Peter Yates | The Dresser / 1983 || Richard Eyre | The Dresser / 2015

a near miracle

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ronald Harwood (screenplay based on his 1980 theater play) Peter Yates (director) The Dresser    

/ 1983

Richard Eyre (screenplay based on the 1980 theater play by Ronald Harwood, and director) The Dresser / 2015

 

Having grown a bit tired of combining films by subject, genre, and director, something I have done so many times in these volumes, I originally planned to review these two versions of Ronald Harwood’s 1980 play separately. But having seen the both over a period of two nights, I realized that comparison between the two were not only illuminating but necessary.

     Even the fact of the time between these two versions represents a period of 32 years, the earlier work having been filmed soon after the original play production makes for very different perceptions and interpretations.

    Strangely, over that period the actor who played the dresser in the 2015 film, Ian McKellen, a gay man, played his role, for example quite straight. Although it is equally clear, as in the first, production that he truly loves the man he brings to life each night in his Shakespearian roles, McKellen plays him not as would-be gay lover but performs his character as one of complete servitude. He seems far more objective about the man he revitalizes after having what appears to have been a mental breakdown in the market place of the small British village of Bradford in which the company is performing King Lear that night, than the original “dresser” Tom Courtney’s Norman might even think possible. Courtney, a straight man, plays the dresser as most definitely a slightly mincing gay man totally devoted by love to “Sir.” 

     Yes, he is servile also, but underneath that servility, there is a sexual being who comes alive in the presence of the ham actor. Although McKellen’s performance is quite brilliant, there is a brittleness to his interpretation that doesn’t permit the sexual to percolate into even a private sense of romance, which I think, strangely, leaves the actor, in McKellen’s case, Anthony Hopkins, in an even more unlovable situation than Albert Finney. Hopkins’ “Sir” has already rejected the love of the stage manager Madge (Sarah Lancaster) after her many years of frustrated and quiet love. And he has long ago lost the love of his own wife, “Her Ladyship” (Emily Watson), and in Eyre’s version he writes in scene that makes it quite clear that she, having given up her role as a major independent actress, is now ready to leave him, begging him to give up the theater. As a womanizer he attempts to woo the young Irene (Vanessa Kirby) who, quite inexplicable, is obviously ready and willing for a seduction. In short, in Hopkins’ role “Sir’ is simply a detestable fool, who occasionally is able to rise the occasion to convince the provincial audiences of his talent.

      McKellen’s Norman can, in fact, simply be seen as another figure who has loved “Sir,” and has been used and abused by him, like the major two women in his life, Madge and her “Ladyship.”

      Without having to dramatize this fact quite so emphatically as Eyre, in the original film directed by Peter Yates, it is just as clear that “Sir” has lost his wife’s love, as immediately after the play she slips home without her husband.

   All the more reason that, even despite “Sir’s” and the theater companies’ and the country’s homophobia—they has just arrested one of the major members of he company, Mr. Davenport-Scott, whom the police, since this is his second warning, oppose bail. Clearly he was caught involved in “pansy” behavior; The fool will have to be played this evening by Mr. Thornton (Edward Fox in the 2015 version)—that one figure still remains who is obviously gay, particularly in a company dedicated to Shakespeare, possibly a gay man himself, or least bisexual as the Sonnets are generally read.

     We can well imagine why in 2015 a gay man such as McKellen would not at all desire to play a gay stereotype, reinforcing the idea that gay men were all mincing, slightly hysterical beings who nonetheless could create magic for those they loved or admired. McKellen’s very age indicates that he has given over his entire life to “Sir.” And perhaps he is a wiser and more flexible gay figure who also clearly loves the actor.

       Tom Courtney in 1983 could still very well get away with portraying the standard stereotype. Yet the very fact that he is still relatively young, but has given over his youth to “Sir” says something even more poignant to my way of thinking than McKellen’s elderly version. And occasionally, we are reminded by Courtney’s performance, that some versions of character stereotypes do function far quicker to establish roles. As I mention above, while it is clear McKellen still loves “Sir,” he, like Madge and her “Ladyship,” is far more bitter and hardened about his role with “Sir” than interested in creating a frisson of sexual love between the him with the cruel heterosexual abuser. If nothing else, their relationship, as improbable as it is, challenges us to more fully understand what it is between the two of them that could even endure 276, now 277 performances of Lear, let alone of all the other numerous renditions of Shakespeare plays “Sir” has performed while Norman subserviently readies him to perform.

     Similar differences between the two films, reveal other issues. The 2015 film basically does not leave the confines of the theater itself, and again one can comprehend Eyre’s decision given that “Sir’s” entire world has been built around the theater. In some senses, he has no “other” life. All we know about “Sir’s” public breakdown is related mostly by Norman, including the vague act of taking him to the local hospital, from which Sir obviously escapes.

     But like so many films of the 1970s and 1980s, Yates opens up his film temporarily so that we too experience the actors many acts of dementia and deterioration. What this version of reality reveals is just how essential the constant Nazi bombings, the roars of the sirens warning citizens to take cover, and the bombings themselves have helped to exacerbate the elderly actor’s dementia and public breakdown. “Sir” cannot even imagine what he might be able to do to help his fellow citizens, at one point offering the poor man watching the fire rage in the building where in once lived, perhaps having even lost in the attack his wife or children, free tickets to his play that night. The shocked citizen responds only with a frozen stare.

