This Is a Lear Who's Read Lear
Riffs on Shakespeare: Hysterica
Necessary Angel Theatre Company
The National Post
When Shakespeare's King Lear is about to topple into madness, he cries out "hysterica passio," which means just what it appears to mean -- hysterical passion. By invoking a condition he is hoping, vainly, to ward it off. The show Hysterica, evolved by Richard Rose and his Necessary Angel company, is not so much an adaptation of Lear as a fantasia, a series of riffs on Shakespearean themes.
But in its choice of title it has sold itself somewhat short. It has passion, of a cerebral kind, as well as hysteria. The hysteria is in the characters' behaviour. The passion is in the presentation, which is pitched at a chilly level of perfectionism. There are things to admire, especially at the beginning, but there turns out to be little to enjoy and nothing to love.
The focus is constricted, and not just by comparison with the immense original. The Baby-Boom generation, confident as ever that its concerns are those of the entire world, has recently decided that King Lear is really about the problem of what to do with your old folks. Actually, Shakespeare's play gives its characters and its audiences other things to worry about -- like the fate of a kingdom or the nature of morality. In this gender-bent four-person version, however, everything comes down to mother, sons and daughter-in-law.
Mother is Leda, an industrial matriarch who has a company rather than a country to give away at her retirement and who awards her grown boys 45% of it apiece, keeping the last controlling 10th for herself. (This is a cannier move than that of her role model, who insisted on retaining 100 attendant knights but left himself with no bargaining power. Leda is a Lear who has read King Lear.)
Of the two sons one, Edward, is a transparently cynical go- getter, while the other, Iain, is a dreamy idealist, a sculptor who likes nothing better than to shut himself up in his studio.
Leda believes she can play one against the other. She doesn't realize that apparent gentleness can be every bit as destructive as honest malice. She also reckons without Iain's wife, Gwen, whom she despises, excludes and fatally underrates. Gwen is a narcissistic schemer whose resentment matches her mother-in-law's dislike.
This set-up plays some ingenious games with its source -- games of combination and compression. Looked at in one light, Edward and Iain are the ugly sisters, Goneril and Regan, between whom Lear divided his power. Taken another way, Edward is Goneril and Regan combined, while Iain is Cordelia, the honourable sibling who got left out.
Then again, the marriage of Edward and Gwen is a reversal of that between Goneril and her well-meaning husband, Albany, who stood around vainly protesting while his wife made her father's life hell.
Shakespeare also wrote a subplot in which another father dealt equally misguidedly with his two sons, good Edgar and bad Edmund. The resemblance between these two and Leda's offspring is accentuated when Gwen starts dallying with Edward just as both Goneril and Regan did with Edmund. Act II even gets going with a modified storm scene.
Leda is a Greek immigrant with as much of Medea as of Lear in her, and Maria Vacratsis plays her very powerfully, in all her pain and all her unreasonableness. For cries to the gods she substitutes memories of how things were done in the old country.
Like Lear, she billets herself on each of her children in turn and calls down curses on their heads when she fails to get the treatment she thinks she deserves. Being more of a realist than Lear, she presumably expected less, but she is just as bitter when they turn her out. Or, in this play's terms, put her into a home. This part of the show feels, as you would expect, recognizably uncomfortable, and the Shakespearean echoes do give it an added resonance. When Leda threatens Gwen with ungrateful children or none at all, her words hardly match up to Lear's "Hear, Nature, hear," but they don't fall embarrassingly short either.
The play has been improvised (in rehearsal, not performance) by the actors themselves, under Rose's editorial eye. This means that everybody gets plentiful time to agonize. They do so with great conversational fluency and to increasingly hermetic effect.
The fate of the characters matters little, and that of the business even less; however much they talk about it, it never seems to exist. The situation evaporates for lack of effective action -- all text, no context.
Shakespeare's play is often supposed to have much plot; this distillation unwittingly shows that opinion to be wrong. Hysterica, like Lear, is a play about sight and blindness, literal and metaphorical. Scenes in Iain's studio are played in total darkness - - tough on those members of the audience who are trying to stay awake.
One makes the effort partly out of respect for the actors -- for Maggie Huculak, whose Gwen is a metallic control freak even able to dominate her (unseen) psychiatrist, and for Duncan Ollerenshaw, whose Iain is another of his compelling studies in indecision.
Hamish McEwan's Edward doesn't have quite the authority of the others (he came late into the game) but he does well as a neurotically glamorous villain who turns out to be longer on neurosis than on glamour, or indeed on villainy. Modern times. The production, austerely manoeuvred on a snow-white set (designed by Teresa Przybylski), looks good but in a bullying kind of way.