Who is, or was, the greatest British actor? As party-game questions go, that’s
particularly slippery since personal preferences vary, public taste changes,
and none of us, not even the dead white male critics whom Nicholas Hytner
recently attacked, got to see the first candidate: Richard Burbage, who
probably created Hamlet, Lear, Romeo, Macbeth, Brutus and, most
successfully, Othello.
But it’s the right time to ask the question, because two other actors are
posthumously clamouring for supremacy. Last week was the centenary of
Laurence Olivier’s birth. Whether it was also Edmund Kean’s 230th
anniversary is impossible to tell, because that fierce, secretive maestro
liked to pretend he was a duke’s illegitimate child who might or might not
have been born in May 1787. But Sartre’s play Kean is revived at the Apollo
on Wednesday, reminding us of his place in theatrical history – and maybe
promoting the claims of another potential candidate, Antony Sher, who
performs the title character.
Kenneth Tynan wrote that great acting consisted of physical relaxation,
powerful physical magnetism, a commanding gaze and voice, superb timing, a
sense of danger and chutzpah – “the untranslatable word that means cool
nerve and outrageous effrontery combined”. It’s a somewhat romantic
definition and has been criticised for failing to acknowledge intelligence,
stamina and energy. All I can say is that you know great acting when you see
or (rather) feel it, because it sweeps you, usually with your emotions and
stomach drastically churned, into a world that’s somehow larger, stranger
yet more real than our own.
Olivier could do that, at least in the flesh. I’ve seldom been angrier than
when I saw a knocking TV programme showing Westminster sixth-formers smugly
tittering at the film of his Othello. They hadn’t felt his mesmerising
immediacy. They hadn’t experienced the “wild beast sewn up in him and
clamouring to get out” that was his agonised Moor. They hadn’t heard the
broken howl of his majestic Shylock. They couldn’t differentiate between the
screen, which makes anything but naturalistic acting seem overblown, and the
stage, where a great actor can be more than true, instinctively finding a
balance between the real and the stylised and, by sheer force of character,
making you believe in the result.
The problem with assessing past actors is, of course, that you must rely
either on film, which distorts, or on the observations of audiences and
critics, who can err. Yet there’s too much written evidence about, say,
David Garrick, to be ignored. When his Macbeth told Banquo’s murderer that
there was “blood on thy face”, the intensity was such that the poor actor
reached up his hand and said: “Is there, by God?”
And the encounter of Garrick’s Hamlet with his father’s ghost was the
18th-century theatre’s most famous moment, since it left men shrieking,
women fainting and even Samuel Johnson daunted. “Would not you start as
Garrick does if you saw a ghost?” Boswell asked the doctor. “I hope not,”
came the reply. “If I did, I should frighten the ghost.”
Fifty years later Kean had a similar impact. He came from years of grind and
poverty in the sticks to astound Drury Lane with a Shylock that was
described as “a Chapter of Genesis”, yet was so burningly real that he
warned colleagues playing Tubal not to be frightened when rage seized him.
Coleridge said that seeing him was “to read Shakespeare by flashes of
lightning”, the elder Dumas that he was like “a wild beast, half man, half
tiger”, Byron that he shrank in fear when Kean’s “frown of hatred darkly
fell”. But there was vulnerability and pathos there too. Keats said that at
Kean’s famous death scenes “the very eyelid dies”.
That’s significant, because the great actors have often made special use of
their eyes. Olivier once said that his were more important than arms or
legs.
The great Victorian actor Henry Irving’s eyes were small, yet “could at a
moment become immense and hang like a bowl of dark liquid with light shining
through”. Kean’s eyes were striking, since white was visible above as well
as below pupils that themselves were large and penetrating. According to
Hazlitt, they were “never silent”, adding to the power of an Othello he
found “electrical”.
