King Lear (Chichester)

This year’s Chichester Festival theme focuses on ‘con artists’, and the obvious inference in presenting King Lear as part of the programme is that we should observe the way that Lear’s daughters con him out of his possessions. Given the average age of the audience of the West Sussex audience here, I’m sure that the filial slights and perceived ingratitude highlighted in the play must find many resonances.

But Steven Pimlott’s challenging production dwells less on the psychology of ageing and the frailty of family relations as much as on the power struggles within a British aristocracy, divided by loathing from the outset. This is a nakedly political interpretation, almost Brechtian in its use of the Fool’s songs to interrupt the action, Alison Chitty’s stark geometric set and Paul Pyant’s harsh white lighting.

Right from the start, we see Stephen Noonan’s nicely sardonic Edmond contemplating a map of England, waiting to be divided – we have a sense of ambition in every corner. The realm Pimlott evokes is also a particularly bloody one, devoid of any compassion. Even Cornwall’s servants are not permitted to treat the blinded Gloucester. It’s easy to see how Lear loses his authority in such a place

David Warner’s rather low-key king is no match for the calculating politicians around him. What’s sorely lacking from Warner’s performance, however, is Lear’s growing sense of impotence as he contemplates his waning powers. The character’s madness is driven by this helplessness – this king seems almost contemplative of his fate. When he says, “Let me not be mad”, it’s as if he’s a man weighing up the possibility as a career move, rather than one rapidly losing touch with his wits.

If the fire is missing, Warner is nonetheless touchingly excellent in the final scenes, when he tenderly removes his robe to cover the dead Cordelia. As played by Kay Curram, the youngest of Lear’s daughters is no whining wimp. She’s more than a match for her siblings – witness how she thrusts herself at Burgundy, almost daring him to take her with him. As her elder siblings, Lou Gish and Zoe Waites make for a deliciously malevolent Goneril and Regan. In fact, thanks to the excellent performances of all three, this is a production that is really dominated by the daughters.

But where is the sense of decay? Rather than facing any acknowledgement of their own failing powers, both Lear, and to a lesser extent Richard O’Callaghan’s Gloucester, seem almost helpless spectators as events unfold around them. Never have Edmond’s musings on the futility of horoscopes seemed more apt. We’re reminded that this is a play full of the direst cruelty, depicting a world where events are shaped by not the stars or the gods but human against human. A world where there’s little need of a con artist to encourage self-deception.

– Maxwell Cooter