Satre's existentialist version of the Victorian actor Edmund Kean is a fascinating and compelling one. This is a play about acting itself and the degree to which every man plays his part: the craft of acting seen as a hall of mirrors, forever distorting the personality until even the actor is unable to know himself. In many ways, this cross-century play is very much a farce, including the bundling of women in and out of cupboards, but strictly of the Stoppardian intellectual type rather than the Carry On variety. Self-destruction and downfall Edmund Kean is a consummate philanderer, a boozer and a debtor, posturing his way through life, constantly blurring the boundaries between external reality and the illusion of drama. Even his private life is a public performance, as he struggles to differentiate fact from fiction.
 | | Antony Sher and Jane Murphy |
His world finally crumbles as he tumbles towards self-destruction, culminating in an amazing public performance of Othello where his dresser, excellently played by Sam Kelly, has to physically prevent him from attacking his one-time fellow philanderer and friend, the Prince of Wales. There are, of course, echoes of Falstaff and Hal here. Indeed, references to Shakespeare abound throughout the work, not least in its own reflexivity as a work of artifice but also in the hero who sews the seeds of his own eventual downfall. Comedy and tragedy Antony Sher makes a welcome return to Bath in a role that could almost have been written for him.
 | | Joanne Pearce and Antony Sher |
He is superb as Kean, bringing out brilliantly the ambiguities and tensions within this complex character as he slides towards his own inevitable self-destruction (Kean himself died well before his time, at the age of 42 in 1833). There is excellent support too from a fine cast. Especially compelling are Joanne Pearce as the sensuous Elena and Jane Murphy as her nemesis, the would-be actress Anne Danby. Adrian Noble's direction is crisp and sharp and never lets the action dwindle in a tour de force for anyone who likes their drama to be a compelling mixture of the comic and the tragic. | 
