It’s no secret that Rupert Goold’s King Lear is a curate’s egg. It’s good in parts – Pete Postlethwaite is beautiful as an ex-king, albeit less effective while still in situ. There’s something terribly tender about the production’s final tableau, as Pete sits there with ashen Cordelia in his lap, his small voice ever reducing, his kingship, manhood and paternity destroyed. So this is what’s left when everything that shores up selfhood, everything that obscures our impotence and pointlessness, all that separates us from the beasts, is brutally removed.
But there’s some rubbish in here too – and (although I wish it weren’t so) the rubbish often makes the stronger impression. The scene in which Cornwall and Regan blind Gloucester is the most ridiculous of the year. It’s not the only moment in Goold’s Lear that is psychologically unconvincing. But it’s the most preposterous, as Lear’s daughter and her hubbie flit instantly from believable human beings to shlock Gothic sex fiends. Cornwall gouges out Gloucester’s left eye. Regan snogs him, wallowing in the gore. She bites out the old man’s other peeper. Blood spews everywhere. The couple get frisky again. Savagery is a turn-on, see? And Regan and Cornwall are, like, baddies. Thus are two of the plays intriguing characters shrunk to cartoon grotesquery.
Have you ever tried biting out someone’s eye? I suspect it’s more difficult than it’s made to seem here. I may be wrong.
I pitied Poor Tom. Why is he pretending to be an idiot, in the middle of a wood? Goold’s production doesn’t make it clear. How shallow must Lear’s love for Cordelia have been, to be so hastily disposed of? Why do the fathers misjudge their children so spectacularly? Has Gloucester never had an inkling Edmund might be a bad ’un? As Maly Theatre director Lev Dodin flatly asked, when I interviewed him a few years back: “how has Gloucester managed to be basically Lear’s prime minister for so many years, living in court, and yet not be able to decipher who is a liar and who is not?” There are no answers – nor suggestions of answers – here. There’s fine image-making, a forward thrust and performances with pizzazz. But Lear’s greatest mysteries aren’t unlocked.
Tuesday, 24 March 2009
Monday, 2 March 2009
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, National Theatre
I queued for this one morning last week at 8.30am, with a thermos of Bovril in one hand and a John Buchan novel in the other. I recommend it. Front-row seats for a tenner – and you feel like you’ve earned it.
I caught the last performance. I couldn’t very well miss it, after so many people told me how great it was. And sure enough, when it finished, and the audience filed out of the Olivier Theatre, I heard it again: “wasn’t it wonderful?”; “beautifully performed”, etc.
Fair enough. It’s a ravishing production, an all-enveloping (the more so if you’re in the front row) total-theatre experience that makes you wonder how Stoppard’s play could ever have been performed without an onstage orchestra. The cast is terrific. The interplay between musicians and actors is well-worked and expressive. But something tells me that, when you watch a play about political persecution in Soviet Russia, your first reaction shouldn’t be: ooh, what a sumptuous staging.
I think the fault – as far as this argument goes – is Stoppard’s. The play is about a sane man, locked up in a psychiatric prison, accused of being mad. The proof of his madness, according to his keepers, is his belief that, in Russia, sane men get locked up in psychiatric prisons. It’s a fiendish paradox, with which Stoppard is clearly delighted. He duly dramatises it in a spirit of jaunty absurdity that eclipses the story's tragedy. Despite the production’s best efforts (there is, for example, a terrific choreographed sequence in which members of the orchestra become torturers and battered prisoners), the play itself is funnier than it is disturbing.
It also has a (sort of) happy ending. The incarcerated hero is finally released – albeit accidentally – to be with his son. Tom Morris and Felix Barrett’s production drowns this conclusion in tears and doomy strings, as if to demand that we weep for all those who weren’t/aren’t released. But their best efforts can’t obscure the ending Stoppard scripted, which lets us all off the hook. And which makes the play, finally, a comedy.
I’m not asking that a play about political repression necessarily whip us into a righteous fury. But Stoppard’s is all wit and too little feeling. We emerge delighted by what’s gone on onstage, but not horrified enough by what goes on in the world.
I caught the last performance. I couldn’t very well miss it, after so many people told me how great it was. And sure enough, when it finished, and the audience filed out of the Olivier Theatre, I heard it again: “wasn’t it wonderful?”; “beautifully performed”, etc.
Fair enough. It’s a ravishing production, an all-enveloping (the more so if you’re in the front row) total-theatre experience that makes you wonder how Stoppard’s play could ever have been performed without an onstage orchestra. The cast is terrific. The interplay between musicians and actors is well-worked and expressive. But something tells me that, when you watch a play about political persecution in Soviet Russia, your first reaction shouldn’t be: ooh, what a sumptuous staging.
I think the fault – as far as this argument goes – is Stoppard’s. The play is about a sane man, locked up in a psychiatric prison, accused of being mad. The proof of his madness, according to his keepers, is his belief that, in Russia, sane men get locked up in psychiatric prisons. It’s a fiendish paradox, with which Stoppard is clearly delighted. He duly dramatises it in a spirit of jaunty absurdity that eclipses the story's tragedy. Despite the production’s best efforts (there is, for example, a terrific choreographed sequence in which members of the orchestra become torturers and battered prisoners), the play itself is funnier than it is disturbing.
It also has a (sort of) happy ending. The incarcerated hero is finally released – albeit accidentally – to be with his son. Tom Morris and Felix Barrett’s production drowns this conclusion in tears and doomy strings, as if to demand that we weep for all those who weren’t/aren’t released. But their best efforts can’t obscure the ending Stoppard scripted, which lets us all off the hook. And which makes the play, finally, a comedy.
I’m not asking that a play about political repression necessarily whip us into a righteous fury. But Stoppard’s is all wit and too little feeling. We emerge delighted by what’s gone on onstage, but not horrified enough by what goes on in the world.
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