Standing Ovations

The following is excerpted from Mark Shenton's December 23, 2010 commentary "The Full Monty," which is about what one blogger calls the "best hung the­at­rical her­oes."

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I recently wrote here about critics getting too personal in reviews, following the furore that engulfed Alastair Macaulay of the New York Times for his characterisation of the Sugar Plum Fairy in a New York City Ballet production of The Nutcracker having consumed too many sugar plums herself. But as Michael Cove­ney sug­ges­ted in his blog on Tues­day, “A per­former gets on a stage and per­forms. With heart, mind and body. All three are fair game for crit­ics, and being rude or not simply doesn’t come into it. What an actor, or a dan­cer, looks like is what crit­ics write about.”

And if a per­former goes naked, it should, to fol­low this reas­on­ing, be fair game for their par­tic­u­lar attrib­utes to be com­men­ted on, too.

Crit­ics, of course, often do, par­tic­u­larly if the per­former doesn’t exactly meas­ure up, so to speak. I have pre­vi­ously writ­ten here how Mark Lawson once com­men­ted adversely on Ian Holm’s man­hood when he appeared naked dur­ing the storm scene in a National Theatre pro­duc­tion of King Lear, and how Holm replied in his auto­bi­o­graphy that the com­ments have “stayed with me, so I sup­pose they must have hit some kind of nerve.” But Holm gets his revenge: “Even dis­reg­ard­ing Lawson’s own phys­ical short­com­ings (the liver lips, the pudgy plas­ti­cine face, the old man’s pre­ma­turely bald­ing dome), I am not con­vinced that his no doubt enorm­ous cock would not also have dwindled after a cold bath in front of sev­eral thou­sand people.”

Ian McK­el­len, play­ing the same role for the RSC (and like­wise strip­ping), on the other hand drew this admir­ing, even slav­er­ing, review from New York critic Michael Port­antiere, in which he noted, “Spe­cial note for those who care about such things: In a brief nude scene, McK­el­len amply demon­strates the truth of Lear’s state­ment that he is ‘every inch a king’.” No won­der that Derek Jac­obi, now play­ing the role for the Don­mar, has pub­licly declared in an inter­view with Dominic Cav­endish in the Daily Tele­graph: “I can’t com­pete!!”. . . and so he doesn’t try and remains fully clothed dur­ing that scene.

When Daniel Rad­cliffe, the Harry Pot­ter film wiz­ard, fam­ously showed his own per­sonal wand as he made his stage debut in the lead role of Equus, a role that involved a pro­longed nude scene, he told the New York Times when he reprised the role there that he suffered from what he called Michelangelo’s David Effect. [According to Radcliffe] David “wasn’t very well endowed, because he was fight­ing Goliath. There was very much of that effect. You tighten up like a ham­ster. The first time it happened, I turned around and went, ‘You know, there’s a thou­sand people here, and I don’t think even one of them would expect you to look your best in this situation.’”

Nich­olas de Jongh, then theatre critic of the Even­ing Standard, how­ever, clearly expec­ted more, declar­ing that “never in mod­ern times has such excite­ment been stirred by the pro­spect of view­ing a very few inches of adoles­cent male flesh”.

The very phrasing, of course, proves that nude scenes in the theatre do undoubtedly cause a frisson and sexual tension that isn’t necessarily to do with the character at all but about the actor’s own exposure of something far more intimate. And in any case, I heard from separate reports over the course of the New York run that far from suffering the David Effect, appearing in Equus proved to be sheer theatrical Viagra for young Mr Radcliffe, who was more man than boy as the play increasingly stirred him to attention.

A similar thing happened to Eddie Izzard when he appeared in a nude scene in the West End play Lenny with co-star Elizabeth Berkley, and rose to the occasion in every sense, so to speak. As Max Bialystock says to Ulla after her audition in The Producers, “Even though we’re sitting down, Mr Bloom and I are giving you a standing ovation,” so it seems that both Mr Radcliffe and Mr Izzard wanted to lead the standing ovations.

To read Mark Shenton's commentary in its entirety, click here.

See also the previous posts:
• Hard
• Not a Weapon or a Mere Tool
• Body and Soul
• Rethinking the Normal Penis