A homeless Lear to clutch at your heart
KInG Lear enjoys a sacramental status in theatre. Actors — and directors — think of Shakespeare’s tragedy as the summit of their careers.
They come over all serious when speaking of it, which is usually time to hit the snooze button. But the best thing about the Globe’s new production is that it’s refreshingly un-starry.
In the title role, Kevin Mcnally is every inch the team player in a warmly egalitarian production directed by theatre’s high priestess of company acting, nancy Meckler.
She focuses the play on its theme of vagrancy, with the cast clambering on stage at the start as if they were new Age travellers setting up a squat. It’s an idea that chimes nicely with the story of a king forsaking his palace and finding out how the other half lives.
Lear himself is often seen as a capricious curmudgeon, but Mcnally makes him more vulnerable. With stubbly pate and bushy jaw, and wearing a battered safari jacket, he has the look of a man in the early stages of dementia.
He is also prone to bouts of angina and clutching his chest in a performance that brings physical pathos to his mental fragility.
But Mcnally is also vigorously insane when marching off onto the stormblasted heath to spite his two-faced daughters. Add to that a lucid, steady grasp of the language, with a good fierce bark when required, and you have a memorable performance.
There is a strong sense, however, that this Lear is just one point in a disintegrating world. Emily Bruni and Sirine Saba are equally canny and duplicitous as his self- serving daughters, Goneril and Regan, determined to secure their future by all means necessary: lying, killing and bonking their way forward.
As the apple of their eyes, Ralph Davis’s Edmund is more indistinct. In his Dr Martens, tight jeans and Oxfam overcoat, it’s hard to see how he can satisfy these man-eating Medusas. Davis brings intelligence, but it’s a role that’s begging for lashings of libidinous charisma.
Joshua James starts out playing Edmund’s virtuous brother Edgar as a bug- eyed wimp, but reinvents himself impressively as a homeless beggar seeking refuge under a grotty sleeping bag.
The real wild card in proceedings, however, is Burt Caesar as his father, Gloucester. Sporting a red velvet smoking jacket, Caesar is an orotund and histrionic actor sent to us from the 19th century, at one point pacing in sync with the metre of his lines.
Lear’s confidante and Fool, Loren O’Dair, is played as an accordion- carrying harlequin hampered by having to pretend her red nose is a coxcomb — an imposition that’s neither funny nor resonant.
THE FACT she’s played by a woman makes sense, but it’s more significant when the actor is the same as Lear’s good daughter Cordelia (a fey but self possessed Anjana Vasan).
Saskia Reeves has a tougher job as Lear’s most loyal servant, Kent. She does a nice turn as a cheeky cockney, but it’s a part that needs a greater degree of blokishness and physical strength for a fight.
For the storms and battles there is Riverdance drumming and a Kung Fu Panda stick fight.
And Roxanna Vize’s design covers the stage in white tarpaulins, with Lear’s carriage improvised from a supermarket trolley. This evokes today’s urban homeless and connects with those of Shakespeare’s time.
But it’s not a startling observation, and what really emerges is a benign account of the play that’s well grounded without scaling any great heights.