King Lear

National Theatre Live presentations are recordings of live performances, filmed in the actual theatre with a live audience in attendance.  This production was recorded in May this year.  I’ll come back to this mode of presentation below.  Simon Russell Beale plays the eponymous king and the production is directed by Sam Mendes, a name familiar to us from cinema (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road, Skyfall) as from theatre.

Many, many words have been written and said about King Lear.  I shan’t add too many here.  It is Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy – and I include Hamlet in that rash statement.  In Lear we find a multitude of complex characters as well as violence, horror, pathos, comedy and an over-arching theme of loss and learning.  Lear the man begins as a self-absorbed egomaniac.  Director Sam Mendes says he is a man who, at the start, has never heard the word ‘no’.  He makes the tragic blunder of dividing his kingdom in two and bequeathing the halves to his daughters Goneril and Regan, blithely assuming he is thus absolved of all responsibility, but that he retains all his privileges.  His intention was to divide his kingdom in three, giving a third to his supposedly favourite daughter, Cordelia, but she is unable to lie that she loves him more than life itself.  She gets nothing and is banished.  Thus begins a violent and tumultuous descent in which Lear himself is cast out and stripped to a ‘bare forked animal’ on the storm lashed heath.  The daring irony Shakespeare gives us is that only when Lear is reduced to nothing – and, indeed, madness – does he begin to see the world as it is.

As one might expect from a National Theatre of Great Britain production, the casting is about perfect.  With a couple of exceptions, each of the actors is visually right for his or her character.  For instance, Mendes wanted to distinguish between Lear’s daughters Goneril and Regan (Shakespeare certainly did) and a dark, angular, haughty but vulnerable Kate Fleetwood is outstanding as the elder Goneril.  Anna Maxwell Martin, as Regan, on the other hand, is the blonde, long-legged sexy beast.  In the horrific scene of Gloucester’s blinding, she wears very high heels and lingerie!  The most original casting choices are Edgar and Edmund, Gloucester’s legitimate and illegitimate sons respectively.  Instead of a handsome – if not angelic – Edgar, we get, with Tom Brooke, a tall, shambling fellow with a face that isn’t at all princely.  With the scheming ‘bastard’ Edmond, we might expect a skulking, saturnine fellow, but in Sam Troughton we get a modern villain: a bland (but sweaty) bespectacled executive in a tightly buttoned suit – the suit replaced in the final act by something more blackly military.  Stanley Townsend, as the Earl of Kent, is big in height, girth and strength – quite right to carry his character’s unquestioning loyalty to his king to lengths verging on absurd.  By contrast, the gullible Gloucester – Stephen Boxer – is a slim and dapper fellow – until he is drenched in his own blood and begging to be taken to a precipice from which he can hurl himself to his death.  Adrian Scarborough’s Fool carries off all that potentially irritating wordplay by racketing up the tension in continually telling Lear the truth of his foolishness.  And as has often been remarked, there isn’t really a lot for Cordelia to do: she is basically a functional character who disappears for over half the play, returning only to be captured, murdered and – beautifully, movingly - mourned.  It is difficult at any time to play ‘goodness’, but Olivia Vinall doesn’t really meet the challenge; she is ‘pretty’ and sweet, but appears ill at ease with the least layered character in the play.

A critic once wrote of Shakespeare (in connection, as I remember, with Antony & Cleopatra) that he was a great ‘hair splitter’.  Antony and Cleopatra are legendary lovers – but Shakespeare makes us see that they are also faintly ridiculous.  An aspect of Shakespeare’s genius is to give us facetted characters: everyone has his or her reasons – if not good then at least plausible; we know they believe themselves.  In this production of Lear, the cast, under Mendes’ highly intelligent direction, points this up over and over.  The ‘bastard’ Edmond is two-faced, manipulative and cruel, but he has his reasons as his magnificent speech ‘Now God stand up for bastards’ argues.  In another soliloquy, he argues that the fault is not in our stars; it is in us.  When Goneril is driven into such a fury by her father that she slaps his face (in this production), you can’t help thinking, ‘Well, if my selfish, irrational Dad came home each evening with a hundred roistering bogans, demanding his and their dinner, mightn’t I get a little pissed off too?’

My reservations about National Theatre Live’s ‘filmed theatre’ (because that’s what it is) are set out in my review of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  To a lesser extent, those reservations apply here.  According to an article in The Age by Michael Shmith (7 June) the camera crew has two rehearsals before they record, using seven cameras.  But, in brief, watching King Lear like this is not like being in the theatre.  Of course it is way better than nothing, but less than being in the theatre because it is theatre and not a movie and the cameras don’t capture the production, but diminish it.  Simon Russell Beale, putatively the greatest classical actor of our time, gives a highly detailed, nuanced performance, having decided that under Lear’s blustering pride and rage he is dimly aware that he is losing his mind and sliding into dementia. 

But in the theatre, no doubt you’d also believe in Lear’s till now unquestioned majesty and authority; you’d believe that his courtiers and people fear him.  In the recorded version, however, you see in close-up what in the theatre is being projected to the gods.  You see a short, rather plump man (reminiscent of a garden gnome) who shouts too much (so slabs of text are lost – by this great classical actor!), and who, despite the military shaved head, isn’t fearsome or even authoritative at all.  The cameras shatter theatrical illusions of power and charisma.  As for projecting – i.e. shouting – much the same applies to Mr Troughton’s Edmund.

Do not, however, let this deter you from seeing this production.  If for no other reason, it is a chance to see and hear one of the greatest plays of all times.  There is no disguising the fact that it is all is taking place on a stage (a huge, deep stage – designer Anthony Ward), but there are long and wonderful stretches when that is quite forgotten.  There are scenes that will have you on the edge of your seat, others where you want to look away.  There are scenes of extraordinary insight into human motive as characters explain or justify themselves, and others scenes again that may have you in tears – as they had me: Lear’s recognition, via ‘poor Tom’, of the state of mankind, mad Lear and blind Gloucester talking past each other about the world’s duplicities and injustices, Lear mourning over the body of Cordelia…  (Why should a horse, a dog, a rat have life,/And thou no breath at all?)  This is no museum piece; it is a timeless play about losing everything and gaining understanding only when it is too late.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Mark Douet