King Lear
by William Shakespeare
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre.
November 5. Tickets $45 – $60. Bookings BASS 131 246
Until November 21.

It is as if Shakespeare’s King Lear is made of huge tectonic plates called power, loyalty and love and, when the king declares his darker purpose to divide the kingdom, they begin to grind against one another like the crack of doom. Lear is a huge, bleak, primeval play, set in archaic times, about something permanently dreadful in our DNA.

But in the State Theatre Company’s, in many ways, distinguished production, director Adam Cook and designer Victoria Lamb have unnecessarily undermined the play’s range and implication by making the opening scene look more like a boardroom tiff, a scene from Damages, than a cosmic cataclysm and a precursor to inhuman terror. Lamb’s imposing décor – a huge concave wall of burnished tiles – is not the problem, it’s the costumes. Black suits and town hall regalia, Edwardian militaria, Edmund dressed like a Menshevik, Edgar in specs and a Hogwarts blazer, the rhinestone Fool tap-dancing in a white suit and bowler hat, Lear’s retinue looking like Young Tories off to shotgun small animals. Macbeth can be done in pinstripes, Julius Caesar in the Reichstag, but Lear needs to be more mythic, less bourgeois, to contain its multitudes.

Fortunately, neither the whimsical apparel, nor the often conspicuously inexperienced drama

students who add numbers but not gravity to the proceedings, can diminish the director’s
diligence or the excellence of many of the performances. Michael Habib is staunch as Kent, Sarah Snook convincing as the artless Cordelia (and valiant as the bedizened Fool), Victoria Longley and Martha Lott are scarifying as Goneril and Regan, and Renato Musolino is chilling as the eye-scrounging torturer Cornwall. Even more impressive is Dennis Olsen’s compelling dignity as Gloucester and Nathan O’Keefe’s Edgar, a linchpin performance, as he embodies the endurance and ripeness on which the uncertain future depends.

But the night belongs to the excellent John Gaden, whose Lear is a masterly blend of intelligence and feeling. He is both the dragon and his wrath. The pitch of anger is ferocious, first to Cordelia, then his hellish serpent’s tooth curse on Goneril, and it all presages the unhingeing to come. His storm brings the décor crashing, his madness is brilliant in its daisy chains of free association. The mock trial of the absent wicked daughters, conducted with the Fool and Poor Tom, is a caper from Lewis Carroll, and the scene cradling the cruelly blinded Gloucester – part Beckett, part hobs of Hell – is extraordinary. The anguish at the finality of Cordelia’s needless execution – “I know when one is dead and when one lives” – is as tragically plain as it is unfathomable.

Murray Bramwell

“Characters rise above a costume drama of no fixed dress”, The Australian, November 9, 2009, p.17.

BRIEF
Adelaide
Theatre

King Lear
By William Shakespeare
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre.
November 5. Tickets $45 – $60. Bookings BASS 131 246
Until November 21.

Lear is a huge, bleak, primeval play, set in archaic times, about something permanently dreadful in our DNA. But State Theatre Company director Adam Cook and designer Victoria Lamb have needlessly undermined the play’s range and implication. Lamb’s excellent décor is not the problem, it’s the costumes. Fortunately, the whimsical apparel cannot diminish the excellence of many of the performances. Dennis Olsen as Gloucester and Nathan O’Keefe’s Edgar are both impressive. But the night belongs to John Gaden, whose Lear is a masterly blend of intelligence and feeling. His storm brings the décor crashing, his madness is brilliant and his tragic anguish plain for all to see.

Murray Bramwell