This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/feb/18/richard-briers-stage-good-life
The article has changed 3 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| Richard Briers was a potent presence on stage, as well as in The Good Life | Richard Briers was a potent presence on stage, as well as in The Good Life |
| (about 2 hours later) | |
| I suppose there are worse fates for an actor than to be remembered for a popular TV series. But it does a disservice to Richard Briers for him to be solely identified with The Good Life. He was a hugely experienced stage actor whose early career embraced Ayckbourn, Stoppard, Frayn, Gray and, briefly, Pinter. What's more, Briers enjoyed a glorious second coming in his 50s when he played Shakespeare's Lear and Malvolio, and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, for Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance theatre company before going on to appear in nine of Branagh's movies. In the theatre, he was a far more potent presence than his career in gentle TV comedy suggests. | I suppose there are worse fates for an actor than to be remembered for a popular TV series. But it does a disservice to Richard Briers for him to be solely identified with The Good Life. He was a hugely experienced stage actor whose early career embraced Ayckbourn, Stoppard, Frayn, Gray and, briefly, Pinter. What's more, Briers enjoyed a glorious second coming in his 50s when he played Shakespeare's Lear and Malvolio, and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, for Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance theatre company before going on to appear in nine of Branagh's movies. In the theatre, he was a far more potent presence than his career in gentle TV comedy suggests. |
| Briers loved to tell how, when he played Hamlet as a young man in rep, he spoke so fast that the Daily Telegraph's WA Darlington compared him to "a demented typewriter". By the time I first saw him, at the Belgrade Coventry in the late 1950s in Peter Ustinov's Romanoff and Juliet, he had learned to harness his quickfire delivery. | |
| Above all, I always think of him as the quintessential Ayckbourn actor. He had a wonderful feathery charm as the young man who pursues his fiancee to a country retreat in Ayckbourn's first West End hit, Relatively Speaking, in 1967. Six years later, as Sidney Hopcroft in Absurd Person Singular, he gave this upwardly mobile suburbanite a distinctly manic edge. And I shall never forget him as the recently bereaved Colin in Absent Friends, radiating the reckless, rise-above-it good cheer of the truly insensitive. | |
| I have a cherished recollection of meeting Briers when he played the second-string theatre critic, Moon, in Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound in 1968. At the time, I was Irving Wardle's deputy on the Times and understood all too well the agony of the understudy whose presence defines someone else's absence. At that period, I regularly sported a black corduroy suit and was astonished to turn up at a pre-show press conference to find that Briers had adopted exactly the same costume for the role. We gawped at each other like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. | I have a cherished recollection of meeting Briers when he played the second-string theatre critic, Moon, in Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound in 1968. At the time, I was Irving Wardle's deputy on the Times and understood all too well the agony of the understudy whose presence defines someone else's absence. At that period, I regularly sported a black corduroy suit and was astonished to turn up at a pre-show press conference to find that Briers had adopted exactly the same costume for the role. We gawped at each other like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. |
| Briers was expert in comedy and farce: he could do dither and charm, and yet convey the nervous anguish of the apparently ordinary. But it was Branagh who saw his untapped classic potential. I confess that when I first saw Briers' Lear, at the jet-lagged end of a tiring week in Chicago, I shamefully fell asleep. Seeing the performance later in Edinburgh, I was impressed by Briers' ability to encompass the hero's rage and madness. He was equally fine as Malvolio: a preening, stiff-gaited jack-in-office who, like all first-rate Malvolios, enlisted one's sympathy in his downfall. | Briers was expert in comedy and farce: he could do dither and charm, and yet convey the nervous anguish of the apparently ordinary. But it was Branagh who saw his untapped classic potential. I confess that when I first saw Briers' Lear, at the jet-lagged end of a tiring week in Chicago, I shamefully fell asleep. Seeing the performance later in Edinburgh, I was impressed by Briers' ability to encompass the hero's rage and madness. He was equally fine as Malvolio: a preening, stiff-gaited jack-in-office who, like all first-rate Malvolios, enlisted one's sympathy in his downfall. |
| So, while it's good to remember Briers for the pleasure he gave millions tending his suburban garden and Felicity Kendal in The Good Life, it was on stage that one saw the real range of his talent. The only sadness is that in 2009 he had to pull out of a West End production of Beckett's Endgame, where he was due to the play the Lear-like Hamm. With his ability to blend seeming opposites, Briers would have been perfectly suited to Beckett's comic vision of the apocalypse. |