Theatre Review: King Lear (Old Vic)

When the news came that Glenda Jackson would be returning to the London stage after an absence of 25 years to play King Lear in a new production directed by Deborah Warner, my first reaction (like most people's) was “Wow”! That response was followed quite swiftly by another thought: “I wish Pauline Kael was around to write about this!”

Sometimes positive but generally not, Kael’s appraisals of Jackson’s distinctively brittle screen performances have given me as much pleasure as her writing on any actress. Full of acclaim for Jackson’s TV work in Elizabeth R, Kael came to find Jackson’s “clenched, hard” film performances much more problematic, and expressed her displeasure in some memorably cutting remarks.

“Miscast, Jackson can scratch on one’s nerves; she can even seem to be scratching on her own nerves,” Kael wrote in her (actually favourable) review of The Return of the Soldier (1983). For Kael, Jackson - “spiky-thin,” with “slitted eyes showing malice” - was “the least lyrical major actress of her day,” her performances “familiarly grating.”

“[Jackson has] been in movies only since 1967,” Kael complained in her piece on Michael Apted’s Triple Echo (1972), “it’s too soon for us to know her every trick, yet she’s as easy to imitate as Bette Davis.” For Kael, Jackson was “a coiled-tight actress who articulates each shade of emotion with such exactness that she has no fluidity and no ease. She carries no-nonsense precision to the point of brutality; she doesn’t just speak her lines – she flicks them out disgustedly.” Kael diagnosed an “unnecessary tension in [Jackson’s] voice and body,” and seemed to put her finger on the issue when she observed: “it could be that she’s so determined not to be smiley-sweet that she looks daggers.”

 

The qualities of androgyny and abrasiveness that irked Kael about Jackson on screen are part of what make the actress a formidably great stage Lear. From the moment she appears - still “spiky-thin” and defiantly “no-nonsense” - Jackson commands the stage with an apparent effortlessness that’s all the more staggering following her long absence from theatre. If the performance takes a little while to really warm up that may be due to some of the production’s more questionable decisions (after all, a cardie and slacks ensemble doesn’t do a whole lot to suggest regality).

But by the time Jackson’s Lear is spewing curses or, later, fiercely berating himself for his neglect of his kingdom, the actress’s control and mastery are quite breathtaking. Jackson does what any great Shakespearean does: she makes us hear familiar speeches totally afresh. The descent into madness is charted with rasping poignancy but without special pleading. Awakening, shocked, to find herself reunited with Cordelia  (Morfydd Clark), the lightness of touch that Jackson gives to lines like “I am a very foolish fond old man” is superbly judged. In not begging for pathos, the actress achieves true pathos. (And, even, though Kael might doubt it, true lyricism.)

 

  King Lear (Credit: Alastair Muir)

The rest of the production is more mixed. I’m a huge fan of Deborah Warner’s productions generally (even her much-derided School for Scandal made my Top 10 of 2011), which have a messy, uncontrolled atmosphere that can be very exciting. Here, though, some of Warner's ideas feel shopworn. This isn’t the first time that Warner has directed Lear (her 1990 NT production with Brian Cox in the title role was widely praised) and maybe she takes too much for granted: the bits of Brechtian business (the spare, white box set; the rehearsal room ambience of the opening; the casual, contemporary costumes; captions announcing Act and Scene, and so on) don’t add up to much.

Yet the affected staging is fitfully powerful: the storm scene, in particular, is simply great, with Jackson and Rhys Ifans’s Fool making their way towards us across billows of black plastic sheets, while a wind effect ensures that we too feel the chill. And I admire Warner for not doing the obvious, such as setting the play in some overt post-Brexit Britain facsimile that would have probably got a lot of people very excited.

  King Lear (Credit: Alastair Muir

The performances surrounding Jackson are fitful, too. Both Celia Imrie, as a matronly Goneril, and Jane Horrocks, as a whorish Regan, feel miscast. Imrie’s indignant line readings sometimes suggest Miss Babs at her most self-righteous, and when she reaches for a pair of marigold gloves to clean up some sick in a late scene, an Acorn Antiques homage actually seems intended. Yet the ferocity Imrie gives to her reading of Goneril’s last line almost redeems the whole performance. Teetering on spiky heels, Horrocks overdoes it quite a bit throughout. Yet, cackling as she clings to Cornwall (Danny Webb), something memorable is achieved: an archetype of coupledom at its most grotesque.

Karl Johnson is a solid, if not exceptional, Gloucester and the always-interesting Warner-fave Harry Melling succeeds in showing Edgar finding himself within Poor Tom’s disinhibition, while Simon Manyonda’s strong Edmund limbers up for malice with press-ups and a skipping rope. (Any production that doesn’t cut Edmund’s final attempted moment of repentance - as this one doesn’t - also wins points from me.)

