This is not Lear

Berenson and McEleny just before the madness.

More bad news on the Bard front, I'm afraid.

I've held off on my review of Trinity Rep's King Lear till the last minute because - well, actually I usually do hold off on bad reviews, if I can (I do front-load raves, and I suppose that's inconsistent - but with pans I'm often only writing for the intellectual record, such as it is!).  And at any rate this production wasn't quite bad, it was just . . . disappointing, particularly given who was in it and the scale of the effort involved.

This Lear was actually a joint production between Trinity and the Dallas Theater Center - and was directed by Kevin Moriarty (who used to direct down in Providence - got all that?).  Moriarty had something of a reputation in these parts back then, but much of what went wrong with this misfire can be traced to his odd ideas, so let's just say I don't think much of him now.  This wasn't quite the car crash that last season's Merchant of Venice was, but most of Moriarty's interpretative touches either flattened the play, or left you scratching your head.

And I was equally disappointed, I'm afraid,  by Brian McEleny's turn in the title role, particularly as I know this Trinity vet knows his Shakespeare (he gave us a memorable Twelfth Night about two years ago). Here, however, McEleny was hampered by the choice to emphasize Lear's decrepitude; meanwhile the ensemble (drawn both from Providence and Dallas) hadn't really become an ensemble yet (and frankly a few of the actors came off as Shakespearean neophytes). So the production was sometimes a thing of shreds and patches - although it was almost redeemed by one dynamite stage image (when Michael McGarty's elegant set collapsed along with Lear's mind), and a storm scene that came closer than most to the edge of madness.

Now that's no small achievement right there.  But it must be balanced against many other loopy interpretive decisions.  At the talkback I attended, one audience member opined that she had "never realized this was a play about Alzheimer's!"  Now I understood her feeling - it was an appropriate response to what we'd just seen; but of course Lear is NOT a play about Alzheimer's, and to pretend that it is distorts Shakespeare's intents and undermines his achievement.  This is simply another example of how the attempt to give the Bard a contemporary handle often ends up reducing him to puny postmodern dimensions. (And just btw, before you say it, my father died of that terrible disease, so I know from Alzheimer's.)


Perhaps this rather clinical mood is what made Moriarty turn the Fool (Stephen Berenson) into - well, just a court jester (admittedly, Berenson made a funny one), who limned little or nothing of Lear's love of Cordelia, or his guilt over his mistreatment of her.  Needless to say, much of the poignance of the building action of the play's first half - as Lear grapples with both his other daughters' treachery and his own awareness that he has brought their treachery on - was therefore lost, and the sisters' descent into evil was likewise truncated and opaque.  (Angela Brazil's Regan was particularly incoherent.)  And then strangely, Moriarty kept the Fool around after his disappearance from the play (who knows why; Berenson seemed to signal sometimes that he wasn't sure why he was onstage, either).  And then there was Phyllis Kay's blank Earl of Gloucester - aside from recalling Hillary at certain moments, she seemed unable to make anything individual of her thematically complicated non-traditional casting (as matricide is, I think, different from patricide in its import and impact).  Of the Trinity regulars, Joe Wilson, Jr. did hold his own as Albany, but only Fred Sullivan, Jr., made a really strong impression as a viciously fey Oswald.

The crowd from Dallas came through with somewhat stronger performances (perhaps because they were more familiar with Moriarty's methods?).  The stand-out was Hassan El-Amin's passionate Kent, but there were the beginnings of memorable interpretations from Lee Trull (Edmund) and Abbey Siegworth (Cordelia) - and Steven Michael Walters' Edgar got better as the play progressed (although he too seemed unable to grapple with the special impact of seeing his mother with her eyes torn out).  Perhaps as the show makes its way from Providence to Texas, these interpretations will achieve greater depth and clarity.

And I admit that even McEleny had his moments - he certainly gave the performance his all, even stripping down to his bare bodkin for the storm scene.  This was by far the production's finest hour - with the set in ruins, rain came pouring in through the roof, and as the shivering, naked McEleny picked his way delicately through the wreckage, chattering pathetically, a shattering image of moral and political chaos suddenly came into terrible focus.  I'll carry that with me as my memory of this Lear; I only wish I had more like it.

Beau Derek

Jacobi on the heath at Dover in King Lear.

In between operas last week, I managed to catch the simulcast of Derek Jacobi's King Lear from London's Donmar Warehouse to our own Coolidge Corner. I have tickets to see the production again, at BAM in May, but I thought I would take this opportunity to compare the simulcast experience to the "live" one.

