Review: Lear

It makes sense…to try and sort your will before the big bell in the sky tolls. No surprises. No disappointment. A mere segue from this world to the next whereupon all parties concerned know their place when you depart centre-stage. And therein lies the problem: you are still very much centre stage, taking up time, taking up resource and now commanding emotional commitment. What makes the source text King Lear so riveting is that we can all imagine being an other-worldly presence at the reading of our will. How grateful do your offspring appear to be? is it at all commensurate with the bounty before them now? Has the miscreant finally learned their lesson? This is what lends Shakespeare’s totemic play such potency: family, betrayal, legacy, and madness…and all of it avoidable had Lear simply followed the normal course of events and shuffled of this mortal coil first. But Lear being Lear (the man that he usually is) instead watches in real time the deflation of his manifest eminence. By refusing to go to his grave first, his grave comes for them all.

Finn Den Hertog’s Lear first dispenses with the time-period of ancient Britain, then jettisons patriarchy whilst leaving in place the oppressive systemic struggles. The play commences in a large country house. Lear (Maureen Beattie) marches in and then out again followed meticulously by her retinue for no obvious reason other than perhaps to signify the early onset of that character’s madness. Her thoughts quickly collected, she calls upon the presence of her three daughters and asks each how much they love her. Their bounty is clearly pre-determined as no time is truly dedicated to carving up her empire. It’s a ritual and they merely have to go through the motions. Goneril, the eldest played by Jenny Hulse, goes first “I love you more than word can wield the matter”. Regan, the second eldest (Lindsay Campbell), seeks to outdo her “I am felicitate in your dear Highness’ love”. Finally, it is the turn of her youngest and most favoured, Cordelia (Ailsa Davison), “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth. I love your Majesty according to my bond. No more nor less”. It is a line which never fails to shock: the words are logical, but the emotion is as cold as Lear’s intent. What ensues is the unravelling of a dynasty upon the alter of ego. Cordelia, stripped both of bond and bounty, heads to France. Her bounty is shared amongst her sisters; their gratitude measured in ever more units of disdain towards their mother. Lear’s vainglory leads her to plant the plentiful seeds of her deserved downfall. Having banished the one daughter who genuinely loved her, she sets about the despatch of her most loyal nobleman, Kent (Mercy Ojelade). The situation is so dire that Lear’s only true friend, the one true sage, is the Fool…and eventually she too will find herself redundant as Lear slowly, then all at once, usurps her.

The claustrophobia of the source text is imbued by the walls of this Chekhovian house. Beattie carries the role of Lear with absolute aplomb. The diminishing queen of what remains. She commands the stage and the scenes between Beattie and the wonderful Fool (played also by Ailsa Davidson) are a delight. Hertog has dispensed with the Duke of Cornwall which only goes to frame Regan’s cruelty in truly stark terms: she delivers theatre’s most shocking torture - an action so horrific it has the power to raise Goneril’s character to one which, reluctantly, may be described as ‘morally ambiguous’. The reliably wonderful Forbes Masson is magnificent as the gullible Gloucester and his relationship with Edgar (Dylan Read) poignant. Read’s transformation from Edgar to Poor Tom is worth the ticket price alone. Outstanding.

There are some beautiful pieces of dramaturgy on display such as when the cast take up their places, much as chess pieces, for the inevitable denouement. Their movement mesmeric, singular, inexorable. Lear set all of this in motion with the premature reading of her will and now all there is to do is let all play painfully out. Mapping a source text from one period to another almost inevitably throws up unexpected creases which can raise questions which might not otherwise have presented themselves. There is often a symmetry to parental oversight or preferment: fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. It is mutually understood that these inequitable bonds exist. By changing Lear’s gender, the incurious acceptance that Lear’s words flip from the obsequious to wrath without skipping a beat is undermined. A mother who turns on her daughter, as Lear does with Cordelia, betrays a dysfunctional relationship and updating the time-period serves only to bring that into stark contrast. It serves to make the relationship between the two at the start of the play less believable. This incongruity does lessen by the play’s end due to the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship which often, sadly, throws up a certain clarity when the former is nearing their end. In Lear, it is a crease which thankfully irons itself out.

Lear continues its run at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 1st Aug.