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Rating: - A love-song to Sir Donald Wolfit
There's a very peculiar review here by one Eric A. Daily, who thinks that the eponymous Dresser is played by John Hurt. Oh no he isn't. It's Tom Courtenay, in one of his most affecting performances. I saw Courtenay play this on the London Stage nearly 30 years ago; unforgettable. By the time I saw the play, Finney had left the cast and "Sir" was played superbly by Freddie Jones, a sometimes underrated, undervalued actor who still is working on UK TV, although now in his eighties; we should be so spry. But this film boasts Albert Finney, and in him and Tom Courtenay you have two of the British theatre's -indeed the World's- greatest living actors.

As the playwright Ronald Harwood has repeatedly said, the play (and film) are based on his own experiences dressing the great, legendary, barnstorming actor Donald Wolfit, who made relatively few film appearances but whose voice was powerful enough to rattle the front-of-house chandeliers. So this is a loving and poignant elegy to a particular era and a particular style of acting that both have passsed from view. This is neither good nor bad, it's just the way things are; cyclical and ever-renewing, because tastes change and interpretations of the classic texts shift from generation to generation. However... experience tells me that when some of today's British theatrical Knights are booming their way through Shakespeare and Chekhov, the backstage corridors at the National Theatre may yet echo with passions and tensions and the creak of over-stretched egos that would sound very familiar to Sir Donald Wolfit's still-growling spectre.

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