King Lear

Having seen Rupert Goold set The Tempest in an Arctic wasteland and Macbeth in Soviet Russia, it comes as little surprise to see King Lear clad in a floral dress twirling a parasol.

While I’d read about the excesses of the original Liverpool Everyman production, it’s still startling to see Edmund and Edgar’s fighting with plastic swords and the Fool performing Singing in the Rain. Goold said that he’d taken some of the comments on board – he’s ditched the controversial Maggie Thatcher opening speech for example, but this is still a patchy, uneven production, there are plenty of interesting ideas but there’s little sense of Lear’s descent into madness.

What’s more startling is the lack of any discussion about power – Pete Postlethwaite’s Lear in shirt, braces and raincoat seems less a king than a northern patriarch with some particularly troublesome daughters. He captures the fragility of the king as he gradually loses his touch with reality but there’s little rage against the dying of the light. Perhaps the best example of this is the way that he speaks the “Blow winds and crack your cheeks” speech with a microphone. This is not a raging man defying the elements to do their worse but more a down-at-heel paterfamilias speaking at a family wedding.

What Goold does capture well is the degree of enmity between Regan and Goneril (and their husbands) from the outset and the division of the kingdom, one that festers and grows.

In a bold stroke, Goold has Goneril heavily pregnant from the start of the play, giving birth during the storm scene. This has the dual effect of making Lear’s terrifying speech against her fertility as completely futile, emphasising his impotence, and indicating that the split in the kingdom is likely to persist after the end of the play, with Edgar not expecting to have an easy time against a more rightful heir – and of course, in a nice twist, making Edgar the illegitimate king.

If Postlethwaite didn’t quite convince there were some compensating performances. There was a particularly strong Fool from Forbes Masson, there was some real bitterness towards Lear after Cordelia’s downfall. There was also some strong support from Jonjo O’Neill as a charmingly villainous Edmund, John Shrapnel ‘s solidly decent Gloucester and Nigel Cooke‘s faithful Kent.

I also think that the decision to have two intervals counts against the production. This damages the dramatic infrastructure as Lear’s long journey is just too fragmented. More practically, it also adds unnecessarily to the length of the evening. The play ended just before 11.00, after a 7.00 start – pity on those poor souls who have last trains to catch.

If this is still a work in progress, there might still be further changes. For all Goold’s undoubted vision and brilliance, there are times when there can be too much innovation and this Lear looks to be one of them.

-Maxwell Cooter