King Lear

Company: Bell Shakespeare
Dates & venues:
Brisbane: Playhouse, QPAC - to 22 May
Melbourne: Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre - 27 May - 12 June
Perth: His Majesty's Theatre - 18 -26 June 2010

John Bell inhabited the uncomfortable skin of the aging King Lear admirably on opening night and was a backed by a cast of actors who also understood their Shakespeare and created more than skin deep characters.

As with all Shakespeare’s plays this has its drama, comedy and conundrums, particularly with madness. Once again an audience is asked to decide when Lear became mad, or was he mad to begin with and discover sanity, or did he go mad at all? All is in the eye of the beholder. King Lear is a meaty offering with its three hour time-span and a multitude of characters, a far cry from so many modern offering that run for the length of an average movie at most.

Have modern playwrights lost the stamina to write more than a few thousand words and explore character like Shakespeare does?

Lear is a king grown old, tired of the responsibility of office. He has also lost touch with reality right at the start. What man in his right mind would put a scorecard on the love of his daughters and banish one who doesn’t have the right words? Why would a man of sound mind who had planned to split his kingdom into three, suddenly decide to split it in half? To me his behaviour looked suspiciously like early dementia that developed over the length of the play.

He was obviously a strong-minded and successful king before his abdication and his daughters are just as feisty - and just as self absorbed. As Lear John Bell’s powerful stage presence helps the king dominate the stage, but Bell is a clever enough actor to surrender the footlights to the other important characters. He worked magic with his old friend, the Fool, who is always on hand to bring him back to earth with a verbal prod. It was almost a comedy double act as he played the stooge to Peter Carroll’s straight man and it was one of the best acting duels of the night.

Of course the story has as many sub-plots as plots. Loyalties are strained and broken, friendships cast out for convenience and every man or woman is for themselves. Its brother against brother, son against father, sister against sister and friend against friend as loyalties shift like desert sand.

It is as good an exposition of personal greed and ambition as Gordon Gekko was.

I liked Marion Potts' direction with its mix of ancient and modern. Tim Walter’s Edmund the bastard son of the Duke of Gloucester, is a thoroughly modern man in gesture and cunning as he plots against the Duke’s legitimate son Edgar, which was another well-played role, this time by Josh McConville.

The three sisters, chalk and cheese physically, but sisters under the skin are brilliantly played by Jane Montgomery Griffiths (Goneril), Leah Purcell as the voluptuous and blatantly sexual Regan and Susan Prior as the good-two-shoes baby sister Cordelia, who turns out to be tougher than the lot of them when, with her husband the King of France, she invades Lear’s split kingdom.

Dale Ferguson’s simple set, with a backdrop curtain and a central rostrum, which held the map of Lear’s kingdom, allowed the action to move swiftly from one scene to the next without the need for heaps of back-stage people shifting scenery.

This helped keep track of the constantly moving storyline, the double and double-double crosses plus who had died in this typical Shakespeare bloodbath.

The costumes were simply fur coats of differing design, but this didn’t detract from character building. We knew by the shape and size of the coat how important the wearers were in the scheme of thingst.

In the first act (one hour 45 minutes long) on stage right was a set of percussion instruments worked by composer and musician Bree van Reyk, which was used in an attempt to generate background music to enhance the text. Bree is a fine musician, but the ploy didn’t work as far as I was concerned.

Watching Shakespeare needs concentration for the text is the key to the action and I found it very distracting to have this musician running around, whacking drums, cymbals and all the other bits of percussion she had. Several times I was drawn to her movement and lost the text.
In the second act the instruments had gone, but the sound was still there and it made life a lot easier without the physical distraction.

King Lear is a good example of why Bell’s company has just celebrated its 20th anniversary.

Eric Scott

To read more of Eric Scott's theatre reviews, check out Absolute Theatre.