Born to be a luvvie
Julie Burchill in the Spectator:
‘I was born to play Lady Bracknell,’ Stephen Fry swanked recently, in an interview to mark a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest, running until January. I can’t be the only one to greet the idea of another round of Fry interviews with a desire to go to bed and not come out till it’s all over. But that would be a long hibernation. For Stephen Fry pronouncements are like professional tennis; it’s always open season.
You can’t get away from the clown, particularly when he’s lecturing women on how they should feel about having great hairy men in mascara sharing their private spaces. Magnificently, J.K. Rowling denied they had ever been friends after Fry came out with a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger lecture about how his previously amiable alleged-mate had been ‘radicalised’ by evil Terfs and had become a ‘lost cause’. Then there was the time we had to listen to him threatening to leave a private members’ club that didn’t admit women – after having been a member for decades under these conditions ‘Oopsie!’ as Fry himself might exclaim, if in Adorably Awks Mode.
…
Maybe I was spoiled by seeing Maggie Smith play Lady Bracknell as a youngster. But surely all can see there’s something off about Fry wearing comedy breasts; it’s a wonder that it took the crass old fraud so long. I can’t help thinking – nay, hoping – that Fry has gone too far this time, and that in his over-reach will reveal himself as the grasping, shallow sell-out that he is. That is, the type of person that Oscar Wilde thoroughly loathed. It may well be true that ‘to love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance’ – but surely the love story between Stephen Fry and himself has delighted us long enough.
He was a perfect Jeeves. Other than that…
1. Stephen Fry can only play one character. As it happens, that character is a stock character in the literature and drama of England, and he plays it pretty well. But that’s ALL he can do.
2. There are scores of veteran actresses who get very little work but would do a brilliant Lady Bracknell. This is just stunt casting.
Is the stock part of the stock character the social role or the vastly more intelligent and knowledgeable than the boss angle? Or something else? Is Jeeves like the Fool in King Lear?
Speaking of King Lear – my husband and I went to a performance the other night, with some of the top Shakespearean actors in Lincoln. I don’t know what’s happening to the world. The audience was laughing. Not just at the fool – you’re supposed to find him funny. But gut-busting guffaws all through the thing, at times I failed to see how they could find it funny.
I’ve been seeing the same thing happening all over lately. A production we went to of Hamlet in Oklahoma City actually added a laugh track. If they maintained that when everyone was dead, I don’t know, because we left at intermission. People were laughing through a production of Streetcar Named Desire.
I don’t get it…have we gotten to a point where tragedy and death make us chortle?
Well that’s gross.
“has delighted us long enough.”
That Austen quote is nasty and still has me giggling.
Fry’s character is the Insufferably Smug Englishman. There are two variants: sometimes he’s smug because of social position, and sometimes because he actually does know things most people don’t.
Iknklast, I suspect that the reaction to Lear you describe has to do with what seems to be a (fairly) recent assumption that the audience have to constantly demonstrate and proclaim that they are there, they are involved, they are enjoying themselves — as though everything were a late-night comedy turn.
But I remember, many tears (that was a mistyping but I am going to leave it, considering what the world is coming to) ago, I was back in Britain and went to a production of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta in Oxford, at what appeared to be a cinema that had been converted into a theatre. Barabbas was played by the very good Scottish actor Ian MacDiarmid (the production went on to London, where it was very successful, as I recall). The local bourgeoise had turned in force for what they seemed to think was a bit of kultur with a capital ‘K’. But the play is a black farce — Ubu Roi three hundred years before its time, and a better play than Jarry’s. The only half-way decent and honourable people in the play are the Turks! And as one anti-Christian joke followed another, you could see the embarrassment & distress on the audience’s faces as they wondered whether they were really supposed to laugh at these blasphemies. I, meanwhile, was trying to stifle my giggles, not very successfully. One was forced to wonder how Marlowe got away with it — though of course in the end he didn’t.