You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Peter Yates's film version of Ronald Harwood's The Dresser begins with a dying fall, the one in the last moments of Othello. The time is mid-World War II; the play is being performed by a touring company in a drab English backwater. Sir, the troupe's aging star and impresario, dispatches himself grandiloquently—pure ham on rye. Then, atop Desdemona's corpse, he mercilessly heckles his poor colleagues soto voce. No competitior will stop Sir from milking the Moor's death and — as it turns out —his own for all it's worth. In the latter enterprise, he will be assisted quite unwittingly by Norman, his dresser, major-domo, therapist manque, and during the Great Man's decline, his nursemaid.
Harwood never names Sir's terminal condition. Sir's circumstances seem similar to the story about the cause of legendary jazzman Charlie Parker's death; a friend said,“Bird? Man, he died of everything! At the tail end of an illustrious career, Sir is reduced to circumnavigating the provinces with the sorry nucleus of his company, supplemented by a more sorry group of stage extras: aging queens, heterosexual dotards, and rejects from the draft. Sir is massively in debt, and there are painful intimations that modern critics scoff at his art as so much fustian.
Egregious narcissists like Sir particularly resent the loss of looks and vigor their later years bring. Add arteriosclerotic brain disease or Alzheimer's syndrome to his misfortune, and you have a man at the end of his tether, assuredly not one about to go gently into any good rignt. The consequent public rehearsal of mortality is reminiscent of the dramatic self-senduffs of the 17th century, for example, John Donne's taking the measure of his coffin, preaching his own