Roger Rees's Shakespeare: Verily a Stand-Up Kind of Guy

Roger Rees in the one-man show "What You Will" at Folger Theatre. (By Carol Pratt -- Folger Theatre)

Roger Rees wants you to learn to stop worrying and love the Bard.

He arrives onstage in "What You Will," his new one-man show, with a bust of the playwright under his arm, and proceeds to talk to and about him in the flippant manner of one who is not impressed with the writer's body of work. As he notes with a conspiratorial sneer, there weren't that many people on the planet in Shakespeare's time.

"Anyone," Rees notes tongue-in-cheekily, "could get published in those days."

This contrarian prologue to the 90-minute piece, which had its premiere over the weekend in a brief run at Folger Theatre, establishes an easygoing accessibility and the actor's charming campaign to divest the appreciation of Shakespeare of any fusty traces of reverence.

The notion that there should be no orthodoxy regarding the Bard's eminence is not a new one: George Bernard Shaw, Rees tells us, compared himself favorably with Shakespeare, and he quotes D.H. Lawrence calling Hamlet a "repulsive" character: all that "sniffing and poking at his mother." But it is certainly entertaining when a star alumnus of the Royal Shakespeare Company steps forward to remind us that it's okay to come at Shakespeare in any way that makes sense to you.

The Folger presentation of "What You Will," which ended yesterday, was clearly a dry run for Rees. The show has a catchall quality; it feels compiled at this stage, rather than fully composed. (On Friday night he read from three-ring binders a lot of the time; it's unclear whether these eventually will disappear.) No doubt some of the material will be jettisoned as he refines the tone and smooths out the rougher transitions.

Some of the humor is a little British twee, too. Recurring bits in which he quotes from malapropisms in student essays -- "Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet" -- sound like the kinds of lines that get forwarded endlessly these days via e-mail.

Even so, Rees's skills as raconteur and his gift for mimicry make the evening a breeze. He reads with aplomb Charles Dickens's funny scene of Mr. Wopsle's performance as Hamlet in "Great Expectations," and does just as well by a James Thurber tale, "The Macbeth Murder Mystery," about a woman convinced that the play is a crime story, and that Macbeth was falsely accused.

Rees spent 22 years with the RSC beginning in 1966, an association that reached a pinnacle in 1980 with his portrayal of the title role in the company's astonishing stage adaptation of "The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby." To TV audiences, Rees may be recognizable for recurring roles on "Cheers" and "The West Wing," and he's playing a surgeon this season on "Grey's Anatomy." But to those who saw him in "Nickleby," Rees will always be the dashing Nicholas, as evidenced by the warm response of some in the Folger audience when Rees made a reference to a "Nickleby" character, Miss Snevellicci.

Personal reflection is at a minimum in "What You Will," and as the actor serves each little morsel, your wish is akin to Oliver Twist's: Please, sir, some more. He mentions that his first part for the RSC was a non-speaking role in "The Taming of the Shrew," and that another spear carrier in that production was none other than Ben Kingsley. He passes along an observation by his friend Judi Dench: "The best moment of playing Juliet is the nanosecond when they offer you the part." And he illuminates an encounter fairly late in the life of Laurence Olivier, when they were acting in a film, "The Ebony Tower," and Olivier learned of the death of his friend the great Ralph Richardson.

The meatiest parts of the show, however, are Rees's recitations of passages from the plays: Chorus's "O for a muse of fire" in "Henry V"; Richard II's invitation to "tell sad stories of the death of kings"; Hamlet, on the issue of rogues and peasant slaves; Berowne's view of love in "Love's Labor's Lost," and Romeo's in "Romeo and Juliet." He even puts on a country accent for a short interlude as Juliet's earthy Nurse.

He conveys each of these characters with the combination of technique and magnetism that has distinguished the RSC actors of his generation. Their work contributed to the belief that they constituted a golden age for Shakespeare on the British stage. In "What You Will," the quality of Rees's Shakespeare is his most exciting argument for continuing enjoyment of the canon.