Reviews roundup: Kean

Antony Sher assumes the role of stage legend Edmund Kean in this revival of Sartre's play. Has the performance brought him bouquets or brickbats?
Antony Sher and Sam Kelly in Kean, Apollo Theatre
Antony Sher and Sam Kelly in Kean. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

"As an actor I find it odd to play another actor," wrote Antony Sher in the Guardian recently, referring to his current role as acclaimed Regency actor Edmund Kean at the Apollo Theatre. Sher takes the lead role in Adrian Noble's revival of Jean-Paul Sartre's 1953 play, which splits its focus between Kean's legendary performances treading the boards and a flurry of backstage dramas including a dangerous liaison with a Danish countess.

In his review for The Times, Benedict Nightingale considered Sher a dead ringer for the Regency actor: "He has the figure, which is small, and the energy, which is big. He can be fierce and feral and everything that made the great Edmund idolised as an actor and detested as a man." Still, Sher's turn wasn't as "forcefully magnetic" as Nightingale expected. "Sher is playing a man who isn't sure he emotionally exists: which isn't so conducive to fire, brimstone and Kean's other diabolical attributes."

The Guardian's Michael Billington also focused on the contrast between the actors' personas: "Sher's own career exposes the hollowness of Sartre's play. Far from being an off-stage cipher, Sher is an accomplished novelist, artist and autobiographer. And, although he gives a highly skilled performance as Kean, he cannot disguise the fact that the play perpetuates the discredited myth of the actor as an echoingly empty vessel."

The Evening Standard's Nicholas de Jongh wasn't convinced by Sher's performance, writing that he "never conveys what a thrilling Shakespearian, seductive lover and exuberant character Kean must have been." But The Independent's Paul Taylor, who believes Sher "has never fought shy of being larger-than-life as a performer", reckoned he was "able to generate just the right sense of inordinate on-and-offstage appetite and reckless, verging-on-the-ridiculous bravura."

Sartre based his play on a work from the previous century by Alexandre Dumas; the current production straddles two different eras, which troubled Nicholas de Jongh. He found it "confusingly staged both in the 1950s, when Sartre's adaptation was premiered, and in Kean's own time - though in either period most actors, Sher excepted, adopt a burlesque style of heightened insincerity and affectation. No comic or satirical points are scored by this device." He continued, "Sartre's contemporary glosses do not brighten or modernise Dumas's torpid plotting."

The Telegraph's Charles Spencer, groaning at "a ghastly evening of tedium and pretentiousness", was of the same mind: "It looks chic, but makes no sense. Britain had no Prince of Wales in the 1950s, and Kean's Romantic acting, unforgettably described by Coleridge as 'like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning', belongs firmly in its period. Here, everything seems to be happening in a curious, design-led limbo." Michael Billington, too, thought: "Noble clearly wants us to see Kean as the ultimate existentialist hero: a Sartrean self-creating being. But there is nothing remotely original in Sartre's ideas."

There are snippets of several plays within this play, as Sher's Kean portrays a fistful of Shakespearean roles. These sections reminded more than one critic of past productions: Billington fondly remembered Sher's "groundbreaking performance" as Richard III back in 1985. Judging by its first-night reviews, Kean might not linger as long in the memory.