KING LEAR. To 28 March.
London.
KING LEAR
by William Shakespeare.
Young Vic To 28 March 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.15pm.
Audio-described 14 March.
Captioned 20 March.
Runs 3hr 35min One pause + one interval.
TICKETS: 020 7922 2922.
www.youngvic.org
Review: Timothy Ramsden 6 November at the Everyman Theatre Liverpool.
Kaleidoscope of ideas sometimes dazzle, sometimes clash.
Here is a Liverpool Lear, from the opening moments as a municipal buffet’s swept away to discover the glass-cased 3D map, like a planner’s urban vision, over which Lear discourses. This is regal pride in civic dress. And as Margaret Thatcher’s voice intones her 1979 election victory harmony quote from St Francis, we know the Toxteth riots were only a handful of years away.
In this world our friends in the North-West might well go mad, or find the world around them suddenly awry with unpredictability, leaving them to cling to old-order certainties which no longer hold sway, or to go with the individual opportunism of free enterprise.
So far, so strong; Rupert Goold is an undeniably brilliant, inventive director. But he works by adding, super-imposing. A bloody torturer’s kitchen for Macbeth, an arctic waste Tempest, the modern media with Pirandello’s Six Characters. This makes for a vertiginous ride, and once the grooves stop fitting, there can be a Headlong tumble – not, presumably, the intent in the name of his co-producing company (with Liverpool’s EverymanPlayhouse operation and the Young Vic).
Some ideas are acutely pointed; Lear cursing into sterility a heavily-pregnant Goneril increases the sense of his desperate impotence. Elsewhere, they are effortful. The nervily distraught Cordelia hardly offsets her sisters’ self-assertion. Perhaps the point is that the new world has no place for a Cordelia, but interpretation’s turning into a guessing-game here. Having Lear’s men with red, white and blue-faces literally paints them as overage hooligans, but it seems opportunistic for they have little in common with their leader.
He’s the man with a natural authority noted by Nigel Cooke’s Kent, one of the most quietly conventional performances (with John Shrapnel’s Gloucester) – both concentrate on character rather than fitting into a director’s picture. Pete Postlethwaite’s Lear has a common-man authority contrasting his party-hat at the start and the patterned dress which, later, might show him exploring his hitherto ignored, or slenderly-known, feminine side. A Lear who's municipal rather than regal fits the Merseyside wasteland scene; if only the production around him helped play out this concept with greater consistency.
Boy: Jacob Anderson.
Oswald: Peter Bramhill.
Albany: Michael Colgan.
Kent: Nigel Cooke.
Goneril: Caroline Faber.
Cordelia: Amanda Hale.
Fool: Forbes Masson.
Burgundy/Curan: John-Paul Macleod.
Edgar: Tobias Menzies.
France: Christopher Middleton.
Edmund: Jonjo O’Neill.
King Lear: Pete Postlethwaite.
Regan: Charlotte Randle.
Gloucester: John Shrapnel.
Cornwall: Clarence Smith.
Director: Rupert Goold.
Designer: Giles Cadle.
Lighting: Howard Harrison.
Sound/ Composer: Adam Cork.
Video/Projection: Lorna Heavey.
Movement: Georgina Lamb.
Costume: Nicki Gillibrand.
Fight director: Terry King.
Asistant director: Lisa Spirling.
2009-01-28 11:35:05