King Lear
Part of the BAM 2011 Spring Season
Apr 28—Jun 5, 2011: Tue—Sat at 7:30pm; Sat at 2pm (Apr 30
and Jun 4 only); Sun at 3pm
US Premiere
Presented by the Donmar Warehouse
and BAM
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Michael Grandage
Let me begin by saying that this Donmar
Warehouse production of King Lear at BAM directed
by Michael Grandage and starring Derek
Jacobi, made for a completely absorbing and successful evening of
theater: it was far better than most Shakespeare we have seen in recent
years, and we felt very good about having seen it. The production moved
us along through the rich intensity of its own experience for three hours
(including one intermission), maintaining our rapt attention and
active interest. The acting was quite credible, and the set design and
lighting superb. So, the short answer is that this production, at BAM
through 4 July, is well worth seeing.
But let me continue by saying that Lear
is the play that most convinces me that Harold Bloom may
be correct in his contention that Shakespeare should primarily be
read, rather than performed. At best, there is always a
difficulty in bringing the power and subtlety of Shakespeare to a staged
production. Lear has some particular difficulties
that make this even more true than with his other plays, and all productions of
it invariably fall somewhat short. To begin with, Lear lacks any
clear center: despite Lear's commanding emotional presence, there
are several other monumentally important characters in the play, all
of which require adequate weight and expression if the play is to
succeed; according to Bloom,
There are four great roles in The Tragedy of King Lear,
though you might not know it from most stagings of
the play. Cordelia's, for all her pathos, is
not one of them, nor are Goneril's and Regan's of the
same order of dramatic eminence as the roles of Lear and the Fool. Edmund
and Edgar, antithetical half brothers, require actors as skilled and powerful
as do Lear and the Fool. I have seen a few appropriate Edmunds, best of
all Joseph Wiseman many years ago in New York, saving an otherwise ghastly
performance in which Louis Calhern, as Lear, reminded
me only of how much more adequate he had been as Ambassador Trentino
in the Marx Bothers' Duck Soup. Wiseman played Edmund as an amalgam
of Leon Trotsky and Don Giovanni, but it worked quite brilliantly, and there is
much in the text to sustain that curious blend. (Shakespeare: The
Invention of the Human, pp.479f.)
In addition, productions must contend with the fact
that parallel to the painful tale of Lear and his daughters there is the
story line about
beyond grandeur...outrageously hyperbolic, insanely
eloquent...always demand[ing] more love than can be given..and so he can scarcely speak without crossing into
the realms of the unsayable...
Lear's verbal force almost always preempts all spontaneity
of speech in others. The exception is his Fool, the uncanniest
character in Shakespeare... One function of Lear's Fool is precisely that
of Hamlet's Horatio: to mediate, for the audience, a personage otherwise
beyond our knowing, Hamlet being too far beyond us, and Lear being blindingly
close. Much of what we know in Hamlet we receive from Horatio, just as
the Fool humanizes Lear, and makes the dreadful king accessible to us.
...You could remove the Fool and Horatio and not alter much in the way of plot
structures, but you would remove our surrogates from the plays, for the Fool
and Horatio are the true voices of our feelings. ...Horatio is a comfort
to us, but the Fool drives us a little mad as he pushes Lear further into
madness, so as to punish the king for his great folly. (Ibid., pp.493ff.)
It is not easy for a production to create a Lear whose
stature, grandeur, and authority the audience appreciates, whose failings and
suffering the audience recognizes, and to whom the audience can personally
relate--and yet this is precisely what is necessary, if the play is to
succeed.
This brings me to the greatest of this production's
shortcomings. At the risk of being misunderstood, allow me to put it this
way: Michael Grandage 's
production is more a comedy than a tragedy. I mean this in two separate
ways, although I fear the latter is rather generated by the former. Most
profoundly, I refer to the distinction that has been drawn between the
essential perspectives of comedy and tragedy (I believe by Northrop
Frye): in comedy we view the characters from the outside, watching what
occurs to them as observers; whereas in tragedy we identify with
the main character and participate in his drama, feeling what is going on
from within his perspective. Richard Sewall pointed out
"the undeniable truth that comedy gains its power from its sense of tragic
possibility. (The Vision of Tragedy, p.1.); the subject
matter of these two forms can be the same--it is the perspective that
differentiates them. For all the reasons I have said, it is most
difficult to create onstage a Lear that both maintains his stature and allows
us to feel inside his humanity; and, if one is allowed an escape, it
is incredibly seductive to be able to distance oneself from Lear's
experience. This Lear succeeds neither in
conveying the majesty of the king nor in allowing us into his personhood.
