The Dresser, Richard Eyre, 2015

The crisis of a Shakespearean actor with a fifty-year career and hundreds of reruns on his shoulders: too heavy a load.

The crisis of a state at war, a World War.

The crisis of a language, the living one, on the scene that has to deal with cinema.

One last King Lear under the bombings, because you never stop being an actor, you are an actor right up to the last act, night after night, without ever missing a rerun, alone with yourself and your suffering, truer than ever behind the mask, the make-up, the wig, the joke. Asking an actor to leave a scene is mission impossible. The adrenaline animates and feeds him, the recognition, the public, the warmth. An amazing addiction that has to deal with the one and only great risk of the job: loneliness, oblivion.

Too long concentrated on himself, too long immersed in the words of characters to bring to life, to neglect real life, unconditional affection, 'servants' and loves, the real ones you can ask to shake a hand and feel its warmth. Ingratitude is the defect and the greatest danger of the actor's profession but it is forgiven him because it is precisely that cumbersome ego of his that animates a company and keeps it together, makes it a family, in which everyone plays his part, on the scene and outside it, knowing that just as there can't be a King Lear without a king, so there can't be a great company without an actor who takes on the responsibilities and risks and absorbs the limelight.

That actor in the last act, alone, in a dark dressing room, will ask to be remembered and to be spoken well of him, for someone to take charge of his memory and the memory of his work.

The dresser is an ode, a hymn to a noble, lofty theater which, in many ways, belongs to a bygone, almost legendary time. A theater that required the sacrifice of an entire life on and off the stage, so much so that one feared not being able to exist and not being anyone outside of that dimension. An idea of theater that is as romantic as it is enveloping, totalizing, made up of responsibility and sharing. The very high vision of a trade and trades of the theater and the arts that today escapes us and of which we can only admire the last remnants in those few and rare exceptions that make us believe in a feeble possibility of recreating the impossible and of glimpsing some light in a darkness of ideas that homogenizes and flattens everything and everyone in the background.

So <<we have to accept the weight of this sad time. Say what we feel and not what should be said. The older ones have endured more: we who are young will not see so much nor will we live for so long.>>

Exceptions and exceptional are the interpretations of a couple like Anthony Hopkins and Ian McKellen who take your breath away with every line.

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