For This Take on the Bard, It's All About Family Matters

king lear
Soulpepper Theatre
the national post

If King Lear is primarily a domestic play about a father and his daughters -- and at ground level it is -- the new Soulpepper production handles the matter exceptionally well. If it's about other, larger things as well, the production falls seriously short.

William Webster's Lear makes his first appearance walking down the dead centre of the stage, with the air of a man who has made a decision he secretly fears may be wrong and is therefore all the more determined to prove right. Arrogant and irrational he may be, but he is no hypocrite and he is not consciously manipulative. He really is in desperate need of his daughters' love and feels perfectly entitled to ask them for public demonstrations of it. The deal he offers them -- land for love -- does not appear to be pre- arranged. Nancy Palk's Goneril seems genuinely surprised to be put on the spot and, fulsome though her protestations are, she might even mean them. Brenda Robins' Regan is more calculating, and this contrast between the two villainesses is kept up until the end; one burns hot, the other cold, until their mutual destruction over their passion for Edmund.

In this context, the refusal of Cordelia, the favourite child, to flatter her father, logically destroys his world. His banishment of her is paternal petulance raised to a higher power; the highest, since he's the king. The mood intensifies once he's resigned his rule. The jabs of regret over Cordelia, which set in early, alternate with his attempts to reconcile his pride and his new dependence on her siblings; their attempts are too, since much of her father's behaviour is intolerable, and Goneril at least seems to have a case. The most original stroke in Joseph Ziegler's production is to have Lear embrace her just before cursing her with sterility; for a moment she thinks he intends a reconciliation. Webster seems to have thought through every word he utters, and everything in these scenes comes through fresh, unforced and surprising, right down to the desperation of "reason not the need," which opens up a wider perspective even while setting the seal on the play as a study of domestic in- fighting. This is how families actually behave: striking ludicrous bargains, clinging to shreds of dignity, indignantly claiming the moral high ground. The beatific obverse of these scenes is the reconciliation with Cordelia (Patricia Fagan, touching here though unduly priggish elsewhere) in which Webster is simple, direct and moving as he is again when he dies, convinced that his slaughtered girl is breathing. He seizes on all the wandering details that Shakespeare so generously provides.

This, however, leaves out the whole stupendous middle of the play. Webster deals just as powerfully and intelligently with Lear's madness, and with the revolutionary insights to which it leads him, but they remain just things he says. Ziegler's production is sharp on text, fuzzy on context. An intermission stops the play in its tracks just when it's gathering steam. The ensuing storm doesn't exactly drown the actors, but it drowns the interplay between them. Diego Matamoros' Fool, after beginning superbly as the merciless voice of Lear's conscience, almost literally fades out. David Storch does a resourceful job on Edgar's succession of crazy voices, but cannot link them to what's going on around him or to the scholar- hero, whom he plays rather well. The mock-trial scene in the hovel goes for astonishingly little. Some of the staging is ungainly, with Soulpepper's newly unveiled thrust stage turning out to have poor sightlines (Edmund's death, flat on the deck, is practically invisible) and even poorer acoustics (at least, I'm not used to hearing these actors mumble).

Christina Poddubiuk's set, two adjacent arches giving on to a brick wall, is usefully stark; her costumes are a very mixed bag, traversing periods in what is presumably in a quest for universality. Kent's disguise, a mixture of Che Guevara and Desert Rat, is appealing, and Lear returning from hunting as a 19th-century English squire is excellent. But to put the Duke of Albany, a vital but underwritten moral force who needs all the dignity he can get, into a skirt (because Albany means Scotland) is a drag not only on the actor but on all the scenes in which he appears -- notably the last one, which only happens to be the greatest scene ever written.

The faults can't be put down to inexperience: Soulpepper hasn't done much Shakespeare, but its individual members certainly have. This is a company with talent pouring out of its ears: It has a magnetic Edmund in Jonathan Goad, even if nothing he does later quite matches up to the contemptuous silence of his first appearance; it has a deliciously smug Oswald from Kevin Bundy that's as good as any I've seen; it can spare Oliver Dennis for a glorified walk-on; and it can even bring life to the minute uncredited role of the Captain who hangs Cordelia. Webster is one of our best actors though, unlike most who get to play Lear, he isn't famous.

This has its disadvantages, since a star tends to account automatically for the reverence in which the other characters hold the king. But it does mean that we get to see Lear as a man rather than a role, and that takes us a long way. But all these constituent parts fail to add up. I don't ask that the production have a Concept; concepts are things beloved of critics that often look better in program-notes and interviews than on the stage. I would like it to have an identity.