ACTORS are at home in every sense when playing Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser, a drama about their milieu and its pitfalls.

The age of the actor-manager it depicts may have passed, but the longest shadow it casts on stage and off is that of the overblown ego.

Will Smith-Haddon plays Sir, the head of a rag-bag touring company, with a calculated regard for the complexity of a character whose devotion to the Shakespearian art is delusional, and renders him oblivious of the real tragedy unfolding as his career nears its end.

Most of his entourage are casualties of the parts he has cast for them backstage.

They founder when the curtain comes down on his life – he having just played King Lear – and are obliged to take stock.

Lawrence Llewellyn gives Norman, the eponymous dresser, a blend of reverence, frustration and crumbling stoicism, adding weight at the end to the idea of a relationship whose precise nature we may not have suspected.

Judith Lindwall as Her Lady-ship, and Claudia Barnes as Madge, are adept at suggesting that the long-suffering will be just about strong enough to survive the titan’s fall.

Chris Edmunds (Geoffrey), Anthony Broome (Oxenby) and Samantha Jones (Irene) each convincingly plays a type one may well have encountered in a wartime band of strolling players, and Bruce Campbell and Graeme Johnson are clearly-heard as ‘actaws’ in the offstage Lear.

Director Ruth Ferguson and her team create an atmosphere of still-resonating nostalgia as lives subservient to a loveable self-seeker face the next act without him.