Theatre Review: King Lear (Almeida)

From Ian McKellen to Derek Jacobi, the late Pete Postlethwaite to Tim Pigott-Smith, the last five years haven’t exactly stinted British theatre-goers for high-profile King Lears, a testament both to the enduring power of one of Shakespeare’s most gruelling and gripping tragedies and to the eagerness of veteran actors to get the role under their belts while they’re still physically capable of lugging Cordelia around the stage. Now, pre-empting Simon Russell Beale’s rumoured production with Sam Mendes, it’s the turn of the excellent Jonathan Pryce to venture out onto the heath, in a fine production by Michael Attenborough that makes up in focus, clarity and intimacy what it lacks in apocalyptic vision.

Indeed, Attenborough’s approach to the play is determinedly unfussy. The storm scene is simply staged - smoke and a few sound effects, no water as drenched poor Oliver Ford Davies’s Lear for the Almeida ten years ago - and the overall look is low-key: Tom Scott’s set and costumes could have come directly from a BBC Shakespeare circa 1976. Still, having been somewhat under-whelmed by Nicholas Hytner’s strenuously modern, straining-for-relevance Timon of Athens at the NT just the other day, Attenborough’s gimmick-free take felt extremely refreshing to me. The focus is firmly on character and relationships here, rather than an overriding “concept,” and the production puts some striking spins on the protagonists. A few of these do feel a tad forced: Richard Goulding’s highly engaging Edgar - a character more usually found with his nose in a book, prior to his Poor Tom transformation - is here introduced indulging in a hearty spot of servant-snogging, while the Lear-as-sexual-abuser card gets played for the first time in a while, and to little effect.

Other elements work beautifully, though. Phoebe Fox makes something original and unsentimental of Cordelia, giving the character a combative, steely resolve that melts movingly in the reconciliation scene with Lear; she’s a study of goodness without a hint of sweetness. Kieran Bew - last seen gracing the Almeida stage as the dumbass Kent in Neil LaBute’s Reasons to be Pretty - renders a gorgeously amused and cocksure Edmund (the play’s best role, IMHO!). Bew makes the character’s villainy entirely winning; he gets an audience-rapport going from his opening soliloquy and sustains it up to the character’s final (wonderful!) moment of repentance. Jenny Jules and Zoe Waites offer well-drawn takes on Regan and Goneril, and Ian Gelder’s faithful, stoic Kent and Clive Wood’s moving Gloucester are equally fine.

And Pryce himself delivers a marvellously compelling quicksilver turn. A more agile, robust Lear than many, he puts fascinating twists on the most familiar speeches, subverting sentimentality at every turn, whether by ripping savagely into “Reason not the need!” or undercutting the “great stage of fools” speech with ironic  sermonizing. Everything he does feels fresh, alive, spontaneous. His moments of tender connection with Gelder and Wood win through to genuine emotion, and his connection with Trevor Fox’s Fool - whose riddling speeches come accompanied by magic tricks, and who’s capable of cracking Lear up even when he's at his most enraged or despairing - is beautifully done. Attenborough takes the action at a fair clip, and locates the black comedy in the play’s bleakness without overselling it. The evening has both pace and feeling. Those who like their Lears wilder - or more high-concept - may not be stirred, but this was, for me, a terrific night in the theatre, and by far the strongest production I’ve seen at the Almeida this year.

Running time: 3 hours. Further information at the Almeida website.

Theatre Review: Play House, & Definitely the Bahamas (Orange Tree Theatre)



Lily James in Play House, photo by Robert Day



Directed by its author, the Orange Tree Theatre’s current double-bill pairs an early Martin Crimp play, Definitely the Bahamas, originally produced on BBC radio but staged at the Orange Tree in 1987, with a new work, Play House, that’s been specially commissioned to mark the theatre’s 40th anniversary. A Richmond resident, Crimp’s association with the Orange Tree goes back to his first forays as a dramatist. The theatre staged six of his plays in the 1980s and was therefore instrumental in getting his work seen and noticed. Among the many admirable aspects of the Orange Tree is its loyalty to the playwrights whose work it has put on. And Crimp’s return to the theatre that first produced him has turned the opening of this double-bill into something of an Event.

As dramas focusing upon two couples - one young and energetic, the other ageing and apparently settled - Play House and Definitely the Bahamas chime together quite nicely. Play House presents episodes in the life of Simon (Obi Abili) and Katrina (Lily James) as they set up home together. We witness the pair engaging in domestic duties (fixing a phone; cleaning the grimiest fridge the stage has ever seen) and some odder, more enigmatic escapades as well. Crimp has described the play as being about “the fragility and volatility of a relationship,” and he seems to be getting at the mundaneity and the strangeness of coupledom here - its pleasures and unease - as Katrina gradually reveals a scepticism about “playing house” that rivals that of the little girl in the Tammy Wynette song.

Unfolding in thirteen abrupt and riddling scenes, the drama conceals as much as it discloses. There are striking moments throughout and the scenes are sharply shaped and rhythmed at their best. But an air of wilful obscurity underpins the enterprise, and the piece isn’t especially satisfying dramatically. Rather, it comes out skimpy and sketchy: due to the structure, the characters’ declarations and tirades feel unmotivated and often fail to generate sufficient emotional weight.

This is despite the sterling work of the two performers. Abili and James (a young actress who’s capable of transforming herself utterly; she’s unrecognisable here from Vernon God Little and Othello) bring gusto and great physicality to their performances, especially in an exuberant dancing scene. But, apart from a few scattered insinuations about Katrina’s difficult relationship with her father, you may not feel that you know a great deal more about these characters at the end than you did at the beginning, making Play House a slightly frustrating experience despite its flashes of interest.

Definitely the Bahamas seems to me by far the stronger, more substantial piece of work. The play focuses on an ageing couple, Millicent (Kate Fahy) and Frank (Ian Gelder), as they discuss their beloved son Michael, with their dialogue occasionally interrupted by the appearances of their Dutch student lodger, Marijke (James again, in another excellent turn). What starts out as a comedy of manners and misunderstandings gradually gives way to something far more unsettling, however, for, in Aleks Sierz’s grandiose formulation, this is a play about the ways in which “fascistic attitudes are manifest in everyday life as well as in history.”

Crimp’s production is a tad too self-conscious: the play is staged as the radio drama it originated as, with no props, the actors seated at tables in front of marked-up scripts, and sound equipment visible. It’s hard to see what this conceit contributes beyond a superficial veneer of “baring-the-device” modernism, and it makes the piece feel static. But the conception is transcended, finally, by the strength of the writing and by superbly naturalistic performances. Ambiguities and uncertainties here feel more integrated and meaningful than in Play House, and the play broadens out quite successfully into a critique of an insular world-view that sees violence as perpetrated by those unlike us: the distant, the Other, the foreign.

As the garrulous Millicent, Fahy (last seen on screen as the matriarch in Joanna Hogg’s great Archipelago) delivers a gem of a performance: the character’s Freudian slips and inanities (“Who do we know in a call-box, Frank?”) are deliciously delivered. Gelder partners her wonderfully, their performances achieving a marvellous equilibrium. And James does brilliantly in a long late monologue which offers a new perspective on events, suggesting that, contrary to Millicent’s belief, threat and danger aren’t just something associated with foreign climes, but may in fact be manifest a good deal closer to home.

The double-bill runs until 21^st April. Further information at the Orange Tree website.