Onstage, a Seducer With Some Qualms
by Brantley New York Times 1/15/2016
No man, at least not since Noël Coward, wore a dressing gown with more slippery ease or dangerous intent. When the British actor Alan Rickman appeared on Broadway in Howard Davies's 2002 revival of Coward's "Private Lives," he brought a refreshing, and slightly alarming, sexual frankness to the role of Elyot, that comedy's fast-quipping, martini-sipping hero.
Here was a man who dressed as elegantly as he spoke. But whether in black tie or silk pajamas, Mr. Rickman's Elyot knew that his bespoke clothes -- like his impeccably tailored epigrams -- could slide away at any minute to reveal a stark-naked lust.
Mr. Rickman, who died on Thursday at 69, is best known to the general public for his charismatic creepiness in "Die Hard" and the "Harry Potter" films. But onstage he was even more compelling as a serpentine seducer with a conscience -- someone who lived for the pleasures of his flesh, while a faint voice was always whispering in his ear that one day the bill for such hedonism would have to be paid. When his Elyot in "Private Lives" said to his bedmate (and ex-wife), Amanda (Lindsay Duncan, his perfect partner), "We're in love all right," the words tolled with a rueful ring of doom.
New York audiences first became aware of Mr. Rickman as Valmont, the fatally attractive French nobleman in the 1987 production of "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos's 18th-century epistolary novel of decadence and its discontents. In that drama, too, Mr. Rickman was paired with Ms. Duncan, who portrayed the Marquise de Merteuil, his playmate in erotic blood sports.
Their chemistry, in both "Liaisons" and "Private Lives," was of a formula seldom seen on Broadway. The wavelength they seemed to share was based on an awareness -- as hurtful as it was amusing to them -- of both the power and transience of sexual attraction. They also managed to suggest, tantalizingly, that when their characters went to bed, the traditional lines between masculine and feminine were destined to be erased.
Like their Amanda and Elyot, this Valmont and his marquise possessed a conscious knowledge that as, Amanda says, "I think very few people are completely normal, really, deep down in their private lives." What Mr. Rickman's performance in both roles made clear was that while in such knowledge there may power, there is not, by any means, redemption.
His presence was exceptionally feline, or perhaps pantherine is the better word. His body seemed to curl and ripple even when he was standing still, and he uttered his crisply pronounced words with a provocative languor.
This demeanor made him an ideal choice for his last appearance on Broadway, in the role of a manipulative celebrity writing teacher in Theresa Rebeck's "Seminar" (2011) who was sensually irresistible to all his students, male and female. As a director, he brought the same sensibility to August Strindberg's fatalistic "Creditors," which located the fire and the ice with an almost scientific precision in a destructive romantic triangle.
I saw that show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2010. And it was the same institution that brought Mr. Rickman to New York the next year for his final pairing here with Ms. Duncan, in James Macdonald's revival of Ibsen's "John Gabriel Borkman," as two lethally sharp sides of another romantic triangle. (A forbidding Fiona Shaw was the third participant.)
Mr. Macdonald's interpretation emphasized the glacial aspect of Ibsen's penultimate drama, the feeling that repressed emotions had frozen its characters into walking zombies. The set was the wintriest I can ever recall seeing, piled with drifts of artificial snow. But while Mr. Rickman may have played down his natural fiery affinity with Ms. Duncan for the occasion, you could sense the flame within still flickering, and surmised that, given the chance, it was strong enough to melt any ice fortress.
R.I.P. Alan Rickman
Re: R.I.P. Alan Rickman
A quality supporting actor who was perhaps unlucky to never get the appropriate part to earn him an Oscar nomination.
He will definitely be remembered for the many occasions he delivered good performances in bad roles. Most of all in Robin Hood - The Prince of Thieves, where he hated the screenplay so much that he gathered up some friends who wrote him much better dialogue than anyone else had in that movie.
He will definitely be remembered for the many occasions he delivered good performances in bad roles. Most of all in Robin Hood - The Prince of Thieves, where he hated the screenplay so much that he gathered up some friends who wrote him much better dialogue than anyone else had in that movie.
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Re: R.I.P. Alan Rickman
Oh, come on! This is a sad loss, and a shock.
Re: R.I.P. Alan Rickman
R.I.P.
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Re: R.I.P. Alan Rickman
This explains his recent marriage.
If I had one friend who was a fanatical Bowie fan, I have many female friends who are fanatical Alan Rickman fans. 2016 is off to a really bad start.
If I had one friend who was a fanatical Bowie fan, I have many female friends who are fanatical Alan Rickman fans. 2016 is off to a really bad start.
"What the hell?"
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Re: R.I.P. Alan Rickman
Shit.
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Re: R.I.P. Alan Rickman
This one hurts...such a fantastic actor, easy to take for granted but always spectacular.
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Re: R.I.P. Alan Rickman
Another shock.
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R.I.P. Alan Rickman
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