"The Windmills of His Mind"
With his long, weathered, but still noble face, sad eyes, gentleness, lanky frame, wispy white hair, mustache, and goatee, Edward Petherbridge,
the distinguished British actor, would make a perfect Don Quixote. One can
easily see him tilting at windmills, but in the brilliantly conceived and
executed MY PERFECT MIND, part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59
Theaters, it’s King Lear he’s portraying; that is, when he’s not also playing other
persons in Shakespeare’s play, not to mention himself. And, as in the Jacques
Brel song, the windmills that he’s tilting at are the ones within his mind.
“I fear I am not in my perfect mind,” says the king in
act four of LEAR. The theatre piece that takes its title from that phrase
says much the same thing about Mr. Petherbridge’s condition following a stroke
he suffered in 2007 shortly after beginning rehearsals to play Lear in
Wellington, New Zealand, forcing him to abandon the show. His mind seems perfect now, however, at age 78, coming up soon, as he reminds us, on 79. He beautifully, and
with great charm and humor, navigates the extremely tricky shoals of this
nonlinear, narratively fractured, self-deprecating, metatheatrical reflection on his life, career, Lear, and, of course, the theatre.
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| Edward Petherbridge, Paul Hunter. Photo: Manuel Harlan. |
Originally produced for the Told by an Idiot
theatrical company, the Young Vic Theatre, and the Theatre Royal Plymouth, MY
PERFECT MIND was written (leaving room for improvisation) by Mr. Petherbridge
in collaboration with the exceptional comic actor Paul Hunter, who hilariously supports the
star in multiple comic roles, and the marvelous actress Kathryn Hunter, who
directed. It takes place on an assemblage inventively designed by Michael Vale
to signify and satirize theatrical conventions. A sharply raked white platform,
a trap door at its heart, set sideways to the audience; at its top a
thundersheet. A plain white panel for a backdrop. Traditional wind and rain
machines. A couple of bentwood chairs, a table, and random props. Not much to
look at, but as used during the performance, a cornucopia of theatrical, and
often terrifically funny, theatrical possibilities.
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| Paul Hunter, Edward Petherbridge. Photo: Manuel Harlan. |
Mr. Hunter serves both as Lear’s Fool in scenes from
KING LEAR, but also makes everyone else he plays part of a rogue’s gallery of people (not necessarily fools) in Mr. Petherbridge’s life. A few odd costume pieces, a wig, hair net, or cap infuse a farcical energy into all the people he portrays, including Dr.
Witznagel, a lab-coated, bushy-wigged neurologist with a comically phony German
accent, whose scenes serve as a sort of frame to the action. He begins the play
as if speaking to a class of future “doctors of the brain,” introducing a case
study of a man suffering from a brain trauma that has given him EPS (Edward
Petherbridge Syndrome), a condition wherein Mr. Petherbridge believes he’s King
Lear. Later, this morphs into its opposite, KLS (figure it out). Each time he
mimes writing notes on the thundersheet, it produces its expected sound effect,
causing him to look up as if the skies were about to open. Mr. Hunter’s comic timing
and sensibility make you chuckle no matter how old-hat his shtick is.
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| Edward Petherbridge, Paul Hunter. Photo: Manuel Harlan. |
Over the course of the play he embodies characters in
LEAR; himself when he costarred with Mr. Petherbridge in a flop 2010 West
End revival of THE FANTASTICKS; Mr. Petherbridge’s pregnant mother, who had a
stroke two days before her son was born; David Lawrence, director of Wellington’s
Bacchanal Theatre Company; a cab driver imagined to
have driven the star all the way from Wellington to Bradford, Yorkshire, where he was raised; a Japanese director casting Mr. Petherbridge in THE FANTASTICKS; Veronica,
a Romanian housecleaner who rehearses LEAR with him; Sir Laurence Olivier, who
at one point performs Othello by combining it with Richard III; Miss MacPride,
his Bradford movement teacher who taught him the importance of “economy and
selection”; the New Zealand doctor who treated his stroke, and others.
As the piece progresses it keeps shifting places and
situations, going back and forth in time, satirizing actors’ affectations, taking
us into rehearsals of Lear, informing us of major highlights in Mr.
Petherbridge’s career (including his famous roles in NICHOLAS NICKLEBY and
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN, and his less famous one as an Incan priest in THE
ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN*), showing Mr. Petherbridge reliving the acting exercises
he performed for Miss MacPride (such as “A Day in the Life of a Gnat”), presenting Mr. Petherbridge as a child performing “Chickery Chick” in a
talent contest at the Bridlington Pavilion, informing us of Mr. Petherbridge’s
family background, and so on. Famous English theatre names drop frequently along the way, although not everyone will pick up every anecdotal reference to
Coward, Wolfit, Finney, Branagh, and Holm. Ironically, we learn that, despite
Mr. Petherbridge’s leaving LEAR, Wellington audiences soon after were privileged
to see the world touring production of it starring Mr. Petherbridge’s friend,
Ian McKellen.
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| Paul Hunter, Edward Petherbridge. Photo: Manuel Harlan. |
Mr. Petherbridge, wearing jeans and a blousy white
shirt with various vests, jackets, and coats, shifts in manner from the
convincingly off the cuff, seemingly improvisational, to the classically
polished and powerful. He may sometimes give the illusion of searching for a word, but he never misses a
beat, and even his most throwaway moments are clearly set and perfected.
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| Paul Hunter, Edward Petherbridge. Photo: Manuel Harlan. |
Having
gained fame mainly as a stage actor, especially during his tenure with the
Royal Shakespeare Company, he’s not become a household name like those peers
who’ve had important film careers. His best-known non-theatre work was as the
debonair sleuth, Sir Peter Wimsey, in the 1987 BBC TV series based on the Dorothy
Sayers novels. But it’s in the theatre that you want to see him, and now you’ve
got your chance. Seize it.
[*Here’s a little anecdote of my own, stirred up when
Mr. Petherbridge mentioned THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN. In 1963 I was a graduate student in Tokyo studying kabuki
theatre. That November an international theatre conference brought many
distinguished world theatre figures to Japan, including the director John
Dexter. I got to know him a bit at the conference and, when the visitors were
taken to see a kabuki production I sat next to him and explained the various
conventions. In 1965 Dexter’s production of THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN, which
had starred Robert Stephens as the Inca king Atahualpa in England, came to New
York with David Carradine in the role. I was excited to see that Dexter had infused
a number of kabuki conventions into this highly theatrical work, and now to realize that, in my own tiny way, I'd had something to do with influencing a play in which the young Edward Petherbridge appeared.]
Other Viewpoints:
59E59 Theaters
59 East Fifty-ninth Street, NYC
Through June 28
