TV REVIEW : Jeremy Irons Awakens an Introspective ‘Dream’

With “Brideshead Revisited” a thing of the past, it isn’t every week that you’ll find Jeremy Irons on American television, but for fans of the actor, “The Dream,” a 60-minute dramatization by Murray Watts of a Dostoevsky short story, is an ephemeral vignette that focuses caressingly and exclusively on Irons as solo performer.

Presented as the latest segment of the “Texaco Performing Arts Showcase” on the Bravo cable channel, “The Dream” was shown as part of a two-day tribute to Irons’ television career by New York’s Museum of Television and Radio earlier this week. It airs today at 4 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.

Certainly Irons lends this monologue a class, sensitivity and degree of suspense it might not otherwise have had, largely because the writing is more introspective than dramatic. To create drama out of close-ups and complex inner thoughts--a dream with the power to revolutionize a man’s life no less--is not the easiest task.

This “Dream” is the retelling of a turning point in a man’s life, a man who thinks of himself as “ridiculous.” So indifferent has he remained to life itself and so low is his self-esteem, that suicide has become a full-time preoccupation. He denies the importance of everything, even shunning a little girl’s desperate appeal for help.

But in this denial lies the key to a reawakening. Instead of killing himself, the man falls into a deep sleep and dreams that he’s transported to another planet, a planet where love prevails and everyone is joyous; a planet whose inhabitants he unwittingly corrupts--or believes he does.

In horror and revulsion, he watches his hosts’ behavior change into behavior that too closely resembles that of the individuals he’d left behind on Earth. Waking from this fitful nightmare heralds the man’s descent into madness.

In the story as written--a tale that Dostoevsky carefully subtitled “a fantasy”--the “Dream” includes terrestrial-looking extra-terrestrials. These are omitted from the teleplay, where director Norman Stone’s camera focuses narrowly and intently on Irons craggy, expressive face and deep, haggard eyes--when it is not wandering about the bleak surroundings.

Stone’s and Watts’ decision to make this a one-man show and rely on the help of inanimate objects to drive home the point is a passive and pat way of conveying the richness of this morality tale.