Stage Struck

Movie stars must tread lightly, writes PETER CRAWLEY

ONE OLD maxim about the acting profession has always sounded a bit creaky: You do cinema for money, TV for fame and theatre for art.

It doesn’t take a seasoned code- breaker to locate some prejudice in that breakdown, one that masks the fact you can also conceivably do cinema for fame, TV for art and theatre for peanuts. But there’s another supposition there too: that actors can’t move easily between different media.

Take Stockard Channing. Most people will remember caustic put-downs as Rizzo from the film Grease. A large number will zone in on her savvy pluck as Abigail Bartlett in TV’s The West Wing. But only a tiny few will spare a thought for the plays of John Guare or Bertolt Brecht. When it comes to global recognition, an actor’s screen persona travels fast and lingers long. Their stage work, on the other hand, carries the same substance as a rumour.

Channing may be a character actor whose career began on the stage, but it's unlikely that this is what endeared her most to director Lynne Parker, who has cast her in Rough Magic's new production of The Importance of Being Earnest,or to the Gaiety Theatre, which has more than a thousand seats to fill a night.

Lady Bracknell, the mercilessly trilling patrician in Oscar Wilde’s comedy, doesn’t immediately strike you as the role the New York-bred Channing was born to play. But as money-conscious theatres emulate the West End tactic of turning shows into star vehicles, it’s vital that she plays it.

It isn’t really a question of whether or not Channing can do it, but whether we allow her to. Through no fault of their own, famous screen actors reach a stage where they are laden down with “baggage”: the publicly devoured details of their private lives, the persistent phantoms of previous roles, the expectations of familiar cadences. Neither critics, producers nor audiences tend to see past it.

Lady Bracknell gets some of Wilde’s best lines, but her most famous is just three syllables long: “A handbag?” The line has been interpreted a kajillion times but we’re so familiar with Channing’s voice, husky and wry, we can almost hear it already: flat, sardonic and withering, a handbag lost in baggage.

Such second-guessing is enormously unfair, of course. No less so than when previously sceptical New York critics conceded this week that Scarlett Johansson could actually hack it on the stage. “Johansson melts into her character so thoroughly that her nimbus of celebrity disappears,” fawned the New York Times, never losing sight of her celebrity. It was much the same deal when Keira Knightley’s stardom became a stick to beat her recent West End debut with.

Star performers have it tough, then; expected to draw in the crowds because of who they are, then to make audiences forget it as soon as the curtain lifts. Pitting name recognition against the immersion of art, the theatre puts stars into direct competition with themselves.

Leave your baggage with the marketing department, the star performer is told, find your handbag on the stage, and try to forget what the box office never will: the importance of being famous.