THEATER REVIEW : Daughter’s Homage to Sir Michael Redgrave

The stage is strewn with a rehearsal light and a few random items that don’t add up to much.

A woman enters in a long overcoat and a broad-brimmed Aussie hat, striding vigorously and dragging a trunk behind her. In the gloom upper stage right is a large portrait of a dashing man: Partly bare upper torso draped in swashbuckling paraphernalia.

Too dark to see clearly, but the face is definitely handsome. Sir Michael Redgrave perhaps?

Not a bad guess, since the show is called “Shakespeare for My Father” and the woman tearing around the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts like Crocodile Dundee is his daughter Lynn Redgrave.

This may be an unconventional start for what amounts to a scattershot compilation of Shakespeare, personal reminiscence and Redgrave family history. But then no one ever accused the Redgraves of being conventional, a fact this affectionate tribute confirms, however discreetly.

Redgrave sets the trunk down, sings a little song, takes some things out, waves a scarf like a magic wand to extinguish the rehearsal lamp--and, presto, the stage lights come up and we’re off.

From the beginning, we are not shielded from the knowledge that perhaps Sir Michael might have been a little . . . . warmer as a parent. An eager scanning of his diary for 1943 around Lynn’s March 7 birth finds no note of it. The man traveled a lot. He toured. He was on Broadway. He was at Stratford. He co-founded the National Theatre with Olivier. Getting his attention wasn’t easy, a point his daughter makes without complaint.

But bleeding through the breezy understated facts is the sense that this, his youngest child, loved him as powerfully as Cordelia ever loved her Lear and was (to understate again) hurt by Daddy’s unavailability. Here we get Cordelia’s famous Act I “What shall Cordelia do?,” one of literature’s greatest declarations of a forthright filial love that won’t stoop to flattery.

And so it goes. A little family business tiered with snatches of Shakespeare, and the whole, on the whole, engagingly tied together.

The Shakespeare might have been potentially confusing for an audience unable to quickly reference the material, but Redgrave and her director, John Clark (who is also her husband and manager), have listed the speeches and their sources in the program--a useful, smart and simple move.

Redgrave’s interweaving of those speeches and a few songs from Shakespeare also trace a fond relationship with her mother, actress Rachel Kempson, and the easy camaraderie of siblings growing up together with brother Corin and sister Vanessa (whose activism and political controversies go deliberately unmentioned).

Their relationship as adults has been more turbulent than Redgrave lets on, but the emphasis here is on them as children. This is not avoidance so much as a sticking to the original intent of paying homage to a complex and difficult father.

When the show extends to Redgrave’s current life, it is to deal with her husband and children--or reach deep into the past to the discovery of her own father’s father, Roy Redgrave, an actor who died and was buried in Australia (the Aussie connection).

All this is quite artfully stitched together, with the Shakespearean passages expertly rendered by an actress to the tradition born: Calibrated, bright, well spoken (despite acoustical oddities in Cerritos that muffled the sound in some parts of the hall and not in others).

There could be some buttoning up of loose ends, particularly in the evening’s second half that leaves Kempson in dramatic limbo after hinting at some kind of breakdown, but nothing that Clark and Redgrave couldn’t work through as the show begins a lengthy national tour tonight in Palm Desert.

It is a playful evening, graceful and spirited, putting a happy face on childhood pain without denying it. (Mercifully, this is a tribute , not a Children of Adult Alcoholics meeting.) Near the end it becomes moving, as Sir Michael, dying of Parkinson’s disease, hallucinates that he is not in a hospital room but backstage, admonishing his younger daughter who is looking in on him not to peek through the curtain (“It’s so unprofessional!”) and inquiring, in a “thin as paper” voice, “By the way, how’s the house . . . ?”

Sir Michael played a handsome Antony in “Antony and Cleopatra” in 1953, the very production from which, we are told at last, that large portrait on the wall is taken. Redgrave plucks her most loving words from that play: “I dream’d there was an Emperor Antony./O such another sleep, that I might see but such another man!”

She ends her evening with “If we shadows have offended,” Puck’s enjoinder to applaud. Puckish it is, but not required.

The applause is earned.

Pedigree tells.

* “Shakespeare for My Father,” McCallum Theatre, 73000 Fred Waring Drive, Palm Desert. Thursday only, 8 p.m. $ 25-$45; (619) 340-ARTS, (619) 278-TIXS. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.