Alas, many of the issues that have been discussed in the Met Opera simulcasts are evident in the National Theatre simulcasts, too. The "show" began abruptly, and was somewhat mistimed so that we missed the first two or three lines of the play. And despite the intimacy of the Donmar (it's only 250 seats), the actors were miked, and also slightly amplified, which gave some exchanges a boosted, ringing quality, and made it hard to tell who had vocal chops and who didn't (Jacobi does). There were also a few electronic blips, and the simulcast seemed to skip a beat when the satellite wobbled or something. The camerawork, however, was restrained and mostly apt - it generally followed what you would expect a spectator's eye to track, along with a few appropriate flourishes (the slow pull-back from the Fool as he disappears from the play was particularly effective, as were the storm sequences - brilliant lightning effects, and a flexible soundscape, allowed Jacobi to whisper his most famous lines from what seemed to be a kind of psychological bubble).

The digital hiccups were mostly minor irritations, however, in the transmission of a production that, if not quite great, was still quite good, and certainly better than the Christopher Plummer or Ian McKellen versions that have recently passed through New York.  Director Michael Grandage has said he considers Lear to be "a political play," and this was evident in his concise cutting of the text; in this version (unlike in so many others!) you always understood just what the balance of power was between the ruthless junior royals.  Beyond that, Grandage doesn't seem to have had any big new ideas about the play, but he has a lean, driving style that served it well, and a directorial habit (a good one in popular versions of the classics) of making each transition a clean statement (at the moment that Lear's mind broke, for instance, Jacobi let out an impressively deranged scream).

At first, however, Jacobi seemed to make a rather lightweight Lear; this was no knotty oak, much less a human Everest, and in the early scenes his anger sometimes sounded more like pique.  But as this particular actor has made a dramatic specialty out of the sympathetic investigation of human weakness, he had a special angle on Lear's crack-up, and his well-known way with delicacy and tenderness made his reconciliation with Cordelia quite moving, and the terrible finale truly heart-breaking.

The supporting quartet of the storm scenes - Gloucester (Paul Jesson), Kent (Michael Hadley) and especially Edgar (Gwilym Lee) and the Fool (Ron Cook) were all at Jacobi's level, and these sequences were therefore tremendous.  Indeed, Jesson and Lee made more of the Gloucester sub-plot than I think I've ever seen actors manage to do; for the first time in my experience, it rivaled the main plot for emotional impact.

Alas, Lear's daughters and their associates weren't in quite the same class.  Gina McKee had her moments as a languidly evil Goneril, but Justine Mitchell made a hash of Regan (she seemed to want to play her as sweet rather than weak), and Pippa Bennett-Warner made a pretty but standard-issue Cordelia.  Meanwhile as Edmund, Alec Newman lacked the sexy swagger than can make the role a show-stopper, and Gideon Turner just seemed lost as Cornwall.

These gaps slowed, but couldn't stop, the drive of the second half of the play, however, and the terrible last scene was just as shattering as it should be; it struck me that this swift, clean version could eventually become known - should it be issued on DVD or shown on public TV - as the current 'standard' version.  There's an encore simulcast tonight at the Coolidge; Shakespeare devotees who can't get out tonight may still want to consider a trip to Brooklyn in May or June.  This Lear isn't perfect, but it's worth it.

Shakespeare Expounded

Caroline Devlin, Richard Neale, Terence Wilton, Dale Rapley, and Rina Mahoney - the entire cast of King Lear.

No lover of Shakespeare could take Harvard's "Shakespeare Exploded" series seriously - but bardolators can get a fix of the sweet stuff out at Wellesley this weekend, where the Actors from the London Stage are performing a touring version of King Lear at 7 PM on Friday and Saturday night at Houghton Chapel.

It's even free.

AFTLS scales Shakespeare's Everest with just five climbers - three men and two women (above), all of whom, fortunately, know the lay of the land, and make it well up the slopes, if not quite to the pinnacle, of Shakespeare's most piercing tragedy. To be honest, the tiny cast size forces a few scenes into a straitjacket (the same talented bloke plays both Edmund and Edgar, for instance, resulting in some rather forced antics when the two do battle). But deft use of simple costumes and props (scarves, sashes, hats) allows the actors to slip in and out of character and interact with each other and their other roles with relative ease.

