A Tale of Two Lears

Review (sort of) of King Lear at the National Theatre, seen 14 June 2014

After seeing the female 'Lear' at the Union Theatre (see previous post), I saw the more usual (king-related) form of the play (the better known Sam Mendes/Simon Russell Beale production at the much larger National Theatre) nine days later. So, this is not so much a review, more a sort of comparison analysis.

Think of it as a "play-off" [heh, sorry] - and like in sport, there’s a bit of violence, a plucky little underdog, and the spectators just get to enjoy the contest, admire the talent, and avoid the (fake) blood. 

First, some brief[1] comparisons:

• Edmund is better done as a character at the Olivier, for me. It's a brilliantly cold, smart, sociopathic performance from the mesmerising Sam Troughton and the bit where he puts on a voice to pretend to do astrology, complete with rising inflection, was pure comedy. Gloucester in contrast was better at the Union because he comes across more as one of the good guys and a man of integrity making choices, where Gloucester at the Olivier had a bit of "i'm doing this cos it's what the text says" about him. 
• Cordelia was good - and fairly similar - in both productions but I think the National has the edge. It justifies her refusal to speak at the start by having Lear as a military dictator-type, and her rebellion comes across as both a child's sullenness and a political protest - that by compelling protestations of love by sheer military power, the King has overstepped (perhaps for the latest time) a mark.
• The trial-in-the-barn scene is amazing at the Olivier and I will not spoiler it, but it worked and I think was the key scene of the play. Sheer Mendesian genius.
• Lear him/herself is a tie, both very different. SRB got off to a weak start with some of what I think of as "fastShakespeare" - the idea that actors have to talk as fast as possible and not have line rhythm, to make it sound natural, which actually just blasts the audience with noise (especially the audience sitting in the first row...) - but there's this amazing symphonic unification of acting and sound production where the later, quiet scenes as with Gloucester at Dover contain enough awesomeness to make up for that. Ursula Mohan at the Union is solid throughout but slight hints of instability from the start, and of sanity at the end, mean her trajectory is not quite as great. Different intent, though. 
• Edgar is unsatisfactory - to me - in both these productions. I couldn't quite work out how he would work while I was reading the text either, and was disappointed not to be enlightened by either director. I trust Shakespeare enough to know that he can work, I suspect this may be the subject of a future post in what’s kind of becoming a Shakespeare-focused series.

What a difference an amazingly ginormous crowd of extras makes

The main contrast between the productions is the size of the space and the cast, which far overwhelms any differences from the gender of the main character. At the Olivier (with a capacity of over 1000) this is intentionally shown as a public breakdown of family and person. There are soldiers watching the division of lands (done as show trial, complete with microphones), and huge crowds of Lear's controversial knights carousing and watching the fun in Goneril's house - and there are servants everywhere. All of the King's gradual madness, and his family's tiny mutual dislikes, are known and watched and used by others for their own gain.

As noted in my review of Lear at the Union I didn't think the play was overly domestic because Lear was a woman, but I now think it was domestic in the sense of private because it's a small production and the director embraced that limitation as a strength, not something to be bluffed through. It was a small space, subdivided even further by the promenade staging, with an audience of 30 and no watching extras, no public outcry. Lear could go mad and get angry, but nobody outside the small group of elites necessarily had to see that.

The difference in the productions - and crucially the sequence in which I saw them - reminded me of nothing so much as the contrast between Dickens' A Christmas Carol and the Bill Murray 1988 adaptation thereof, Scrooged. (If you've not seen this I am not going to swear it's actually good, as I'm unsure how much of my love for it is repetition + the "Bill Murray in anything" factor, but it is definitely worth catching on TV at Christmas). Scrooged takes the standard "Scrooge seeing ghosts" story and puts him in public, as a TV producer (subtle it ain't) in front of colleagues and bystanders, thus heaping on embarrassment and real job- and reputation-killing consequences to a private mental challenge. The Mendes King Lear is the same: things are so. much. worse. because there's all those people watching - decisions and slurs become set in and irrevocable rather than family matters only, and Lear isn't allowed to rest or have any quiet to be mad in, so to speak.