As with Hamlet, the greatness and depth of King Lear is such that no single production can really encompass it, and, while Jackson’s greatness in the role seems to have been acclaimed by all, Warner’s staging has proved as divisive as expected.  It's an erratic Lear, to be sure. Yet, writing about this by turns annoying and exhilarating, obtuse and illuminating production a few weeks after seeing it makes me feel very eager to see it again.

King Lear is booking at the Old Vic until 3 December.

Theatre Review: "Why Greeks Matter" Discussion + Oresteia (Almeida)

With Ben Whishaw heading up the Bakkhai from July, Kate Fleetwood tackling Medea in the autumn and Robert Icke’s production of the Oresteia now under way, the “Almeida Greeks” season is one of the most highly anticipated theatrical events of the year. “For theatre, to begin at the beginning is to begin with the Greeks,” notes Artistic Director Rupert Goold, and the exciting season is also being supplemented by a series of context-providing talks and Q&As. The first of these, held last Monday before the performance, found Goold, Deborah Warner and Ivo van Hove sharing their thoughts on “Why Greeks Matter”. With Goold serving as interlocutor, the directors talked insightfully, wittily and sometimes even movingly about their experiences of directing Greek tragedy over the years. (The discussion can be viewed at the Almeida website.) 

Deborah Warner

All agreed that these plays pose unique challenges for practitioners, actors and audiences, mostly because, as van Hove noted, they’re built around very specific “conventions that have to be approached in a new way.” Frank about her dissatisfaction with some English approaches to the plays, Warner reminisced about her first foray into the field with her influential production of Electra in 1988. The director recalled the “frightening” experience of not making any progress after three weeks of rehearsal (a soon-to-resign Orestes with a drug problem didn’t help, apparently) before ordering an impromptu run-through that – thanks primarily to Fiona Shaw’s dynamic brilliance – showed her that the play could indeed “release pure emotion” as she intended.  

Warner was particularly interesting when discussing the limitations of a text-based approach to Greek tragedy, emphasising that the words can be a mere blueprint or membrane in this case: “With most plays you think you can go to the words on the page and something will happen. But you can speak a Greek play and nothing may happen.”

Ivo van Hove

Both directors talked about the importance of specific collaboration with actors - Warner with Shaw, of course, and van Hove with Juliette Binoche on their recent Antigone - with van Hove stressing the importance of researching the characters’ context and back-story: his first direction to Binoche when preparing Antigone was to go away and read Oedipus at Colonus. Van Hove discussed his strategies for involving the Chorus in Antigone while  Warner warned directors to be wary of the “Choral Revolt” – which happens  when cast members realise that they’re not playing one of the main roles. Hilariously, she recalled how the Chorus for her Medea came to her and announced that they couldn’t be in the play, after all, because they didn’t approve of child murder. (Warner: “I’m not sure that I do, either…”)

Especially memorable (and moving) were the directors’ remarks about the contemporary resonances, or political parallels, of the plays. Warner recalled how a performance of Electra in Co. Derry in 1992 affected the audience to the extent that they didn’t applaud but instead demanded a discussion with the cast afterwards. Suggesting that his approach has become more politicised over the years, van Hove, meanwhile, talked with palpable emotion about the impact of the shooting down of Malasia Airlines Flight MH17 last July on his staging of Antigone. Warner, however, was adamant that such parallels shouldn’t be forced or imposed on the plays but rather emerge organically from specific contexts. Ultimately, the plays are family stories, she said, and, as such, “they go to the core. To something essential. They define the profound experience that theatre can be.”    

Jessica Brown Findlay  and Angus Wright in Oresteia (Almeida Theatre) 

The idea of “approaching conventions in a new way” is unsurprisingly central to Icke’s take on the Oresteia: sometimes  scintillatingly, sometimes less successfully so. Icke’s production of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns last year was one of the great polarising productions of recent times and his take on Aeschylus, on which he serves as both adaptor and director, could prove just as divisive. Running at a lengthy 3 hours 45 minutes, Icke’s production approaches the trilogy with a good deal of irreverence, replacing the Chorus with a "doctor" figure (Lorna Brown) who’s interviewing Orestes (Luke Thompson), for example. Hildegard Bechtler’s fine design is filled with meandering, ghostly presences as the evening progresses, as Icke, a shrewd and often daring manipulator of pace, tone and mood, languorously stretches out some scenes, allowing particular flourishes to really resonate.

Some of the production’s innovations (mics and screens, the employment of an iconic pop song) aren’t really innovations at all. Rather, they’re borrowed wholesale from the precedents set by the likes of van Hove and Warner. But while there’s perhaps too much recourse to elements that have essentially become the "lingua franca" of contemporary takes on classical tragedy, the actors come through: Angus Wright with a memorably conflicted Agamemnon, Jessica Brown Findlay with an intense Electra, and especially Lia Williams as a stunning Klytemnestra, galvanising when screaming “I’ll wake the house!” as her husband confronts her with his murderous plans for their daughter or raising a shriek of pleasure at her own violent acts. The production, with its share of excitements and irritations, makes for a memorably bold and potent start to this season.