Occasionally with celeb-packed productions, which this certainly is, one senses that schedules meant the whole thing was rehearsed without the full cast being together very much. This one seemed not to have been rehearsed not so much in different rooms as on different drugs. Depending on the scene the mood shifted from panto--one of Gloucester’s eyes got thrown into the audience--to Culture Industry solemnity to “everyone a bit on edge because we’re showing Iraq War footage” in the blink of an eye.
This company never gelled. In particular, Harry Melling, playing Edgar, gave a performance that seemed tonally adrift from everyone in the performance. When an actor, forsaking all humanity to cast himself into the wild as Poor Tom, strips naked on stage, your dominant thought should not be “Huh. Gentile.” A truly unhinged performance--one might say, a balls-out one--if well-managed can break through a production, revealing idiosyncratic layers in a text or part. Here this character’s oddness was more like a balloon being let loose, finally sort of withering as it shot around the stage. Rhys Ifahns as the Fool was much, much better, even if he seemed disconnected from Lear himself--for me his recitation of the Merlin speech in what seemed to be a Luchador mask was the highlight of the evening. But what these performances meant as part of a coherent anything I could not say: most of the performers acted like well-off Londoners at the sort of dinner party where everyone talks about house prices. In person that’s actually scarier than having one’s eyes plucked out; on stage, I must say I’m getting tired of seeing the universality of human experience represented to me as limited to Zone 2 of the Piccadilly and Northern lines, near good schools.
For the life of me I could not figure out what this production was trying to do. The pointless modernist set, moving blank walls and projections, kept noting what scene it was--we’re quite alienated already, thanks--and the stage crew figured prominently as “characters.” I think they were trying to establish that King Lear is theatrical? I have a recurring fascination with the stagey way that productions have their non-characters--stage crew, “directors,” that sort of thing--act as though they’re not acting. This is usually established through exaggerated normalcy: POINTING at clipboards, ADJUSTING headsets, LISTENING attentively through totally naturalistic motions that can nevertheless be observed by everyone in the theatre. But what this all meant I could not say. Like a lot of things in this production, these stage characters were inflected--were singled out as having a particular presence--but to no particular end. This felt, as a lot of productions here to, like effective elements from other productions that in their native habitat had had a purpose, but had now been imported to no particular effect.
The physical production often got in the way. The storm scene overwhelmed the actors, even when they were miked up. For the most part everyone was dressed in what I think of as Margaret Howell Window modernism, meant to suggest the deep historical resonance of ultra-contemporary life--that old thing--without anyone trying too hard or thinking too much. The second act felt even baggier than the first. Simon Mayonda’s Edmond was probably the best thing here, although overwhelmed (somehow) when the baggy second act went all Aaron Sorkin dialogue fast. And in the midst of that, moments of unexpected power--the merlin speech, the sudden appearance of an Anonymous mask--fizzled, contextless, like unexploded bombs.
In the midst of this, Glenda Jackson as Lear was tremendous at everything this production didn’t seem interested in: endlessly sharp at language, overwhelmed by sets and spectacle and undisciplined tonal anarchy. I wish the production had been kept clearer to simply give us more time with her--the second-act scene of Lear carousing felt organically whole in a way most of the rest of this production didn’t. (Or was it Act One? Should have been reading the surtitles.) As the production failed mostly to cohere, I found myself becoming closer with the rest of the audience, united in our common confusion and less stage-managed denim.
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