As a (I believe) secondary consequence, the production evokes far too
many laughs to be appropriate to this great tragedy. To be sure, there are
moments in the play design to have some humorous intent...but not nearly so
many as in this production (to be fair, some--albeit not all--of this laughter
may be attributable to some lack of sophistication in the audience)--and definitely
not in some of the places they occur. Even in what Bloom has termed
"the poetic..center to the tragedy...the meeting
of the mad king and the blind Gloucester" [Ibid., p.481],
there is laughter evoked from the audience, rather than a sense of sublime
pathos; and Lear's expression of revulsion at female sexuality in his tormented
attack on womankind is clearly intentionally treated as a bawdy joke, rather
than anguish at the fact that his relationship with his daughters has usurped
and unhinged him.
In truth, there are many aspects of this Lear
that seem to miss or trivialize some of the more profound themes and moments in
Shakespeare's play. The Fool, one of the play's great characters,
although extremely well-played by Ron Cook, seems to have been
denied some of the profoundness of the role: at very least, too much of
his interaction with Lear is played more as comic than meaningful--so as
to make it difficult to realize that it is driving Lear further into madness,
although he clearly loves him; and, although I am not completely sure, I
actually think the production may have omitted the incredible speech of
prophecy the Fool is supposed to make ("The prophecy of Merlin shall I make;
for I live before his time." [III.ii.79-95]) as
There are some quite wonderful performances. Michael
Hadley was excellent as
Which brings me to Derek Jacobi as
Lear. His doing the role was, in fact, what made me want to be sure to
see this performance in the first place. Nevertheless, I am somewhat
mixed about his performance. On the one hand, it was quite
splendid: Jacobi is a commanding presence on stage (I
was amazed to learn that he is actually quite slight in his actual physical
stature, as that was not at all the impression he created on stage); he
appropriately seethed with amazing emotional energy; he was incredibly riveting
to watch--and the fact that we were in the third row center intensified what
was already an incredibly intense experience. On the other hand, his performance
had some serious flaws: most importantly, when he was expressing
emotional agitation (which is for a great percentage of his role), his
elocution was not always adequately good to permit me to understand all of the
words he was speaking--even though I am quite familiar with most of Lear's
speeches. Most of the other flaws I rather think are more attributable to
directorial decisions than to his acting decisions, but it is, of course, hard
to know for sure: while his incredible presence and energy did lend
stature to the role, the interplay of the anguished and the furious, the
mad and the comic, and the regal and the haughty did not play out to maximum
effect--he was a character more confused than tragic. (I wish I could
create a better allusion to "More sinn'd against
than sinning"...) Still, it was an incredible performance, if a
somewhat disappointing portrayal of Lear.
The actual physical staging of the play was completely
successful, and totally to my personal taste: it was done most simply (as
I believe Lear always need to be), on a bare stage, without
any scenery, save for the incredibly interesting backdrop of a semicircle
of floor-to-ceiling, vertical panels, painted in a
thickly-applied, abstract, Pollock-like pattern in grays and white. This
excellent set design was by Christopher Oram
(who also dis the simple but effective costumes).
Almost all of the remaining effects were created by the fabulous
lighting by Neil Austin: again done in the most understatedly
effective way--mostly with varying intensity and hue of basically white light
(ranging in color/temperature from warm yellow whites to brilliantly
cold blue ones).
Despite the fact that, on the deepest levels, this
production fails sustain the tensions that are necessary fully to create the
profound tragic depth that lies at the heart of Shakespeare's incredible
play, it is nevertheless a wonderful evening of theater. See
it, if you can.
Note: Very
limited availability remains. Call Ticket Services at 718.636.4100 for inquiries.
