Dear Sir, While brevity is the soul of wit, I did not intend my review of the State Theatre Company’s Month of Sundays (Age Old Questions, March AR) to be quite that witty.

It would seem that there are times when even FAX fux up and this was one of them. A page of copy went missing in transmission and with it honourable mention of performances by actors Ron Haddrick, Brian James, Diane Smith and Carol Skinner in particular, as well as contributions by designer Peter Cooke and lighting designer Tony Youlden.

Could you please record my regret that the review was incomplete.

Murray Bramwell,

Grace and Codpiece

King Lear
by William Shakespeare
State Theatre Company
Festival Centre Playhouse

Directed by Gale Edwards Design by Mary Moore Lighting by Nigel Levings Sound design by Les Gilbert and David Chesworth

In their present season in the Adelaide Playhouse the State Theatre Company express not King Lear’s darker purpose but something altogether lighter. And whereas the production team of director Gale Edwards and designer Mary Moore worked in splendid unison in last season’s The Winter’s Tale, in –Lear, with State’s Artistic Director, John Gaden, as the foolish, fond old king, their purpose seems a divided one.

Lear is a play about power, loyalty and love – in that order. An all-powerful king turns his realm into a chook raffle and doesn’t trouble to imagine whether he’ or others might suffer for it. The loyal – Kent, Edgar and Cordelia – rally valiantly to prevent the mayhem of civil war (a horror not entirely unconsidered for anyone living and writing during the reign of the virgin Queen Elizabeth) In the process, love filial and temperate is by them epitomised and also malignly negated by the dopplegang of four – Edmund, Cornwall, Goneril and Regan.

Lear is about a kingdom sundered and a natural order overturned; where the luck of the king is the luck of the land. The mortality rate is hectic and resolution is as much wishful as actual. Ripeness may be all but there is only a precious little left to blossom by the end of the play.

The set in this production, with its huge inky backdrop and a massive, fissured disc of basalt, tells that story well enough. But, when, amidst Les Gilbert’s awesome soundscapes, it cracks open like doom, a very different play is hatched.

Gale Edwards has opted for an accessible production as if that were an end in itself. Events are made clear, and often gratuitously comical, but their meanings get too little sifting. Almost everywhere the play is delivered with reflexive ironies and downbeat asides such that it is relinquished with a series of shrugs rather than embraced for the sheer vigour of its poetry.

Moore’s costumes don’t always help either. The look is velvety Napoleonic, with colour coding for clans, but Goneril and Regan in sheath-cut satin in Act I resemble more the wives of Argentinian fascisti than rulers in their own right and Kent, and others, in their furry jerkins seem to have taken a wrong turn from Sherwood Forest. John Gaden’s Lear is a Beckettian codger but this is no time for the tragicomic. After all, there are already two Fools in the play, it is to disturb the psychic and thematic equilibrium to allow more. There is no sense of Lear’s power and therefore of the ruin caused by its forfeiture. Lear capers, sniggers and cackles, he even rants on occasion, but he lacks majesty. Gaden’s Lear doesn’t over-act, he over-reacts and in key scenes he is locked in by diminishing, distracting gesture and hasty; crabbed delivery. With the Fool he is too readily jocular for a man with his thoughts elsewhere, with Goneril and Regan he is short on spite and on the heath, short on madness. In their fear of going over the Top, State have stayed overcautiously on the lower slopes instead.

Geoffrey Rush, with a huge padded coxcomb and geriatric dressing gown is visually impressive but he plays a sweet Fool not a bitter one, and when he puts up his umbrella in the storm and the thunder and rain come to a standstill, the production pays a high price for a clownish whimsy, especially since at that point the show is still perilously low on ergs anyway.

As Edmund, John Howard stands up not just for bastardry but spirited acting and Geoff Morrell, in the crucial role of Edgar, while only lukewarm as cold Tom, gathers momentum in the final scenes. Ron Graham’s Gloucester anchors much of the play, plainstyle but well-centred, he shares Gaden’s finest scene on the heath and in blindness leads Edgar to surer footing.

The dog-hearted daughters Goneril (Deborah Kennedy) and Regan (Rose Clemente) are dressed to kill but are unconvincing either in hellish conspiracy or enmity, while Kaarin Fairfax, raven-haired and martial, is only equal to Cordelia in the later episode with the ailing Lear, a scene sublimely enhanced by Gilbert’s panpipe threnody. Don Barker and Patrick Frost acquit well as Kent and Albany and Benjamin Franklin’s Oswald is an intelligent account of the shifting pragmatism of the weaker vassal.

This King Lear has elements of the elemental but State achieves none of the ensemble strength of last year’s Winter’s Tale. Often actors are kept at arm’s length from character and one another, while inhabiting a set which has blacker thoughts than their own. So, while Gaden’s company has served-us -well in staging a classic work of this stature, we can only regret that their tale of Lear is not so much a tragedy as a bit of a pity.

Murray Bramwell

“Fooling with Lear” Australian Listener, July 30, 1988.p.45