2 responses to “McKellen’s Lear”

1. 

   Unknown

   April 19, 2007

   April 2007 RSC King Lear The Courtyard Theatre.
   This is a hope-less production. In its grim bleak world, utterly devoid of hope, mankind stumbles helplessly towards death and utter extinction. Immediately before the interval we see Lear’s Fool hanged, and at the play’s end we see Kent stride offstage to commit suicide, leaving the stage full of corpses who have died with no hope of resurrection. There is no intimation of the transforming power of love, no possibility of redemption. As the set progressively disintegrates, dogs howl into the night; the human race is doomed.
               Whatever one thinks of Trevor Nunn’s interpretation, with perhaps only a single exception, the acting is uniformly good and Ian McKellen’s Lear genuinely outstanding. I imagine that Frances Barber will be marvellous as Goneril, but her cycling accident robbed me of that experience. But it was not her highly capable understudy, Melanie Jessop, who was the weak link in the chain. Edmund is not the most difficult role to play and Philip Winchester is a perfectly competent actor, but he seemed out of his depth in a company of this quality. Perhaps because both Goneril and Regan fall in love with him, directors sometimes appear to assume that Edmund must be good looking. I could imagine Trevor Nunn telling his casting director to find him a cross between a David Beckham look-alike and a young Sean Bean. Unfortunately this leaves us with an Edmund who is an even poorer actor than Bean, who isolates words and places inverted commas around them, inserts stage pauses and really fails to engage us on the level the rest of the cast has set. Personally, I would have liked to see how his understudy Peter Hinton would have done – his cameo as the Duke of Burgundy was promising.
               But enough of negativity. Jonathan Hyde was the best earl of Kent I have ever seen by a country mile, McKellen aside, the real star of this production. He had authority, integrity and resolution in spades and one can understand why Nunn couldn’t afford to allow him to survive the play if he were to keep his desolate message intact. William Gaunt’s Gloucester travelled from consummate authority and confidence to tragic despair in a profoundly moving performance. Ben Meyjes was excellent as Edgar managing the three phases of the part – elder son, poor Tom and warrior – quite superbly (Simon Russell Beale really only managed the first two when he played the role). Romola Garai was a very spirited and feisty Cordelia. In the opening scene, she first thought her father was playing a game, giggled when she was condemned, then slowly the realisation that the old man was senile and his rejection real, dawned on her. There was no meek and mild daughter here – she remained spirited to the end.
               The Courtyard Theatre looks superb – with a wonderful relationship between stage and audience. But because it is, after all, a tin box, lined with wood, the acoustic is not good and the actors are to be commended on handling it as well as they did. Experience told here. But I wondered if Trevor Nunn liked the stage as much as I did. He was, after all, Stratford supremo for 18 years and didn’t change the Odeon stage. I felt that he didn’t use the stage as much as he could and chose to set a lot of the action upstage, almost within the proscenium which isn’t there. Was he making a point I wondered. I felt this particularly in the ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!’ scene. To give us an impression of heavy rain, this was played as far upstage as possible with a sheet of rain (or the appearance of it) cutting off the actors from the audience. For a stage which places the actors in the same room as the audience, this seemed odd – they were, as it were, outside the window. We could hear Lear shouting, but could not distinguish the words. Why not imagine the rain, place him down in the centre of the stage, able to turn and roar his defiance at all four corners of the compass, make contact with the audience.             That scene apart, McKellen’s Lear seemed almost faultless. His anger, senility and mood swings at the opening made us unsympathetic. When Kent questioned his action, he gave him a vicious rabbit punch to the stomach. His behaviour with the knights was disgraceful and one could understand Goneril’s position. So there was no sentimental fondness for the old man to spur us when he slide into dementia. Yet, somehow, when he declared  ‘I am a very foolish fond old man’, he moved us profoundly. He was real. Lear lived. None of the Lears I have seen (a list which includes Michael Gambon, Robert Stephens, Nigel Hawthorne and Corin Redgrave) have moved me more or engaged my emotions more completely. But those feeling died with the man. Nothing was allowed to remain. When I left the theatre there was a full moon shining over the River Avon. I remembered that Shakespeare had looked at that moon. I hoped that his vision of Lear was not so grim and bleak at the end, not so utterly hope-less.

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2. 

   Geoff

   April 19, 2007

   Gaveston – oh, thank you for this review. It set my imagination alight.

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