{"id":674,"date":"2013-03-14T12:09:39","date_gmt":"2013-03-14T16:09:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/?p=674"},"modified":"2013-10-18T09:01:56","modified_gmt":"2013-10-18T13:01:56","slug":"the-greatest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.tr10023.com\/?p=674","title":{"rendered":"The Greatest"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The single greatest performance I ever saw an actor give was Christopher Plummer<\/a>‘s Iago, which he played, not as a human being, but as the embodiment of unadulterated, fathomless Evil. \u00a0This was back in 1982 at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. \u00a0James Earl Jones was a fine Othello, but it was Iago’s show from start to finish. \u00a0Plummer didn’t win the Tony for his miraculous performance, however. \u00a0That year, the Tony went to the actor who gave the second<\/em> greatest performance I ever saw: \u00a0Roger Rees’ star turn in “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.” \u00a0Rees was so great in that monumental play (eight and a half hours long!)\u00a0— the greatest theatrical experience of my life — that I doubt even Christopher Plummer could have resented losing the award to so excellent a performance. \u00a01982 was a good year for Broadway.<\/p>\n

\"Plummer<\/a>

Plummer as Iago:<\/strong>
So will I turn her virtue into pitch,<\/strong>
And out of her own goodness make the net<\/strong>
That shall enmesh them all.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

I’ll never forget the way Plummer delivered the lines quoted above: \u00a0his clarion voice brayed out the words in an accelerating, but even, rhythm and the notes ascended the scale until he arrived at the word “enmesh,” when he startled the audience by lingering on the “shhhhhh.” Such nerve! \u00a0And so thrilling! \u00a0A lesser actor would have sounded ridiculous. \u00a0In his black leather, Plummer already looked like a reticulated snake — one with porcupine quills bristling on his head. \u00a0The “shhhhhh” clinched the look: \u00a0the most villainous snake-in-the-grass of all time. \u00a0I remember the Sunday matinee crowd I saw it with audibly gasped at his audacity. \u00a0But his whole performance was like that: \u00a0surprises everywhere, but always completely in service of the story. \u00a0Plummer was so diabolically funny and entertaining, you couldn’t help rooting for him . . . until his plans started to pay off with tragic results. \u00a0He made Iago irresistibly entertaining — a wise choice, since it happens to be the third longest role in Shakespeare. \u00a0(And perhaps the longest, since Hamlet’s and Richard III’s lines are often heavily abridged.)<\/p>\n

That was the first time I saw Plummer on stage. \u00a0Before then, I only knew his work from the pictures he’d been in. \u00a0Until the mid 70s, he wasn’t much good in pictures, to be quite frank. \u00a0Certainly, it wasn’t entirely his fault: \u00a0he was in a lot of dogs. \u00a0“Inside Daisy Clover” is a fantastically bad picture: \u00a0nobody in it emerged with his dignity intact. \u00a0And in the famous musical from 1965, which Plummer likes to call “S and M,” he wasn’t good. \u00a0In most of the pictures he made before the the 70s, he seemed anxious to make it clear that he knew how crummy the material was — “Don’t blame me<\/em>, folks: \u00a0I<\/em> didn’t write this crap.” \u00a0The result was that he often came off worse than those who did their best to do elevate the second- and third-rate stuff. \u00a0At his best, he was very good — as, for example, when he played Rudyard Kipling in John Huston’s “The Man Who Would Be King” (1975). \u00a0But nothing prepared me for the sensational\u00a0Iago he played in 1982.<\/p>\n

\"Plummer:<\/a>

Plummer: The Man Who Would Be Kipling.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

In recent years, he has become one of the most reliably entertaining character actors in pictures, but Christopher Plummer’s natural habitat is the theatre, in front of a large, adoring crowd. \u00a0In the theatre, he’s stunning, even in the worst crap. \u00a0A revival of “Inherit the Wind,” for instance, back in 2007. \u00a0I found something I wrote to a friend right after coming home from seeing it:<\/p>\n