Indeed, this was probably the clearest and least impacted version of Lear I've ever seen. Although to be honest, it wasn't quite the best (that would probably be Brian Bedford's version at Stratford a few years back), although it ranks high among the local efforts of the past twenty years or so. It would be hard to argue, for instance, that lead Terence Wilton genuinely sank into madness as Lear, and as Goneril and Regan, Rina Mahoney and Caroline Devlin never came to full evil flower. Perhaps the strongest performances in the production belonged to Dale Rapley, who subtly and skillfully delineated his Kent and Gloucester, and Richard Neale, who brought a welcome, if somewhat broad, energy to both Edmund and Edgar (although he eventually grew shouty as both).

Above all, this production gave us Shakespeare shorn of concept and trend. Which is always something to be grateful for.

"This is not Lear . . ."

. . . it's only Ian McKellen.

Although it hasn't quite opened at BAM, word is already spreading that, despite the pre-show hype, the Ian McKellen King Lear (directed by Trevor Nunn) is something of a bust. I caught one of the last "previews" this weekend (it's already sold out, and the production has already "opened" at the RSC, so please, fellow bloggers, spare me a recap of the whole George Hunka debate), and am here to report that yes, Sir Ian does indeed drop trou during the storm scene; but reason not the need - as one blogger breathlessly reported, "Gandalf is hung!" Despite the extra inches, McKellen isn't every inch a king, however. Instead, he offers a dryly cerebral, actor-tricksy performance in a role that should descend to the core of human vulnerability; true, his choices are often intriguing, and he's always watchable, but you won't feel for McKellen's Lear, or much care if he (or Romola Garai's rather horsy Cordelia) lives or dies.

The evening would still be worthwhile, of course, if Trevor Nunn had assembled a stunning production around McKellen's hollow star turn, but alas, this may be the weirdest, most rambling Lear I've seen. Set in a crumbling, belle-epoque theatre (rather like the one in which we're sitting, the BAM Harvey), the production opens to thunderous organ peals, and Lear in Orthodox-bishop drag, mumbling imprecations to the sky; Nunn then shifts gears to what feels like operetta, playing much of the opening division-of-the-kingdom sequence lightly, even for laughs. Soon thereafter, the Cossacks seem to have invaded, and the Fool (Sylvester McCoy) drops in from the local music hall to play the spoons.

Meanwhile Regan and Goneril, though dressed like Cinderella's stepsisters, shift gears into Noël Coward. Monica Dolan makes Regan a lightweight lush who's always on the bottle (Nunn simply cuts her vicious lines at the blinding of Gloucester, realizing, I suppose, that laughter here would be unthinkable). As Goneril, the redoubtable Frances Barber hits some nicely perverse, exasperated notes, but her murder of her baby sister is wildly misjudged; Barber whips up the poison right onstage, and pours it with a smirk into the alcoholic Regan's cups - as she subsequently tippled, I found myself fighting off the giggles.

Clearly, Nunn is bent on redacting the standard interpretation of this deadly duo - i.e., that their evil blossoms with their power; but he's got nothing compelling to replace it with, and, sans villains worth Lear's salt, the production merely struts and frets its hour upon the stage - actually, make that its three hours and forty minutes upon the stage (it's also the longest Lear I've seen). One might imagine that Nunn's strategy is to stress the role of Edmund (and, by proxy, the play's questioning of the gods and stars in the problem of evil), and luckily he's got a truly great one in the lithely hungry Philip Winchester (who actually snaps his teeth at the audience) - but alas, the character simply doesn't have enough stage time to serve as sole thematic fulcrum, and so the strategy fails.

The production has, of course, its compensations. Nunn remains a brilliant (if somewhat literal-minded) dramatic analyst, and his emphases on overlooked details can sometimes be striking - and so occasionally we're willing to grant his pastiche of operetta, music hall, and drawing-room comedy some license as a symptom of an utterly random (dramatic) universe - but then at other times, such as the heavy-handed hanging of Lear's Fool, we're suddenly aware that Nunn has ordered up more than enough rope to hang himself, too, and our sympathy utterly fails.


Flying long-haul: Jonathan Hyde, Frances Barber, and Monica Dolan in The Seagull.

