London Theater Journal: Well-Seated Performers

Nobby Clark Rowan Atkinson as St. John Quartermaine.

LONDON â€" Rupert Everett and Rowan Atkinson are very good at sitting. This is more challenging and less boring than it sounds. I, for example, sat for nearly five hours watching these actors sitting in different West End revivals one day recently. But I seriously doubt that anyone focusing on me, or on any of my fellow audience members, during those hours would have been held in thrall.

That’s because Mr. Everett, appearing as Oscar Wilde in David Hare’s “Judas Kiss” at the Duke of York’s Theater, and Mr. Atkinson, who plays the title role in Simon Gray’s “Quartermane’s Terms” at Wyndham’s Theater, find the dynamic in seeming inactivity. Though their characters only rarely budge from the furniture that they claim as their fixed corners in a heaving world, you could scarcely call either a couch potato. That’s true even when the plays around them lean toward stolidity.

Of course these performers sit to different effects and different ends. For Mr. Everett’s Wilde, seen before and after his imprisonment for acts of “gross indecency,” immobility might be described as an esthetic and, even more, a moral choice. His refusal to budge - from the chairs of a comfortably appointed London hotel room in the first act and a squalid room in Naples in the second - is a refusal to enter or acknowledge a world he feels is unpardonably vulgar, hypocritical and cruel.

Mr. Atkinson’s St. John Quartermaine â€" a dim instructor at a school teaching English to foreigners in Cambridge, England in the early 1960’s - is making no such statement and no s! uch choice. St. John sits doggedly in the school’s faculty lounge, even at times when he’s supposed to be teaching, because he has nowhere else to go. Yet unlike Hare’s fatalistic Wilde, St. John sits in hope - of conversation, an invitation, an offer of friendship. He sometimes brings to mind a tweedy Lady of Shallott, vainly awaiting deliverance.

That Mr. Everett and Mr. Atkinson manage to convey these respective psychologies so heartbreakingly, and with such little extravagance of gesture, is a testament to talents not necessarily associated with them. Mr. Everett made his name playing men of supple, smoldering grace and beauty (Noel Coward’s “Vortex” on stage, Christopher Marlowe in the film “Shakespeare in Love”). Mr. Atkinson is best known for the broad, kinetic comedy of “The Black Adder” and “Mr. Bean” series.

There is little that’s physically graceful about Mr. Everett in “The Judas Kiss,” directed by Neil Armfield (“Exit the King” on Broadway). You can understand why he chooses to move as little as possible, aside from the reasons he claims of esthetic languor.

Antoine Antoniol/Getty Images Rupert Everett.

Padded into doughy corpulence, Mr. Everett’s Oscar stumbles when he tries to walk in the first act, as he is trying to decide whether to flee London or stay and be arrested by police, which his petulant young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (known as Bosie, ! played by! Freddie Fox), would prefer. In the second act, in exile in Italy after his imprisonment, he can barely walk at all.

Mr. Everett’s Oscar is more conspicuously vulnerable and less monumentally noble than that of Liam Neeson, who created the part on Broadway in 1998. This is a more ambivalent portrait of an aesthete, with Wilde as a prisoner of his poses as well as his principles, and it enriches the drama. So does the masterly use of lighting (by Rick Fisher) to convey the sense of time passing, entrapping and eroding.

But the play still suffers from declamatory windiness, especially in the second act. And there seems to be little point in letting Bosie the betrayer state his case at such explicit length, since we’ve written him off as a rotter from the moment we first see him.

Mr. Fox makes as much of the part as he can, and looks very fit naked; and Cal MacAnnch, who keeps his clothes on, is very good as Wilde’s steadfast, humble friend, Robert Ross. Mr. Everett does his best and deepest work to date here, letting the holes in Wilde’s silken webs of words emerge both surprisingly and naturally. I am unlikely to forget this Oscar, seated at a table, erupting into tears over a lobster he finds he has no appetite for.

St. John Quartermaine is not the crying kind. As played by Mr. Atkinson in Richard Eyre’s broadly drawn revival of Gray’s 1981 comedy of melancholy, he hardly seems to know what he feels, except a sort of vague ache of solitude and a vaguer awareness of his own incompetence. So there he sits, in the faculty lounge of the Cull-Loomis School, trying to remember how and when to smile and nod as his colleagues pour out confidences and grievances.

Nobby Clark From left, Mr. Atkinson, Felicity Montagu, Will Keen and Conleth Hill.

These days, I suspect, poor St. John might well be diagnosed as having early-stage Alzheimer’s. But for the play’s purposes, he’s the ultimate example of the human urge and inability to connect and communicate with others. Mr. Atkinson’s performance artfully takes the character one step further, in suggesting that St. John doesn’t even communicate with himself. Even attempting to rhythmically tap his thigh with his hand, the two body parts never quite meet.

I was surprised to see in the audience more children and young adolescents that I would have expected for an evening performance of a play about middle-aged malaise. I suppose they had come to see Mr. Bean. And unlike Mr. Everett, Mr. Atkinson still looks like himself here - that is to say, like Mr. Bean.

And Mr. Atkinson is quitefunny on occasion in “Quartermaine’s Terms,” especially when he breaks out into a barking laugh that sounds like a dolphin at mealtime. In this case, though, he gently pushes his character onto - if not across â€" the line that divides farce from tragedy. Like most good magicians, he achieves his magical transformations while scarcely seeming to move at all.