     At another point when the actor begins to strip in public, an elderly woman attempts to help him redress, suggesting how much she has loved his performances in the past. Norman gathers up his clothing giving the woman tickets to Lear which she attends, telling Norman in the interval when he goes out to purchase another flask of his necessary brandy, how much she is enjoying the performance. It is at the moment when a doctor is about to inject him with a sedative, that “Sir” escapes the hospital, roaring in his most stentorian voice that has previously stopped a train from leaving the station without his troupe.

     In these scenes we get a sense of what is really happening daily that helps to explain this man’s breakdowns. Even as they are about to begin the plays, Norman is sent out to explain to the audience that the city is undergoing another bomb warning, and encourages people who may want to “live,” correcting himself almost immediately from the obvious subconscious Freudian slip by suggesting that anyone who wants to “leave,” should do so quietly.

     Finney is always an excellent actor, I believe far superior to Hopkins, but this is not his best role. He is best as in Tom Jones (1963) and even the later Erin Brockovich (2000) as a slightly naughty man-boy with a glint of bad behavior in his eyes. Hopkins’ general overacting, on the other hand, is almost a perfect match for the ham actor “Sir.” While Hopkins’, “Sir” can be absolutely wonderful at moments, and unbearable to watch in the very next.

     In the end though this dementia-ridden and dying actor is nearly insufferable as a human being, a character somewhat similar to the skin-flint, unloving father in Eugene O’Neill’s James Tyrone, an actor of also of some ability, but who has finally sold out to popular theater-role of Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. At least “Sir” has continued with the Bard, even if he is no longer up to several the roles, finding it now difficult to even carry off the body of Cordelia, played by his wife.

     But it is the ending of this play, and the final reactions of the characters that is ultimately most revealing. In the 2015 version, “Sir” dies while Norman is reading the introduction naming those he have given most to him from the introduction to his non-existent memoirs. He thanks the carpenters, the electricians, even the scene changes without any mention of his dresser, the fact of which so infuriates Norman that when he discovers the elder actor has died, he seems angrier about the final slight than the actual death, and among his first words is “what is going to happen me,” while the impervious Madge call us his wife and the doctors, telling Norman simply to try to sober up after his many swigs of brandy. Norman takes up the nonexistent manuscript and adds thanks to the dresser, while sticking out his tongue like a child to the nearby dead man. We can well comprehend McKellan’s reaction, given the fact that we have earlier heard Sir” tell Madge that “You’re the only one who truly loves me.” But love is ice cold, that of a true masochist, while Norman’s has been that of a caring man who has given his entire life to him. Madge reports that her Ladyship will be coming at once, but that she took it very calmly, but wants him covered in his Lear cloak, which once more Norman mocks in this 2015 version. “It isn’t the death of Nelson you know?”

    Madge demands he come away, but Norman now seems more concerned that he get paid that anything else. He reminds Madge, moreover, that there is mention of “backstage managers” either, although at this point of officious Madge doesn’t even know what he is talking about. What is he going to do, he demands to know. Madge suggests that he “speak well of him,” to which McKellen replies, “Speak well of that old sod? I wouldn’t give him a good character, not in the court of law.”

     Madge tries to forcibly move him out of the room, while he shouts, “Oh, holy, holy, holy, is it. This isn’t a shrine. No pissing on the altar!”

    “I know all about you, ducky. I have eyes in my head. We all have our little sorrows: stiff upper, loyal, loving. I only have one thing to say about him, and I won’t say it in front of you, no her ladyship, nor anyone. Lips, tight shut. …You think you loved him. What about me?”

     Once she has stormed off, he begins speaking the corpse again, arguing “This is no place for death. I had a friend….”

     In short, although we know the situation, very little true love is represented in these last scenes in Richard Eyre’s text. The ending represents three bitter people whose lives have already been eaten up by the larger than life actor, who have no place else to go.

     Yet the 1983 version is far different. Yes, here too Norman is hurt by the lack of mention of him in any form in the introduction to the nonexistent memoirs, and he observe him, this time at distance adding in his own role to the lest. But that all hardly matters on the larger scale of what occurs.

     He also wonders what will happen to him and refuses, as Madge, suggests to wait outside, angered by her line: “Try and sober up.”

     And he also refuses to take Madge’s advice to speak well of him, furious with the “old sod” for not even mentioning his role to him in his nonexistent memoirs. But the lines here are much more personal: “He never once took me out for a meal, never once.” And she leaves before his speech about saying only one thing and the dead actor, and not in front of her, presenting it more as another personal diatribe, not an acclimation of hate. Indeed, the speech even to Madge is not directed at her, but remains part of a monologue, and when he says “You think you loved him,” as he responds “what about me,” he falls apart in tears. This is more than a lashing out for a lack personal recognition of his true love gone utterly ignored because it was homosexual for all these years, ignored not just by “Sir,” but by everyone in his world. He has put up with everything and even more that the women in this man’s life for some minor satisfaction that the old man might some day recognize his intense love. More importantly, Norman then does something that the fairly sexless older Norman played by McKellen could not have done in this role, he lays his body partially over the dead “Sir,” remaining in that hopeless representation of a buried sexual love as the film closes.

   In the end, as great as McKellen is, I have to say I quite prefer the 1983 film which speaks of so much more than the 2015 film is willing to explore. Norman as played by Tom McCoutney, has a far more repressed sexual love for his failed hero than any of the women might have offered him, but has been utterly so ignored by our failed actor and everyone around him that it can only be recognized as a sort of tragedy. The later version seems to end only in anger and hate, while the earlier version still explores the remnants of love Courtney daily expressed to “Sir.” And that, particularly in the midst of the AIDS crisis, represents a near miracle.

 

Los Angeles, September 20, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).