The Dresser

With a quality script from Academy Award winner Ronald Harwood and an impressive cast, The Dresser is both watchable and thought-provoking

Review by Natalia Baal | 18 Aug 2007

Shakespeare’s plays have given the world of theatre so much material that there exists an entire repertoire of spin-off plays written by both his contemporaries and ours. There is of course Tom Stoppard’s wonderful Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead, which tells of the adventures and mishaps that two relatively unimportant characters in Hamlet experience in between the scenes of the main play. And here, in The Dresser, we have a play not about the characters, but about the people behind the scenes in a back-stage dressing room during a performance of King Lear.

The Dresser, set during the Blitz, introduces us to a Shakespearean actor (only ever referred to as “Sir”) who is experiencing a break-down of sorts after spending his life pretending to be other people. We watch as his long-suffering dressing room assistant of 16 years desperately tries to comfort him, picking up all the pieces and putting them back together in order to get him out on stage.

With a quality script from Academy Award-winner Ronald Harwood, complete with timely wit and an impressive cast, The Dresser is both watchable and thought-provoking. It is a novel play about mutual dependency, loyalty, and dedication, and of course the tragedy of when these go unrecognised and things take a turn for the worse.