King Lear
by William Shakespeare
State Theatre Company
Playhouse
This year the State Theatre Company’s sad tale for winter is King Lear but, unlike the John Gaden/Gale Edwards/Mary Moore production of The Winter’s Tale last year, in Lear the considerable talents of the team seem more at odds than in unison.
Mary Moore’s sooty cavernous set, with inky wash backdrop and a huge obsidian dish which splits open amidst Les Gilbert’s terra-crunching soundtrack, portends a dark purpose for a production which the direction and performances mostly refuse to sustain.
The play presents many difficulties for directors and actors alike and there are plenty of interpretations to choose from, or, as State have done, studiously avoid. The old-fangled way was not only to have the storm blow and crack its cheeks but for Lear to pop all the veins in his forehead as well. Then Peter Brook, ever the dissenting voice, presented a grimly restrained Paul Scofield in raggedy pelts at the centre of brutish squabble between Picts and shovellers. More recently Michael Hordern has done a doddery for the BBC and Lord Olivier, a voyage-around-my-Stonehenge for London Weekend TV.
Director Gale Edwards has opted for a Beckettian Lear with such an excess of foolery that you might wonder if the Popular Mechanicals had arrived a month early. It is as though a clear reading of the text means that moments of gravity and truth have to be rendered with disengaging irony and misplaced comedy in case the Year Elevens get restless.
They did anyway, guffawing when Gloucester’s eyes are gouged and flung like oysters kilpatrick across the stage. A scene of appalling cruelty expressed in language that would break the heart of an undertaker, is almost reduced to parody by awkward staging and risible diction -often Gloucester surrenders after one eye Regan shrieks “the other too” as if the poor bugger had three of them to lose.
King Lear is a play about power and love unnaturally relinquished and unnaturally abused. Lear gives away the farm and creates cosmic havoc in the process. The loyalties of kinship and fiefdom are barbarously overturned by bastards and harridans and it is left to sturdy yeomen like Kent and Edgar, inspired by the fairytale virtue of Cordelia, to put it all back together.
Moore’s set establishes the sense of elemental chaos inherent in the play while her costumes are Trafalgar martial-boots and all. They sometimes work well, but not evenly. The wicked sisters spend the first half looking like Peronist matrons in slinky sheath dresses and heels unequal to the terrible power of their designs. It is only when they reappear in leather tunics in Act V. they really look the part, and although it is OK for Edmund to look like a bikie and Oswald a hotel commissionaire, when Kent turns into an Ewok it is a disappointment.
John Gaden’s Lear is skilful but rarely compelling. In the crucial opening scene he is too bemused to be formidable. Lear has the breath of kings; his word is law. He doesn’t have to shove Cordelia to the ground or go bustling after Kent like a geriatric buccaneer. Without the still centre of regal tyranny we cannot comprehend the enormity of his loss.
When rebuffed by his daughters Gaden’s Lear bites back but his curses fall short of the venom of the text and the Storm scene is so self-consciously underplayed it is hard to believe he is out of his tree at all. This Lear is neither mad as a snake or a meat axe, nor do we feel the terror of that possibility.
Geoffrey Rush looks splendid as the Fool but the bitterness is missing in his rebuke of Lear and, when he stops the storm with a flourish of his umbrella, a fay visual gag gratuitously undermines the immense poetic force of the scene. It is theatrically clever but dramatically damaging.
As Edmund, John Howard unevenly but energetically utters bastardry and Geoff Morrell serves well as Edgar but sometimes poorly as Tom. Don Barker is a doughty Kent, Patrick Frost a gracious Albany and Benjamin Franklin delves service and servility as Oswald. Ron Graham gives Gloucester strength and dignity and Gaden’s Lear an apt foil in the heath scene, one of the play’s best.
Kaaren Fairfax as Cordelia lacked presence initially but shares the scene of reconciliation with the ailing Lear in what is a lambent moment for both her and John Gaden. As Goneril and Regan, Deborah Kennedy and Rose Clemente lack ferocity both in league and in contention, Deborah· Kennedy is’ an accomplished actor but you can’t play Goneril with one eyebrow.
In choosing to be downbeat this production disavows the richness of the tragic text and fails to capitalise on its own dramatic gains. There are fine moments but they do not accumulate into anything greater. State honour us with a major staging of Shakespeare but Lear is not only a great play, it is a great poem and in treading in fear of bombast Gale Edwards and John Gaden have shrugged it off with funny business instead.
“Unaccommodated” The Adelaide Review, No.54, August, 1988, p.26.