The presence of the soldiers was highlighted in an interview with Mendes and Beale in the program as an "impact on the country" thing and that is of course logically true, but to be honest I think it comes across more as the other way around. All the soldiers running all over the place don’t matter because we as the audience care about what the main characters are doing, not how the lower classes feel about it.[2] That’s why it’s always such a jarring shock when Cornwall is killed by his servant as a protest to the torture and blinding of Gloucester. No matter the familiarity with the play, I still don’t see it coming. Cornwall and Regan – and therefore the audience - had not even thought about these “extras” as having a capacity to think independently or be a threat, and every time there’s a sense almost of affront – Cornwall can’t have died like that! He's important! It’s brilliant plotting.[3] 

Public exposure also shapes why the characters make the choices they do. To take a specific example, the cursing of Goneril's womb was something I noted in the Union Lear as being quietly brutal because Lear herself was a woman who had had children, cursing her own daughter by denying her private happiness, and Goneril seemed to weep for the breakdown of their relationship and the loss of any chance at a mother's affection. In the Mendes production, Lear's venom seems transgressive in part because people are watching and Lear's invocation of the gods is deliberately public. And in turn, Lear's anger seems like a reaction to Goneril getting rid of his very present crowd of men and therefore displaying his powerlessness - his impotence - to the world. He wants her barrenness to be public too. The scene is devastating and effective in both productions but the character motivations are very different.

The Final Outcome

So, which of these "wins"? My recommendation is an irrelevance now with both in their final days, and obviously you should have seen them both, but I'd go for Willmott's Lear at the Union. There's two main reasons for this. The first is that I think the interpretation fits together better as a whole. The problem with Beale's aging dictator is that one is clearly meant to assume a lifetime of tyranny and murder up to and including possible genocide, and it's never really clear why "decent" characters like Gloucester and the Fool - and even Cordelia - would stick with him. I'm not saying that doesn't happen in real life, I'm saying there was always a little bit of a mental disconnect where you have this unlikeable character but the decent folk stick with him, and it made me care a little less. At the Union, on the other hand, Mohan plays a Lear who one senses was autocratic, capricious and abusive of power but not with horror signified so blatantly. Plus, with the removal of Kent and the placing of the fool as a nurse, you remove a lot of the need to explain the allies anyway, though I do think it worked better regardless.

My second reason, and I think the thing that bothered me most about the National Theatre King Lear, was that for live theatre it wasn't very alive. I was sitting in the front row and didn't see any eye contact or sense of engagement between the cast and the audience all night, which is unusual and a bit disappointing. Also, and perhaps relatedly, the characters themselves lacked connection – they all seemed to be moving along precise tracks, acting (very well) rather than interacting. I was not even going to mention this at first as the run has been long, maybe they’re played out [heh] or just had a bad night - but if the NYT can make note of it from earlier in the run then it must be more general. I sort of got the sense that Anna Maxwell Martin, for example – good though she is - would have been doing the same movements and intonations if a prompter had been reading the other parts and a dummy had been standing in for King Lear. And why else would you go to a live show if not for the energy, the connections between actors in the moment, and with the audience? There was the occasional slight glimmer of this I think, such as the meeting on the cliff of the King and blind Gloucester - you for once got the sense that they were actually in the same place as each other - but it was otherwise just a little bit off, masterly rather than engaging. Still definitely worth catching as a recording, in fact my concern is that you won't lose that much. At the Union, it’s a small show, the actors are less experienced, adaptations are made for it all to work: but the audience is part of the space and it's a much more memorable live theatre experience - which is the point, after all. 

[1] The rest of it is...less brief. Still working out this blogging thing. Feel free to skim.

[2] And yes, there is a whole thing right there about how we read history and identifying with the upper classes because they have a voice.

[3] yep, I’m making the controversial claim that Shakespeare is good at writing plays. Deal with it.