THEATRE
Written by William Shakespeare, by Bell Shakespeare
At Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre Melbourne until 11 August 2024
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Stars:*** (3)
This review is published only on this blog. I’ll present a radio review on Arts Weekly on 3MBS on Sat 3 Aug 2024. KH.
 |
| Robert Menzies, Bell Shakespeare's King Lear _Photo by Brett Boardman |
King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies and any new production attracts plenty of comparisons to previous successful or patchy versions.
Peter Evans’ new Lear for Bell Shakespeare comes some years after two productions featuring John Bell himself as Lear, both of which received mixed responses. It also follows Ian McKellan’s Lear that visited Melbourne, Barry Kosky’s controversial interpretation and Evelyn Krape playing a female Lear for Melbourne Shakespeare Company. Most memorable Lear for me was by Rustaveli Theatre of Georgia in which Lear was a tyrant. More of that later.
Evans captures the tragedy of two elderly fathers, King Lear (Robert Menzies) and his loyal Duke of Gloucester (James Lugdon), both of whom are victims of vile abuses by their children.
Menzies’ Lear is a highlight in the production. He is frail, beleaguered and tortured but he is also narcissistic and vengeful; Lear’s venom and vitriol directed at his two ungrateful and disloyal daughters is vividly played by Menzies and he delivers the poetic text with nuance and skill.
James Lugton, as Lear’s trusty friend, Gloucester, is noble and dignified with a command of Shakespeare’s language and he elicits gasps from the audience at his horrific torture.
Unlike many other Shakespeare plays, there are fewer attempts to shift it into some contemporary setting or period. Evans sets the play in no specific time. It takes place on a sparse design by Anna Tregloan that features gleaming, reflective, coppery panels and flooring, and the costumes are simple and mostly black with a few splashes of colour.
King Lear is a tragedy about a man who believes he has power – until he loses it. He believes he has love, until he realises it was never there. He believes he has loyalty, until it deserts him.
At the very start, Lear makes his first mistake, by planning to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. When his youngest and dearest, Cordelia (Melissa Kahraman), refuses to mouth platitudes of love to equal the obsequious flattery of her two sisters, Goneril and Regan, Lear disowns, disinherits and banishes her with his blunt but loyal Duke of Kent.
It all goes wrong for Lear from that fateful moment. His older daughters want his power and wealth but deny Lear any love, power, position or even his retainers. He ends up half-crazed and roaming the wilds in the storm with his wise Fool and a poor naked man.
Although the cast generally expresses a clear understanding of the text, there is some unevenness in performances and some less successful casting.
Janine Watson is audacious as Kent and Alex King captures some of Edgar’s qualities, but lacks the wildness of Edgar as Poor Tom in the storm.
Cordelia is often played by the same actor as Lear’s Fool, in this case Kahraman, but apart from the witty prattling language of the Fool, these two characters sound and appear too alike. Goneril (Lizzie Schebesta) and Regan (Tamara Lee Bailey) are stroppy and mean-spirited without seeming dangerous. This pair of treacherous daughters could be more overtly brutal and self-serving to highlight Lear’s total abandonment.
My greatest experience of King Lear (apart from seeing McKellen in the role and production that didn’t do his performance great service) was Rustaveli Theatre of Georgia, directed by Robert Sturua.
In Sturua’s production, Lear is a despot. The design appears to be a torture chamber, decked with weapons and devices of torture. For the first eight minutes there is silence as his family and courtiers await the despotic Lear’s is arrival. The desperately terrified Albany faints. It is the most powerful eight minutes I’ve ever seen at the beginning of the play!
When Lear enters, he is relaxed and cheerful, holding a canary in a cage while Cordelia, his favourite youngest child, capers around him. It is both remarkable and alarming and highlights the fact that Lear is completely comfortable in his tyrannical power while others quake at the thought of his arrival. This makes his downfall and his madness and his loss of his wits all more tragic and compelling.
Although this Bell production lacks that same power, it captures the essence of Lear by relying heavily on the two oldest and strongest actors, Menzies and Lugdon. These stalwarts of Australian theatre are the core of the production.
By: Kate Herbert.
No comments:
Post a Comment