William Webster Can't Escape King Lear; Plays Him Straight, and With a Twist
king lear
Riffs on Shakespeare: Ever thus, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The Famous Victories of Henry V, the True Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters.
soulpepper theatre, Moonhorse Dance theatre, Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men
the national post
Evenings when he isn't playing King Lear at the Young Centre, William Webster is playing King Lear at the Young Centre. That is, on his nights off from playing the title role in Shakespeare's tragedy for Soulpepper, Webster is appearing in the same space, and on the same thrust stage, as the one echt actor in a fantasia on Shakespearean themes presented by Moonhorse Dance Theatre and titled Ever Thus. In this he figures as the paterfamilias of a theatrical troupe who, arriving at the site of their next gig, elect, rather than checking into their digs like normal folks, to run through spoken and choreographed selections from their repertoire. Webster himself begins, with great and endearing authority, by casting a weary here-we-go-again eye and voice over the empty space. Another op'nin', another show (Porter, C.). 'Twas ever thus (Shakespeare, W.).
Later, he gets to do a few lines of Lear, including the start of the storm scene, spoken over eerie music rather than the usual thunderclaps. This is rather effective, and starts you wondering whether in an actual production it might not work better than the customary battle between actors and sound effects. He also appears, more or less in his own person, as part of a bafflingly interpolated Q&A sequence, talking about the Lears he has appeared in, at Stratford and elsewhere, before getting the chance to play the king himself. The gag here is that he and his fellows keep getting interrupted, and have to move to another part of the stage. I felt cheated; I wanted to hear Bill Webster's anecdotes.
Ever Thus is a refined but also weakened version of a longer piece tried out last year at the late lamented Theatre Centre and titled The Castle. That was set, as far as I could make out, in a hotel doubling as a haunted pile. It was obscure, but it had a certain brooding quality, and it included more substantial slabs of text: Webster got to throw a quizzical new light on Lear's awakening.
It seems unreasonable to expect dancers to handle blank verse, but in The Castle some of them got away with it. Standards have slipped in this regard. Of the four movers and shakers only Claudia Moore (the piece's director and choreographer) makes much of her lines, and even she is far less compelling a dramatic presence than previously. She plays, mainly, Lady Macbeth; or rather the spirit of the play the Lady inhabits. Significant lines are intoned, irrespective of character. Sometimes the performers swap significant words that recur from play to play; it's like flipping through a Shakespearean Concordance. The actual dancing tells us, among other things, that Hamlet was a neurotic youth who had issues with women, but that hardly counts as a revelation.
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A more stimulating sidelight on Shakespeare in general and King Lear in particular can be had from Shakespeare and the Queen's Men, a joint theatrical-academic project on view at the Glen Morris Theatre, on the University of Toronto campus, and subsequently beyond. The Queen's Men were an Elizabethan theatre company who flourished briefly in the 1580s, in London and on tour, before disappearing from the record in mysterious, and conceivably sinister, circumstances. This was just before Shakespeare began his career, and the present enterprise is staging and discussing three plays that definitely or conceivably influenced him. Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, about rival magicians, may have inspired The Tempest, though personally I doubt it. The other two are uncontested sources: The Famous Victories of Henry V, which is like a whistle-stop tour through most of the English histories (not just the obvious one), and The True Chronicle History of King Leir and His Three Daughters.
This play is Shakespeare's Lear without the sub-plot and with a happy ending. In the latter respect it resembles the post- Shakespearean adaptations that found the death of Cordelia and the attendant darkness an intolerable affront to natural justice. No less a figure than Tolstoy agreed; an incorrigible moralist, he thought the old King Leir a perfectly decent play, crammed with religious feeling, that Shakespeare went and ruined. Indeed, the changes Shakespeare made, after an opening that he followed closely, are breathtaking; Lear's madness, the storm, the Fool, all the social and sexual insights are his invention. He must have been driven. Though I also like to think that, when Burbage or whoever brought the old play to his door and demanded an update, his first response was, "Well, that spelling has to go for a start."
The old play, though you can't help watching it without making comparisons, stands up nicely. Certainly it does in Peter Cockett's production, which adheres as closely as possible to the Queen's Men's own conventions, known or surmised: a platform stage, generic costumes, men in the female roles and, except in the crucial matters of music and fights, minimal rehearsal. The actors, like their forebears, learned their words from individual "parts," containing only their own lines and the immediate cues. So, as one of them told me, when they came together they really had to concentrate. It's tempting to wonder if a comparable freshness might be achieved by applying the same methods to actual Shakespeare productions, but that is probably to yearn for an innocence past recall.
The present show unfolds like a grown-up pantomime, with strong overtones of Cinderella and her Ugly Sisters: Gonorill and Ragan, as they're called here, are explicitly jealous of young Cordella's beauty, while her courtship by the King of France becomes a full- blown romance. At the end the two of them invade Britain, jointly and successfully; the couple that stays together, slays together. The siblings (Matthew Krist, Derek Genova, Julian DeZotti) are among the best I've seen in any version.
The play's main weakness is that its narrative outruns its characters, so that it seems long: Defeat the baddies already, one wants to call out; we know it's coming. Leir himself hardly undergoes much development. He's deceived, then quickly undeceived, then he suffers and becomes saintly on account of it. But he doesn't so much learn charity as put it on, like a new suit of clothes. Don Allison plays him with authority, and later with a twinkling benevolence that put me in mind of Stephen Fry.
The most accomplished performer, though also the one whose cleverness is aptest to overstep convention, is Alon Nashman, who doubles a randy French courtier (the play, again like pantomime, is never afraid to snatch at the nearest joke) with an eager English assassin, sent to dispatch the king and his even holier henchman Perillus, a figure whom Shakespeare seems to have sliced three ways: into Kent, Gloucester and the Fool.