Plummer was wonderful as always, but gee whiz, what a terrible, turgid piece of agitprop!\u00a0 It’s amazing that it keeps getting revived. \u00a0From first to last, it’s utterly false — & the platitudes rain down in torrents.\u00a0 My expectations weren’t high:\u00a0 I’ve seen the movie, which is pedantic & dull & preaches nosily & clumsily to the choir . . . but I hoped that seeing it live might make at least parts of it crackle.\u00a0 Alas, no.\u00a0 The whole thing is so smug & one-sided — nobody opposed to the Darrow character is allowed to have a flicker of intelligence or humanity — Darrow is saintly & sagacious & everyone else is a prating fool or hypocrite or both.<\/p>\n

In some ways just as bad is the quasi-one-man show, “Barrymore.” \u00a0I saw that idiotic show twice. \u00a0Plummer made it worth seeing, but it’s awfully thin porridge.<\/p>\n

\"Plummer<\/a>

Plummer as Barrymore: ‘The rain beats at the door with the persistence of an unpaid madam.’ That line, alas, is not in the show: it’s a paraphrase from Gene Fowler’s biography, ‘Good Night, Sweet Prince.’<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

As Barrymore, Plummer is wonderful wonderful wonderful. \u00a0The moment he enters, wheeling a cocktail tray ahead of him and with an inebriate glint in his eye, you know you’re in for a high old time. \u00a0He looks amazingly like the Great Profile himself. \u00a0(Poor old Jack Barrymore was so haggard from alcohol that Plummer, who was 67 when he played the role on Broadway, looked younger than Barrymore did when he was 40. \u00a0Barrymore was only 60 when he died, but looked decades older.)<\/p>\n

\"Plummer<\/a>

Plummer as Barrymore: Lush Life.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Plummer richly deserved the Tony he won for that performance, but the script is far beneath his talents. \u00a0The writing, especially as it gets toward the middle, is hopeless. \u00a0Barrymore’s actual words are marvellous, but when the playwright has to invent . . . well, it’s roughly the equivalent of what it would sound like if Neil Simon tried to write Shakespearean verse: \u00a0impossible. \u00a0Somewhere I read that the movie of “Barrymore” is an unholy mess, but of course I read it online, so who knows? \u00a0The DVD is to be released on May 7, 2013, and I’ve already ordered a copy. \u00a0There’s at least an hour of Plummer at his Plummiest, but the play stinks. \u00a0The writing is so incompetent that it’s not even really a one man show: \u00a0half way through, when the playwright runs out of invention, he has an offstage voice converse with\u00a0Barrymore. On Broadway, the offstage voice spoke the lines so amateurishly, I felt more compassion for Plummer than I did for poor, doomed Jack: \u00a0why should such an artist be forced to work with such a piss-poor co-star? \u00a0Both times I saw the show, I was distressed to see so much talent lavished on such drivel, but now I remember only the extraordinary wit of the performance.<\/p>\n

Happily, the other plays he has done on Broadway have been better than “Inherit the Wind” and “Barrymore.” \u00a0He was the greatest King Lear I ever saw, and the wittiest. \u00a0Indeed, his performance made a deep impression on me because, to date, he’s the only actor who ever made it clear why Cordelia, Gloucester and Kent are faithful to him, while his other two daughters hate him. \u00a0And it all has to do with his venomous wit. \u00a0As Plummer played him, Lear’s rages aren’t nearly so terrible as his acid tongue. \u00a0Goneril and Regan didn’t spring from the womb as villainesses; they were driven to it by their hateful old father, who never loved them. \u00a0Cordelia gets the shaft in the first scene, but it’s the first time she ever incurred Lear’s disfavor. \u00a0She loves him because he always loved her best. \u00a0Gloucester and Kent are faithful to him because he had been a very great king until he made the disastrous decision to retire from the cares of the throne. \u00a0Plummer’s interpretation made this absolutely clear.<\/p>\n

\"Plummer<\/a>

Plummer as Lear: More sinned against than sinning, and very, very funny.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

In interviews, Plummer has said that he, like Olivier, lacks pathos. \u00a0His Lear wasn’t as moving in the final act as others I’ve seen, probably because one doesn’t easily feel sorry for Christopher Plummer. \u00a0But he was refreshingly unsentimental and he spoke the lines beautifully. \u00a0He explains some of his thinking about the role in the clip below.<\/p>\n