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| Frank Langella explains to the balcony how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to be Lear (photo: Richard Termine) |
A month or two ago, I saw my 150th
production of Shakespeare. With so many evenings drawn from the same set of
plays, I tend to value the innovative approach and the unique staging over
quality executed conventionally. A case in point: BAM’s production of King Lear, acclaimed by most critics, left
me cool. The treatment felt old-fashioned—it favored the melodrama and external
emotion over complexity, nuance, and an expression of consciousness through language.
But the show wasn’t a wash-out: quality executed conventionally. Plus, I saw facets
of the play I’d never noticed before.
Mostly, this Lear (from the Chichester Festival Theater) feels familiar, unrisky,
a little bit rote. Angus Jackson locates it in a generic medieval England: lots
of leather and metal on the costumes, a stage dressed with wooden planks and
stone, and set with flaming braziers and a gothic throne. The cast declaims its
verse straight to the balcony. In the lead role, Frank Langella plays each
scene well—how could he not, with that rich baritone built for the sonorities
of Shakepearean verse? But he’s not a coherent psyche, he’s a flipbook of mental
states. The show may provide that old Aristotelian “pity and terror”, but it’s
apprehended from afar. Lacking psychological depth or a tragic sensibility, covered
too deeply by a melodramatic artifice out of the 19C, this Lear seems more like a historical pageant than a drama.
Again, that pageantry is executed quite
well. And to me, it also reveals an archetypal layer to Lear, one that prefigures Shakespeare’s tragicomic romances. As Lear
damns each of his daughters in turn (with Langella shaking his fist at the
rafters), the repetition takes on a ritual meaning. Edmund and Edgar, now flattened
into Bad Son and Good Son, revert to their antecedent roles as players in a morality:
one tempting his father to evil and the other working to salvage that soul. Note
also the strangely stiff formality to that subplot’s act 5 climax, as the
trumpets sound thrice to summon Edgar for trial-by-combat.
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| Lear cracks as the designer drenches his set with real H20 (photo: Richard Termine) |
While this Lear shows how the play foreshadows the style of the romances, I doubt
that’s its intention. The central image of Jackson’s show is the old standby, Lear
howling at the storm. But it’s rare that an evening’s most memorable moment is
its centerpiece. Long after I’ve forgotten this particular tempest (except
maybe the actual torrent of water onstage), I’ll recall the quiet beat when
Edgar describes the chalk cliffs of Dover to his sightless father. Here, as an
aid to his imagination he blindfolds himself, in mirror to his father’s bandages,
and then recites the speech. The action helps the viewer become a listener, and
enlists the mind’s eye to conjure the vision. I’ll remember it as a perfectly
staged moment of Shakespeare.
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King Lear
Chichester Festival Theater at BAM
director: Angus Jackson
