Belvoir St Theatre, November 20
7/10
At the end, director Eamon Flack has the dead sitting watching the few poor sods who still live. It’s a telling moment, given this greatest of tragedies – greatest of plays! – is seldom well served upon the stage. The challenges are too vast for all the spokes of the huge wheel to be consistently strong, and so it is again.
Yet there’s much to admire in Flack’s production, from the opening moments, when Colin Friels’ Lear draws a chalk circle on the blank stage, instantly pulling us into his pagan world. Just as the setting is nowhere and therefore everywhere, the music, composed by Steve Francis and Arjunan Puveendran, and performed by the latter on mridangam (hand-drum) and occasional vocals, with Hillary Geddes’ electric guitar, creates mythical timelessness, which could have been better echoed in James Stibilj’s costumes.
Flack’s production uses part of the title of the first Quarto edition: The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear and his Three Daughters. That title actually continues, With the Unfortunate Life of Edgar, Son and Heir to the Earl of Gloucester, and his Sullen and Assumed Humour of Tom of Bedlam. Edgar’s importance in the play comes both from his vying for the second-biggest role (with the Fool and Gloucester), and because he succeeds Lear as king. This elevated him in the eyes of Shakespeare’s contemporary audience, just, as at the outset, they would have quickly latched on to the scale of Lear’s imperiousness in a way that’s harder for us today.
Tom Conroy has transcendent moments when Edgar has reduced himself to Mad Tom, hinting at how high this production might have soared. Friels, too, can be every inch a Lear, brushing against the role’s greatness, then bouncing off, only to collide once more. He rushed lines that should be allowed to linger (opening night nerves?), yet could rise to a magnificence that brought both character and verse to their full glory. Deeper into the season he might stay up there.
Peter Carroll’s Fool does now. What inspired casting! I’ve never seen the Fool performed by Lear’s elder, and Carroll, with his innate playfulness, can now pertly admonish Lear not only from the privilege of position, but of age.
The gender-swapped Gloucester is played by Alison Whyte, whose bell-like voice commands the language. Raj Labade understands the complexities of Edmund, even if they aren’t consistently manifest: that jumble of charisma, evil and, crucially, the magnetism that drives Lear’s older daughters, Goneril (Charlotte Friels) and Regan (Jana Zvedeniuk) to distraction and destruction. Ahunim Abede is a suitably soft and loving Cordelia, and Brandon McClelland a typically convincing Kent.
The problem is that we’re never brought to tears by the saddest play ever penned. Carroll, bless him, takes us closest, but Whyte, Conroy and, above all, Friels should plunge us into the waiting abyss. The ingredients are mostly in place.
Until January 4.