King Lear
Stratford Festival
The National Post

Colm Feore's King Lear is a fine portrait of a father, a less powerful one of a king. This matters least where you might expect it to matter most, in the opening scene. This Lear, planning for his retirement, lacks neither vigour nor lucidity; relinquishing his power seems not just ill-advised but unnecessary. But he takes his position for granted; he doesn't use it to call down vocal thunders when his authority is challenged, even when, as in his confrontation with Kent, the text might seem to demand it.

The pride he asserts is paternal, and its thwarting is tremendous. There's no sign, in Antoni Cimolino's Elizabethan costumed production, of his daughters' loyalty contest being a formal public ceremony, agreed in advance; it could well be a spur-of-the-moment idea, conceived by Lear, in his own mind the most loving and indulgent of parents, in the absolute certainty that they would play along. Obviously nothing in his personal or professional experience has prepared him to hear the word "nothing" - Cordelia's way of saying "no." It releases in him a kind of titanic meanness; the coronet that he divides between her sisters' husbands is, in this rendering, torn from her head. At moments like this, he's every unreasonable old man, taking it out on his family. The bitterness and the self-righteousness grow in tandem.

The wound festers, breaking out in livid colours when Lear calls down the curse of sterility on Goneril, which Feore, while relishing every hideous detail, makes as much a physical as a verbal attack; it's the definition of in-your-face, and Maev Beaty, who has been taking to the limit the revisionist view of Goneril as more trespassed-against than trespassing, is devastatingly devastated by it. It's a hard act for even its actor to follow, and the next paternal encounter, with Lear bouncing between Goneril and Regan according to which will allow him the more followers, loses some of its bitter self-humiliating comedy. (It's like the opening competition redrawn: "Which of you shall we say doth hate us least?") Still, he exits into the storm on a promising note of desperate outrage.

And here the production makes the same cardinal error as the Soulpepper version of a few years back. It inserts an intermission, stopping the play, the character, and the performance dead just when they are gathering steam. No actor should be asked to jump into "blow winds, and crack your cheeks" straight from the dressing room, and in fact the storm effects here, aural and visual, serve mainly to drown Feore out. He doesn't come through cleanly again until the mock-trial scene, done with a poignant sense of the tragic-grotesque by everyone concerned. But Lear's deepest agonies have somehow passed us by.

In fact, the real depths are plumbed here not by Lear but by his parallel deluded sufferer Gloucester. Scott Wentworth, playing the role for the second time, strikes a new note at the beginning, describing the "good sport" at the begetting of his bastard son with unusual relish. Much later, after the appalling physical and mental cruelty of his blinding, he sounds the genuine tragic note of a man confronting the abyss. He's guided and accompanied, on his journey there and back, by Evan Buliung's Edgar, another second-timer making an unexpected start; at least I don't recall any other Edgar making his first appearance clutching both a drink and a serving wench. It may not be the most original image of dissipation, but a sozzled Edgar makes a more plausible dupe than most. Sobered up and in madman disguise, he matures as both character and commentator; confronted by his father and by the genuinely mad king, he registers two distinct varieties of the shock of recognition.

When Feore, flower-bedecked and wandering, joins this father-son duo at Dover, he reaches his own peak. This is the greatest scene in the greatest play ever written, and its most startling moment may well be Lear's greeting of Gloucester ("I know thee well enough") at a time when he seemed past recognizing anybody. The subsequent reconciliation with Cordelia is weakened by having Lear, in a giveaway white robe, too gentle from the start and Sara Farb's Cordelia, perhaps trying to avoid goody-goodiness, too abrasive; he should surely learn gentleness from her. His two last scenes with her, the second being with her hanged body, are expectedly moving, or perhaps unexpectedly; Feore has not previously been an actor noted for pathos, but he does seem here to have lost himself in the character.

It's in these later scenes, though, that the earlier lack of regality comes back to bite the play; we don't feel why his followers should remain so loyal to him, or why the plight so pitiful in the meanest wretch should be so undemocratically worse for a king. He hasn't had far enough to fall.

He has a superb Fool in Stephen Ouimette, whose every line tells and who is as much missed in the later parts of the play as any Fool can ever have been; missed too by Lear, whose "my poor fool is hanged" seems in Feore's touching rendition to denote a genuine confusion between the jester and Cordelia. My theory is that, in Shakespeare's company, they would have been doubled; they never appear together.

Ouimette's clown excels at making Lear his straight man, though on the first night this Lear got a fair number of laughs on his own account; King Lear should surely provoke some uneasy laughter, but the response to lines like "has thou given all to thy daughters?" suggested an audience rather too happy to be let off the hook.

Beaty's Goneril gets more authoritatively demonic as her moral standards crumble, while Liisa Repo-Martell's Regan, weaker-willed and hence more vicious, plainly never had such standards to begin with. Both these actresses are going to be assets to Stratford, but they haven't yet got the full measure of the theatre; to put it another way, they aren't always audible.

The best of Cimolino's production is its attentiveness to dialogue subtleties and character interaction. Its broader ambitions are unevenly realized. On matters of old age and dependence, it strikes unforcedly home.

Having a silent chorus of beggars thread their way through the play seems more like gratuitous nudging. One of them gives Edgar the idea for his Poor Tom disguise, and at the very end he's back again, if not to reclaim his identity then to remind us, and the lucky young aristocrat left in charge, of its existence. But the play isn't, in the last resort and the final curtain, actually about either of them. Lear's mid-storm salute to "the poor naked wretches" whom he had neglected in his days of pomp certainly opens up new vistas for him, and so it should for us. But they can't be new if we've already seen them.