SPOILERIFFIC & UNSTRUCTURED THEATRE REVIEW: ‘LEAR’ at the Union Theatre
Show: 5th June 2014 (their 2nd ever! - so some things may change)
Let’s get the main bit over with first:
Lear played as a woman worked. (For those wondering, Lear is the only gender
swap in the production.) One of the main reasons it works so well is the acting. Ursula Mohan’s Queen Lear is outstanding and I hope gets seen by a wider audience –
vivid in her portrayal of an ageing, powerful woman of increasingly doubtful
sanity. I had no trouble accepting that she had been the all-powerful ruler of
the kingdom even when her presumed husband was alive, yet there was also
immense vulnerability on display as she wandered in slippers and a nightgown
through Goneril’s castle, losing her grip on power and on reality, or when she
wakes confused at Cordelia’s war-camp.
I reread the play over the two days prior to going to see
this production, with the possibility in mind, and it actually made a lot of
sense in the text. In fact, I think the clash of mother and daughters (as with
fathers and sons) can be far more intense, far more brutal in the sense of
betrayal and expectation, than a father and his daughters. And a woman with
power being tracked for weakness or signs of frailty? Yep, that happens.
In textual terms there were swaps of “king”
to “queen” (and sure, what was lost from “ay, every inch a king” was more than
made up for by the increasingly uninhibited queen wanting Oswald’s “service”,
so no worries for those who like their Shakespeare with as many innuendoes as
possible) and a few pronouns altered, but little else.
I went as part of the Reading Women
Feminist Book Group Meetup group (@RWFemClub; thanks Georgie for organising!)
and had some great discussions with my fellow attendees. Some considered that
the change to a woman in complete power over a country made a difference in emphasis on inheritance, hierarchy and politics, and that it made the play more
domestic by focusing on the familial interactions. This was not my view (having
admittedly read it through the “could be a woman” lens): King Lear sees
Shakespeare creating rich, beautiful complexity of character and theme, and
there’s certainly overlap and parallels between misrule in the domestic realm
and misrule in the kingdom (or queendom), but the domestic dominates more
naturally in the text, for me. This may be because the kingdom seems so damn
unimportant: we end up actively barracking for a French victory on English soil
(I’m Australian, by the way – no horse in this race!) and because the end of
the play seems deliberately to obscure what the next succession plan is: Neither of the two surviving candidates, Albany and Edgar, shows the slightest hint that
ruling a kingdom was at all important to them – the opposite, in fact.
With a few minor exceptions, the rest of director
Phil Willmott’s choices also were effective. The staging is unusual. The first
act has the crowd standing, milling between action taking place in different
domestic corners of the intimate theatre (only 30 tickets!). The
second act has us seated in the standard bench seating around two sides, as in
a “normal” theatre, while the third act had a large table centrepiece
that doubled as a raised stage and contained most of the fighting and small
set-pieces, with many of the audience sat around it, part of a group with the
actors. It was fun to be “in” the proceedings and right up close to the actors and
the fights, and get spoken to directly at times – I highly recommend a seat at
table if you go! The era is “unspecified modern” with selfies and mobiles,
camouflage t-shirts, but no guns and with handwritten letters rather than computers. Just
don’t think about it too hard, I guess.
Willmott changed the first 3 scenes around
from the text I read – we start off with Lear’s pronouncement, skip briefly to
Edmund’s planning and manifesto, and then Gloucester introduces him (more
briefly) to Kent, making note of course of the bastardliness, before seeing the
incriminating letter. This is brilliantly effective and works so much better
than in the text – not only does it cover Gloucester and Kent knowing of the division,
but it also adds irony to Gloucester’s praise of Edmund, while to a mild extent
justifying the villain’s own obsession with his “natural”-ness.
Speaking of Kent, another interesting – and
I thought effective – change in this adaptation is to essentially exclude him. There’s no “disguised
servant” here, just Lear and her fool against the world. Kent is morphed into
an ever-present if rather ineffectual doctor – he’s there at the start
protesting Cordelia’s rejection (but not banished), he’s the one that protests
Gloucester’s eye-gouging (but survives) and he’s there to put Lear to sleep for
Cordelia in the last act (and affirm Cordelia’s death). I don’t think this
continuous fringe character is particularly necessary or additive either,
though – for me it was far more powerful in the text where multiple servants of
Cornwall were kind to Gloucester in his blindness, as it showed how the royal
family struggles were losing the people en
masse. That’s a fairly minor quibble, though.
