THEATRE REVIEW: BARRYMORE
30 JAN/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

First the good news: Christopher Plummer is, 14 years later, even better in the title role of BARRYMORE, the role that, after a stint at the Stratford Festival, earned him a Tony Award in the show's New York run. We know this because Plummer stepped back into BARRYMORE Sunday for a limited run at the Elgin Theatre — a run that will culminate in a film for limited release this fall.

At the age of 81, Plummer remains at the top of his form, essaying the role of a man more than 20 years his junior with apparent ease and clearly enjoying the hell out of it.

And such a man. John (or Jack, as he was known) was a member of the Barrymore dynasty, with siblings Lionel and Ethel, both of whom are duly mocked as BARRYMORE unfolds. The youngest, he was also one of the foremost interpreters of Shakespeare in his time, conquering London in HAMLET and following it up with a host of classics. But when the curtain goes up on BARRYMORE, Jack's glory days are sad prologue and he's scrambling to get backers for a revival of RICHARD III that will help keep his three ex-wives at bay and the wolf from the door. He has enough money, he tells us drunkenly, to last for the rest of his life — as long as he dies right now.

But though he has assembled a theatre full of potential backers and even secured the services of his long-time prompter (played by an offstage John Plumpis), he can't focus. Instead, he wallows in an ocean of booze and memories, recalling his glory days on the stage, the horrors of growing up Barrymore, even his longtime friendship with playwright Ned Sheldon. Wallowing, however, has rarely been so raffishly charming — for like Barrymore, that kind of charm is Plummer's stock in trade, on stage or off. After a lifetime on a stage, Plummer seems quite capable of performing a soliloquy, seducing a brace of matrons, and hailing a cab - all with the arch of a single eyebrow.

The bonus here, of course, is that interspersed with his memories, Barrymore pulls out bits and pieces of Shakespeare from his alcohol-soaked brain and casually invests them with great artistry — and here too Plummer shines. A touchingly mad Hamlet, consigning a cat to a nunnery or marveling at the piece of work that is man — Plummer's Barrymore is transformed and a youthful Prince of Denmark peeks from behind his eyes.

This is a performance — rich and multi-dimensional — that is not to be missed. But if Plummer's performance in the first ten minutes reminds us of the Tony he won for this turn — and could no doubt win again — it has also reminded us that playwright William Luce was not similarly honoured. Nor, frankly, did he deserve to be. Rather than take us into Barrymore's world or even offer us any sort of meaningful glimpse of it as his life draws to an end, Luce gives us a script so riddled with "Take my Wife — please" style jokes and limericks that one suspects Barrymore is simply dying with vaudeville, rather than from his abuse of alcohol.

Even the design work of Santo Loquasto and Natasha Katz cannot disguise the fact that only an actor of Plummer's calibre, working under the still vital direction of Gene Saks, could hope to disguise that this is little more than a collection of often-witty one-liners, strung together in the fervent hope that they will somehow make a play. That they do is, in the end, a testament to the depth of Plummer's acting genius. And his enduring charm.