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London,
Unpredictable: Sir Ian McKellen with a superlative Cordelia from Romola Garai and Peter Hinton as Burgundy
FIRST NIGHT
King Lear
Courtyard, Stratford-upon-Avon
***
What a fascinating disappointment Ian McKellen's white-bearded, King Lear in his scarlet and gold Ruritanian uniform turns out to be! In the midst of Trevor Nunn's gaudily emphatic production, Sir Ian's performance as the octogenarian monarch who falls from glory to the lowest depths of despair kept me on constant, nervy tenterhooks, even if it too rarely moved me. Sir Ian swings precariously from the traditional to the innovative and back again.
The key to his subdued King Lear is its chronic unpredictability - right down to the moment when he loses his wits and drawers, revealing his penis to no particular point, good or bad. You, together with Lear's daughters and courtiers in the opening scene, never quite know what to expect of this monarch. Even his initial decrepitude proves misleading, since he keeps bouncing back to undue spriteliness.
This Lear first, though, shuffles on in a ceremonial procession to exultant music, with his subjects falling on their knees, as if he were some ancient monarch: the vaguely Victorian-Ruritanian costumes make nonsense of the pre-Christian atmosphere, with hands flung up to the God Apollo. McKellen springs his first surprise by making his Lear a smiling, benign head of state who treats the division of his kingdom as if it were some regal game, an old man's version of Monopoly. There is not a flicker of Lear's familiar, testy imperiousness. Yet when Romola Garai's superlative Cordelia, shimmering with distraught nerves, refuses to be party to the unctuous daddy-worship of Frances Barber's Goneril or to the dulcet winsomeness of Monica Dolan's chilling Regan, this Lear erupts into red-faced rage, the worse for its suddenness.
Yet McKellen never rises to Lear's great crescendos of cursing, fury and outrage, when up against his elder daughters, caught in the storm or overwhelmed by Cordelia's murder. His cries of "Howl" are long on vowels and short on feeling, though he rises to flights of pathos with Sylvester McCoy's traditional, spoon-playing Fool.
McKellen seems more often to be keeping his tinderbox dry of lachrymose histrionics. No such judgment could be made on Nunn's production which takes Lear's reference to "the great stage of fools" as a metaphor for a kingdom teetering on the verge of civil war and beset by French invasion. Christopher Oram's set is predominantly bare though the circular backwall is carved in the shape of increasingly dilapidated and collapsing theatre.
You expect this world to be one of Jacobean savagery and elemental suffering, though it never really becomes so, except with the invented scene of the Fool's hanging.
William Gaunt's Gloucester, who suitably begins as a lordly cynic slips into a fine Beckettian dejection near Dover, but suffers the loss of his eyes too stoically. Edmund, that fixer of other men's suffering, stints both on sexual charm and wickedness in Philip Winchester's performance, while his brother, Ben Meyjes's Edgar, suffers with an enthusiasm that verges on the masochistic.
Even the blinding of Gloucester, that ghastly symptom of a world gone to the dogs or even the panthers, passes in all too hasty flashes of brutality. Dolan's gloating, soft-voiced, heavy-drinking Regan strikes me as the one genuine, wicked article.
Elements of the ridiculous, I fear, are detectable in Frances Barber's luridly wicked and pantomimic Goneril. Trevor Nunn delayed Lear's press night until Barber had recovered from an injured knee and returned to the cast. It was not, to be candid, worth the wait.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
I was in the Courtyard with Nicholas de Jongh last night, but we seem to have witnessed different performances of King Lear. The one point on which I agree with him was that Frances Barber's Goneril was not worth the wait. She cheapened the seriousness of the first half of the play, compared to Melanie Jessup, her dark, imperious understudy, who was a brilliantly still and icy Goneril.
Apart from that, all of my party of drama teachers and students were utterly enthralled by this, our second viewing of Trevor Nunn's definitive production. So often in the past we've seen great actors blow over the top into self-indulgent mayhem, in this most challenging of Shakespearian roles. Lear requires a mature actor of exceptional emotional range. He must be able to carry the audience along with him, on a voyage of self discovery beginning in blind abuse of power, progressing through mental suffering of every kind, and ending in tender acceptance of forgiveness and love, tragically cut short by unjust death. In Ian McKellen, Trevor Nunn has found a Lear capable of showing all this. Most of the audience, veterans of decades of over-the-top Lears, were moved to tears.
We disagree too, about the supporting cast. We found Regan as silly as Goneril, but Edgar thrillingly heroic, as was Kent.
- Susan Rollins, Reading Berks