For acting, the highlight is undoubtedly
Mohan’s Lear (or Lear’s widow as she’s occasionally referred to in this
adaptation). It is a performance that shows off the actor’s range, and she
nails the power and the frailty, the maternal love and the bitter family cursing.
There’s a good line in occasional humour as well, the sort of thing that gets
referred to as “saucy” in an older woman (but not in an older man – an example
of how changing the gender changes the character even with the same language).
Daisy Ward as Cordelia is affecting in a
minor role, I particularly liked her concern in the otherwise hard-to-parse
first scene, that by not proclaiming love what she really wants to do is stop
her mother making a fool of herself in public with required declarations of
love, seen here as perhaps an early sign of future loss of inhibitions and
full-on madness.
(A digression and not particularly related
to this production: I thought only after leaving the theatre that Lear is being
abandoned as Cordelia goes to wed in a foreign country, either France or
Burgundy. So s/he may already be looking for a reason to lash out at his “betraying”
youngest child. And the outcome from giving away power is, basically, a
purchase of an escape from imminent isolation: Lear is paying with wealth and
power to live at his elder daughter’s homes, a month at a time, with 100
knights + squires + fool etc, for the rest of his life – perhaps for 10 years
or longer. Put that way, the elder daughters’ qualms seem a lot more
reasonable!)
Obviously, the two “evil” daughters have
meatier roles. Claire Jeater’s Goneril was powerful and sensual (she appeared
to be using Oswald for “service” before going after Edmund), and a real
physical force on stage, not just because of the actor’s height but because of
her cleaning obsession, a nice bit of stage presence and contrast to her dishevelled
mother. But there was real hurt when Lear cursed her to infertility – an instance
where Lear-as-mother brings an extra depth and viciousness over Lear-as-father –
and some sense that there was once affection between them. Better could have
been made of the change in Albany has he takes action, and the change in her
relationship that means she becomes willing to kill, but in the momentum of the
production it does mostly work over this as her wanting Edmund, a lot.
Regan is portrayed by Felicity Duncan as
somewhat louche and heavily made-up, with a handsome, younger-seeming husband. It
would have been nice to see more of Cornwall and Regan planning together,
actually, they worked well as a nasty power couple.
We see drugs used in this production as
signals of character – Cornwall snorts coke before planning treachery and
torturing Gloucester, while Regan drinks – and then joins in willingly and
almost joyfully with the torturing. And (I have to talk about it) in one of the
more doubtful directorial choices, Edgar (seen first as an exercising “simple
jock”-type here) becomes Poor Tom by belting his arm and injecting himself
with, presumably, heroin. I have nothing inherently against the idea that his
personality shift is so different it needs some external motivator to create
it, rather than just being put-on, but the drug doesn’t really interfere with
him coming out of character and philosophising, so it’s left as a fairly
shocking “modern” bit of stage business without any addition of character depth
or plot assistance. Edgar’s a difficult role and I think he did come across as
largely personality-less in this production, but he did in my reading of the
text, too.
Edmund was pushy, pugnacious, courageous – I
would have liked a slightly smoother sociopath type, rather than one so nakedly
on the make he could have come from Wall Street, but others in our party
disagreed.
The fool (Joseph Taylor) had an innocent
look and a tenderness and unstinting loyalty in his care for Lear. I liked the costume
as representing, I believe, some sort of nurse in a mental home (he tries to give
Lear pills right at the start, but is rebuffed). Having just the two of them
together for most of Lear’s travels is a sweet, designedly mother-son dynamic
in this production.
The ending is touching and bleak, as Lear
holds Cordelia and dies herself, and the fate of the kingdom is let slide – the
table centrepiece is covered with and surrounded by the dead of the play (among
audience members). It is testament to the strength of the production that at
our showing there were several seconds of silence when the lights went down,
with the audience unwilling to break the grief-stricken atmosphere with
applause.
All in all, a very good, interesting and
well-acted production of Lear – not to mention much cheaper than the National
Theatre alternative down the road! Go see it before June 28.
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