Christopher Plummer won a Tony portraying another great actor, John Barrymore, in the 1997 one man play “Barrymore” that ran nine months to rave reviews.
In the work by William Luce, the actor from the famous stage family, is attempting to mount a late career comeback in the 1940s after his Hollywood career fizzled in the 1920s. In the first stages of trying to mount a revival of a role he had done at a much younger age, Shakespeare’s “Richard II,” he struggles so much with his lines that his prompter, there to coach him, takes on a much more important role. Together, they put on more than one back-and-forth of “line, please!” that could make the play a comedy.
But there is great pathos underlying his limerick-spouting figure, as he falls into reminiscences and reveries of the past, rails against age and old wives, and demands the drink that had been part of his downfall.
The tour-de-force was remounted and captured on stage in Toronto in 2011 for a film that finally reaches its biggest potential audience tonight on “Great Performances” (PBS, 9 p.m., check local listings). More than a filmed play, this version of “Barrymore” is more like a film, in that it uses some flashback and the bare, scary setting of a bare stage and empty auditorium to fuel the fizzling rehearsal.
It’s another ringing achievement for Plummer, whose mellifluous accented voice is a delight to hear bellow and raging for two hours. Another peak in a career that included two Emmys,two Tonys and last year’s Oscar.
At 84, he shows no sign of slowing down. Just before he was to open a one man play “A Word or Two” at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, he sat with reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena to talk about the role, and the filmed version of it.
“There’s nothing worse to me than a filmed stage play normally,” Plummer says, “because there’s a curtain between you and the audience. I mean, there’s a it stops you from really communicating. Whereas, in the theater, I mean, you’re right there, and it’s the sort of haven of the imagination, the theater, and you use every part of your thinking.
“But this was filmed with, I thought, great taste by Eric Canuel, who was a French Canadian director, who was very talented,” he says. “What was most unnerving about seeing it for the first time on the screen was I found it far more emotional than the play had been.”
The reason, he says, is because of the close-ups that ” captures my own fears and thoughts so cruelly that it’s kind of wonderful. You see the pain inside.”
Plummer says when he originally got the play from the playwright Luce, “it was just a bunch of gags to begin with, very funny, but there was no depth, or it was rather shallow.
“So we took it on the road for a long time and worked on it in each town, and William Luce was so flexible and wonderful to work with,” Plummer says. “And Gene Saks, who directed it, was, again, flexible and wonderful to work with. So we managed to find, finally, some sort of kind of pain behind the eyes of Jack, and, of course, in life it was a great deal of pain. So I think we found it. I think it’s there, and it was a lovely exercise to develop a part and a play.”
Few from the storied acting family have seen the play or commented it if they had, Plummer says. But one day on Broadway, he was informed that Barrymore’s last wife Elaine was in the audience.
“I was absolutely terrified,” he says, adding that he tried especially hard to sound exactly like his subject that day. “It was okay. I did the show, and afterwards she came backstage with a friend, and all she said was ,and it was the nicest compliment I think I’ve ever got she said, ‘Jack would have loved to have done the town with you.’ And that was fine with me. That was just great.”
Plummer says Barrymore’s own acting career was “a terrible waste” of lost potential. “I’ve done so many more parts, great parts than Barrymore ever got a chance to do,” he says.
“I mean, he would have been the perfect Mark Antony, actually, the bon viveur and all that. He would have been a great Mark Antony — I’m talking about ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ not ‘Julius Caesar.’ And there were so many more parts. He would have been a great ‘Lear.’ I mean, good Lord.”
As a child, Plummer was drawn to the Barrymore legacy, mostly through reading about him.
“Jack Barrymore, then, was so glamorous to me,” Plummer recalled. “He was so handsome and such a great actor and at the same time a wonderful boozer. I thought, Oh, God, what a great profession this is. I want to be in it. I mean, you can please the ladies and also get drunk every night. What a great, great profession. So he inspired me to be an actor actually, although, I’d never met him.”
On screen, Barrymore’s best work, in Plummer’s opinion was the 1934 screwball classic “20th Century.”
In it, “he’s totally outrageous and totally wonderful, and so is Carole Lombard. I mean, the two of them just are divine in that. I think that’s my favorite movie,” Plummer says.
Of his Shakespearean roles, “his Mercutio was a little too drunk and over the top. Basil Rathbone, whom I knew because I played with him on the stage, played Tybalt in “Romeo and Juliet,” the MGM movie in which Jack was Mercutio, and he told me that during the famous Queen Mab speech, Jack was so drunk that he and Reginald Denny, who played Benvolio, had to get on either side of the camera during his close up and hold him up. Otherwise, he would have disappeared. That was from the horse’s mouth. So I believe every word of it.”
Plummer says he likes doing one man shows “because there’s no one else to spoil the party.
“And also, they’re terribly lonely so that you get your punishment as well. It is lonely up there.”
He does get help from the prompter in “Barrymore,” but he also says “the audience is very much” a partner.
“The audience is always a partner even when it’s a full cast, because even if you’re playing a love scene on the stage, you’ve got to be aware that the audience is out front, and you’ve got to be aware of their responses. And if they start hacking and coughing, you’ve got to know how to duck all that and wait until they’ve left the room and then carry on.
“You’ve got to be aware of the audience. And an awful lot of acting schools tell you, ‘Oh, you must be within yourself. You’ve got to be real and not care about where you are.’ Rubbish. You’ve got to be totally aware of the people in front of you.”