned to who we are and what we’re currently experiencing,” Lewis said. “The author was once asked why he thought this play has held up…. And he came down to this very idea that there are the universal human natured in which we strive, we fail, we struggle. And then sometimes we look for an exit….. That works on from yesterday, today, and I think forward, even tomorrow.”
The production has at least two other ties to its past. Dramaworks produced The Dresser almost exactly 20 years ago, marking the young company’s emergence as a major venue in the state and its significant growth in drawing large audiences.
Third, Hayes originally performed the title role, Norman, and will return to it with two decades of added experience.
The plot is a backstage depiction of the touring company dodging the Blitz-laden provinces in 1943. The leader “Sir” is the collapsing aging bardmeister barely clutching the fraying end of his rope.
After he stumbles into his dressing room almost paralyzed with physical, mental and emotional exhaustion, his loyal, longtime dresser Norman forces Sir to ready for his 228th portrayal of Lear. Norman virtually does Sir’s makeup, quizzing him in vain for the actor to recall his opening lines.
Act 2 depicts Sir and his tattered band doggedly stumbling through the abbreviated play – as bombs explode around the theater’s exterior – and with Sir deteriorating throughout. Meanwhile, the drama onstage echoes the frantic chaos depicted by the staff offstage.
Harwood based his script on his own life experiences serving the legendary but over-the-hill stage actor (and occasional film actor) Sir Donald Wolfit.
Sir is an exhausting role and one of Hayes’ conditions to produce the play was that it would be played by one of the standard bearers of Dramaworks’ unofficial non-existent repertory company, Colin McPhillamy.
But equally, even more difficult, is the mountain taken on once again by Hayes. Norman is a deeply committed kind of manservant who basically cares for the failing Sir with all the devotion and severity of a stern nanny. The relationship of the two is volcanic, moving and often quite funny with dry snappy, sad and acerbic humor. Like many dressers of the period, Norman would step in as an actor or stagehand when others were ill or drying out.
The majority of audiences know Hayes as a show director and producer, as well as the co-creator of the company with his wife Sue Ellen Beryl and friend Nanique Gheridian,
But he has acted in Dramaworks early productions such as No Exit and The Zoo Story. In recent years, he has returned in a few roles such as the angriest of jurors in Twelve Angry Men.
How easy is it to return to a work this difficult that you and the company previously triumphed with – two decades later?
“Easy is not a word that comes to mind,” he said with a bit of a laugh about the earlier production directed by Gheridian.
“I hope that I’ve matured as an actor and a human being. I think there’s hopefully more layers I can bring to it. I think I understand the character more than I did then, of course, because I didn’t have lifespan to bring to it then.”
Indeed, despite the advantage of 20 years, “I don’t remember a lot about the first production we did, and I think that’s a good thing. Certainly, the lines didn’t come back 18, 20 years later. Yeah, I was familiar with the scenes, but…it’s just a totally clean slate, which is nice.”
The Dresser is jammed with long speeches, especially for Norman who simultaneously applies makeup to Sir throughout the first act — even answering his own questions as Sir would do when Sir does not respond. So Hayes began the process of memorizing the complex part over four months so he would come into rehearsals this month “off book.”
He also began training to find just the right accent with Ben Furey, a dialect coach based in London who has helped on previous Dramaworks productions. “Norman comes from a working-class family, and if we go with the Yorkshire, totally authentically, the audience is not going to understand half the dialog…. So it’s kind of a blend of Yorkshire and standard British that we’re using,” Hayes said.
Norman has been clearly gay in most productions, especially the ones in London and New York and the 1983 film. Mannerisms, speech patterns and rhythms embedded in Harwood’s script mirror the oft-assumed perceptions of mainstream audiences.
“When you go back and do any research from the playwright himself, he says from his own personal experience… of a Shakespearean company in the 1950s, it was a well-known factor that many of the dressers at that particular time were gay,” Lewis said. “It was not something that was addressed. It was not something that was even dwelt upon, but he used the word that many of these individuals were effeminate.”
At the same time, modern audiences know it is possible to be effeminate but not gay. “But it certainly will probably be where it lands. Undoubtably, Norman hero worships Sir and at some level loves him,” Lewis said.
On Dramaworks’ 25th anniversary, the choice of The Dresser dates back six or seven years to when the company was planning ahead for its 20th anniversary season.
The Dresser at the end of 2003 and the mega-hit revue Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris in the summer of 2004 were landmark successes for the still fledgling company.
“Several of our (current) audiences haven’t seen them because we didn’t have much of an audience at the time,” Hayes said.
But when they could not get the production rights to revive Brel, Hayes turned to The Dresser provided Lewis and McPhillamy could do it.
“Then when the pandemic hit… and said, okay, we’ll wait and do it for our 25th.”
McPhillamy was a must partly because of the length and depth of his broad resume, including Heisenberg at GableStage, the one-man Jacob Marley at City Theatre and an acclaimed Exit The King at Dramaworks. Born in London to Australian parents, he is also a writer and blogger.
With his dry wit, he spun about the passage of time: “What’s fantastic for me is that when I was training in London, if somebody had said to me, you, you will do 14 plays in Florida in 18 years, I would have said ‘hallucinogenics!’ But here I am, and quite remarkable to have the opportunity to do great work, to do good work with great people in a wonderful location where the climate is temperate in the right months. How can possibly be better than that? I mean, really. Come on.”
More seriously, he said, “My personal belief is that for quality acting, the action is in the American regional theater because in Broadway commercial theater, the casting is always top heavy, the production is always skewed in focus towards the star or stars, and the ensemble suffers and the meaning of the play can get cast adrift.”
Besides being a decade or two older than Sir he is in real life, he said, “the role is that of a self-obsessed, bombastic old ham. So quite why they’ve come to me is a little bit of a mystery.”
“But… it’s a love letter to the theater. The play really, is very poignant, it’s got a lot of heart, but it’s also a historical document. When I graduated from drama school in the early ‘80s, there were 120 producing theaters in England and now there are fewer than 30. And most of those are just receiving houses, they don’t produce….. Theaters up and down the country, that was the thing people went to and it was a totally different style of acting. So what’s interesting is that I’ve been lucky enough to work with in my younger years with a few veterans of that age of theater… I’ve seen the legacy of that period.”
“And as to the age in question — well, there’s makeup,” he said drolly.
The trio of Hayes, McPhillamy and Lewis join several other actors in the cast who have worked together such as Elizabeth Dimon, Dennis Creaghan, Gary Cadwallader and Cliff Goulet.
That’s the final advantage the production has to take over time rather than the other way around.
Hayes said, “There’s a shorthand you have with each other. You enjoy each other’s company.”
The Dresser at Palm Beach Dramaworks, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach, Dec. 20 through Jan. 5. Previews Dec. 18-19. Info: (561) 514-4042; palmbeachdramaworks.org
