When the English playwright Ronald Harwood (1934) was writing the play The Dresser (1982), he drew from his personal experience as he had previously worked as a personal dresser to Donald Wolfit, the main actor in Shakespeare Company, for five years. Shakespeare's King Lear was Wolfit's greatest success, so in Harwood's play it serves as the basis for its development as well as for the characters' personalities, especially for Sir.
In their adaptation Veljko Mićunović and Slobodan Obradović left out the historical and biographical circumstances of the play. The play is centred around the archetypical life situation and a universal human characteristic (passion) – a characteristic of people who one evening find themselves before a theatre play in which an old renowned actor Sir is about to come to his sad ending. The connection between Sir and King Lear's destiny is emphasised in the adaptation, and at the same time,
there is something very Beckett-like in the relationship between Sir and Norman.
At first glance it would seem as if Sir was a tragic character, but in reality, Norman is the one who is tragic. It is through him that we learn about the sad personal story from the theatre’s backstage. As Sir's dresser Norman spent almost his whole life in the theatre experiencing Sir's highs and lows, his joy and desperation, and this makes the scene when Norman begins to read the beginning of Sir's biography only to find out that among the people Sir has dedicated his book and art to, he
is not mentioned at all, even more disturbing.
The play The Dresser is a complex study of human characters, especially those typical of the theatre. It is about the archetype of theatre life through which hidden triggers of action in the theatre backstage are revealed, especially the psychology of interpersonal relations.
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