The director has better luck with Chekhov's The Seagull, which I saw sans McKellen (on days when he's not doing Lear, he plays Sorin - whom I saw capably handled by William Gaunt). Nunn here offers a generally straightforward reading of the play, with only one false move (he stages Kostya's first suicide attempt, much as he stages the hanging of Lear's Fool - perhaps an intended parallel, but since Hamlet is actually The Seagull's Shakespearean twin, this feels more likely a bad-idea double whammy). Frances Barber is once again in fine form as she segues from slimy sibling (Goneril) to monstrous mother (Arkadina), and though Richard Goulding feels miscast as son Kostya, he nevertheless delivers an intelligent, convincing performance. Romola Garai remains more equine than avian as Nina, and seems almost half-crazed early on, but actually turns down the volume for her mad scene, which as a result is quite affecting (if not shattering).

The rest of the ensemble is solid (and sometimes better; Ben Meyles is all but definitive in the supporting role of Medvedenko), although there's one important exception - Nunn has inexplicably cast the sexily-tressed Gerald Kyd as Trigorin, the stick-in-the-mud novelist whom Nina's stuck on. Kyd's no slouch, but he's also hardly incisive, and since he looks as if he should be crooning "Moonshadow" or "Morning Has Broken," the intended irony in Nina's infatuation goes missing. This misstep, combined with indulgent pacing, causes The Seagull, though airborne, to slowly coast downward. Indeed, by the end of its flight, we're more than ready to disembark. Which is a pity, as with maybe twenty minutes knocked off its running time, this production could truly soar.

Stratford Festival Round-Up

Sorry for the gap in blogging, but I've just returned from my annual pilgrimage to the Stratford Festival in Ontario. At left is Brian Bedford, in the title role of King Lear - which, incredibly, he also directed. Reviews were mixed - the gist was that Bedford had delivered a star turn, but had neglected to shape a full production - but by the time I saw it, through the alchemy of repeat performance, somehow the precisely opposite effect had been achieved: now the production as a whole was stronger than Bedford was, and easily eclipsed the Christopher Plummer/Jonathan Miller staging which Stratford mounted some five years ago and toured to New York.

Bedford has given us a traditional (if somewhat creatively edited) and strikingly straightforward Lear - and the results are always gripping, and at times staggering. In fact, this is the best Lear I've ever seen (although that call may change after I catch Sir Ian at BAM later this year, in a production which crosses the pond to very positive buzz). Bedford's own performance is not perfect; he doesn't quite bring off the shattering finale - and even, unforgivably to some, leaves Cordelia's corpse to expire by himself, in a spotlight, of course. But this is the only slice of ham served by an actor who's been prone to far more generous helpings. For the remaining three hours, Bedford remains utterly disciplined, etching a portrait of a petulant, increasingly decrepit patriarch who realizes rather earlier than the average Lear, and with lacerating self-awareness, the depth and breadth of his folly.

But the production is never merely a setting for a star turn, whatever the local critics said. Bedford has surrounded himself with talent, and there are penetrating, spirited interpretations from Dion Johnstone (Edmund), Wayne Best (Cornwall), Wenna Shaw (Goneril), Wendy Robie (Regan), Scott Wentworth (Gloucester) and Gareth Potter (Edgar). I found myself particularly moved by Wentworth and Potter - in this Lear, more tears were shed during their encounters on the blasted heath than were spent at the finale. One last mention - at the performance I attended, Keith Dinicol had to step in for Bernard Hopkins as the Fool, and acquitted himself admirably.

I'd urge any Bardolator like myself to make the trek to catch this version - but of course it's a long way to go for a single show; what else should you see at the Festival if you do decide to book that flight? What my friends and I found worthiest were Richard Monette's intelligent (if, again, traditional) An Ideal Husband, by Oscar Wilde (at left), and a worthy attempt to put over Albee's A Delicate Balance (featuring a Tony-worthy performance from Fiona Reid), which rewardingly scaled the first two acts, but lost ground in the inferior third. Elsewhere, Richard Rose directed a Merchant of Venice that was studded with intriguing ideas, but hobbled by a listless Antonio and a lackluster Shylock (and some of the worst costume designs to ever traverse the Stratford stage). Of the musicals, we found My One and Only far superior to Oklahoma, and can recommend the reliable Seana McKenna's solo rumination on Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's Will. Shows not seen by my merry band, but enjoying a positive (i.e., often sold-out) response, include To Kill a Mockingbird, The Blonde, the Brunette, and the Vengeful Redhead and Of Mice and Men - but we feel compelled to dissuade all comers from either The Comedy of Errors or Othello. Now get thee to Canada - if only for a sample of what a real theatrical culture feels like.