Kean, like Garrick, was unusually small. So are some of our most brilliant
contemporaries: Judi Dench, who is 5ft 2in; the shrimp Sher, who was told by
a leading drama school he would never make an actor; Simon Russell Beale,
whose Hamlet inspired the headline “Tubby or Not Tubby?” and whose
appearance left one critic comparing him to Gertrude Stein. Indeed, so many
great performers have lacked matinee-idol looks that physical disadvantage
almost seems an acting advantage. Thanks to deprivation and dissipation,
Kean had a thickish voice, “like a hackney coachman’s at one in the
morning”.
Irving sounded unmusical and walked clumsily. William Macready was graceless,
rather ugly and an occasional stutterer, but gave the 19th century a
skulking, momentous, definitive Macbeth. Dench has a crack in her voice that
once led her to consider putting up a notice in the foyer denying that she
had a cold.
Psychologists must decide the energising impact of a supposed deficiency on
someone who is able, ambitious and, in Kean’s case, deeply angry. But it
adds to actors’ emotional range by helping to emphasise that, however magic
and magnetic they may be, they are also vulnerable, fallible members of the
human race. It also encourages performers to become more versatile. “I can
fool you into thinking me taller, older or younger than I am,” Dame Judi
once said – and (as witness roles from Lady Bracknell to Cleopatra to the
lanky Neopolitan ex-prostitute in Eduardo de Filippo’s Filumena) she
certainly can.
It’s harder for actresses than actors to achieve greatness for the reason that
Glenda Jackson gave for renouncing the theatre: the major classical roles,
and indeed the most challenging modern parts, are few and get fewer with
age. But how terrific it would have been to have seen Mrs Pritchard, a
ferocious Lady Macbeth to Garrick’s Macbeth, or, a generation later, Sarah
Siddons, whose sleepwalking scene left a fellow actor saying: “I smelt
blood, I swear I smelt blood.”
How marvellous it was to see Vanessa Redgrave in A Long Day’s Journey into
Night in New York recently, her mix of desperation, bitterness, dreamy
self-absorption, thwarted tenderness and baffled love reminding you that she
was a clone of O’Neill’s mother and that he wrote the play in “tears and
blood”.
I suspect that the Italian Eleanora Duse, who Shaw said “touches you straight
on the very heart” and Chaplin called “the finest thing I have seen on a
stage”, would win the international plaudits for emotional honesty and
visceral power. But Redgrave, Dench and Peggy Ashcroft all have claims to
the British throne, as, for me, does Eileen Atkins: a small, slim woman who
grows in size onstage and has a silvery glint in her eyes that can combine
with an extraordinarily focused technique to suggest something hidden, dark,
even dangerous, inside.
So who is or was the greatest? As I say, it’s hard to compare like with like,
since what one generation finds honest the next will find mannered. Again,
contemporary performers are at a disadvantage, since so much is hostile to
big, bold performances: theories of acting that emphasise the downbeat; the
tendency to see characters as psychiatric case studies; the antiheroic tenor
of our times. But male candidates would presumably also include John
Gielgud, though he relied on voice rather than physique and wryly agreed
with the critic who said he had “the most meaningless legs imaginable”, Ian
McKellen, the finest Macbeth of our era, and Paul Scofield, his gaunt,
creased face, voice rumbling up as if from a crypt, and his air of infinite
melancholy.
And, of course, Olivier. Yet wasn’t there something calculated about his
acting? Certainly he left me feeling that, while he might astound my eyes,
boil my blood and freeze my backbone, he couldn’t activate the lump I keep
in my throat. And that, too, is where Kean scored.
Listen to the testimony of G. H. Lewes, now remembered as George Eliot’s lover
but a major critic in his day. The last time he saw Kean, the actor was
tipsy, hoarse and sick, yet when his Othello scuttled in a gouty hobble
towards Macready’s Iago, who was much taller than him, and grabbed his
throat with a rasp of “villain, be sure you prove my love a whore”, he
“seemed to swell into a stature that made Macready seem small”. Such was the
pathos that “old men leaned their heads upon their arms and fairly sobbed”.
Kean could do pain. He could do power. He could do both at once. He was
lifelike and he was larger than life: the contradiction at the heart of
maybe the greatest actor of them all.
— Kean is previewing at the Apollo, W1 (0870 8901101), and opens on Wednesday
