Yes, it is true, I am king...about three times a week
Alexandre Dumas He was not afraid of getting into fights. He drank straight from the bottle, bottle after bottle. He first hit the stage at the age of four, in a ballet where he played the role of Cupid ; still a child, he went off to sea, but couldn't stand the discipline on board ship, pretended he was deaf and dumb and had a limp. He had enough talent to fool all the doctors. He played the role of Hamlet for the first time at fourteen, and his reputation reached as far as the ears of King George the 3rd, who demanded a private meeting with him at Windsor. As a teenager, he worked in a circus and broke both of his legs during an acrobatic number. He required no less than three women in his dressing room, in order to maintain his « spiritual equilibrium ». Even his fellow actors found him eccentric : he named his horse Shylock and loved to play around in his living room with his pet lion. At the age of 25, he saved the theater of Drury Lane from bankruptcy by playing the roles of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Shylock and Richard the 3rd - and the latter role, performed during a tour of the New World, led to his being named honorary chieftain of a Huron Indian tribe after one of his performances.
He was also the first actor in two centuries to perform Lear as Shakespeare had written it, renouncing Nahum Tate's happy end (he saves Cordelia's life and allows her to marry Edgar). His adulterous relationship in Switzerland with Charlotte Cox, wife of a London notable, led to a sensational trial. In a nutshell, Edmund Kean (1787-1833), drunkard, skirt-chaser, uncontrollable and incomparable Shakespearian actor, was not only a theatrical genius, he was also the first superstar. We can understand why he fascinated his contemporaries : his life inspired Alexandre Dumas père to write a play, just three years after his death. He was the first global specimen of what the bourgeoisie would create during the industrial revolution: the cult of celebrity (reaching its apotheosis today in pop culture).
Kean, media superstar, was also its first victim : praised or crucified by the press, which recounted his every escapade, divulged his every passion and relationship, he was never considered an equal by the upper classes for whom he performed. Because this demigod of the stage, it is told, was the son of a prostitute, who occasionally acted herself, and a father who he never knew and who committed suicide shortly after his birth. Kean-the-outrageous, torn between two worlds, eternally hunting down the truth of his very being through the roles her performed, and vice versa, has just been resurrected and given a facelift by Frank Castorf at the Volksbuhne. He chose the extraordinary Alexander Scheer to play the role of Kean. In order to buttress Dumas's already brilliant text, he has dug into Heiner Muller's « Hamlet-machine », in order make the dialogue between Kean's historical period, and our own, that much more pertinent. In many ways, Kean heralds the contemporary world.
