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Review: King Lear

★★★★★

Five Stars
 
A confession: I had not read King Lear before coming to see this production. It’s a confession of ignorance but also a proviso to all you punters. To a Lear philistine, it is not clear where Shakespeare’s Lear ends and where director Stephen Hyde’s Lear begins. Watching last night’s performance I think the blend of directorial and authorial input broadly worked. Yet the philistine’s idea of blend is more often than not the purists’ idea of perversion. By way of reconciliation my advice to both is the same: brace yourself.

Shakespeare’s epic tail charts the rise and fall of two daughters who, having inherited their father’s kingdom, proceed to brutally usurp him. Their subsequent machinations and eventual downfall implicate an ambitious bastard son who betrays his own father in aiding the sisters’ coup. Like the best tragedy, it casts us into the most horrifying and disturbing extremities of the human experience. Like the best tragedy, it is the artifice of the form that confronts the brutality of the truths revealed. 

We are constantly reminded of this relation between artifice and reality in Hyde’s production. Soliloquies are often accompanied by a live filming to which are privy via a huge wall projection. The characters seem to be both aware and unaware of their image on the wall. We as the audience are thus at once complicit in the character’s view of themselves yet at once detached from this identification. In a brilliant touch, it is the fool who wields the camera, the character who is at once the outsider and the inner most core of the play. Playing with the artifice behind our identification and yet maintaining the horrific fascination induced by such identification is perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the production.

This achievement owes no small measure to the cast. There were some absolutely stand out performances due to a masterful naturalism across the board. There was no lazy characterization by way of grandiose proclamation and hammy melodrama. Rather a nuance and sensitivity in the delivery made for some really captivating moments. In particular, James Hyde’s rendition of a ridiculous yet commanding, childish yet perverted, despicable and humorous Lear was very convincing. His counterpart, the fool, was so well played that under Alex Wicken’s interpretation, one wishes Shakespeare had written him more lines. The sisters were as sinister and generally unpleasant as one would expect. Unexpectedly they were played with a flagrant sexuality, which while intriguing still remains unclear to me. In a torture scene, one of the sisters practically orgasms over strapping the poor Gloucester to a chair and then proceeds to menacingly gyrate over him. It was an excruciatingly visceral scene, yet I’m not sure if it was in spite or because of this odd sexualisation.

The elements of a great production were all certainly in abundance and in the end it managed to be more than the sum of these parts. But only just. Hyde directed this as if he were directing a film. The music (original and brilliant) was used like in a film, the use of shadow and light was very film noir and indeed use of the live filming almost made a film of it. On stage, this cinematic aesthetic sometimes sat too heavily particular at the start. In the end I think as an audience we bought it, but purists beware.

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