King Lear proves to be ... well, a natural for al fresco treatment at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival
King Lear al fresco impresses
King Lear Freewill Shakespeare Festival Directed by: Jim Guedo Starring: John Wright, John Kirkpatrick, Dave Horak, Julien Arnold, Nathan Cuckow, Sheldon Elter, Kristi Hansen, Belinda Cornish, Annette Loiselle Where: Heritage Amphitheatre, Hawrelak Park Running: through July 20, even dates Tickets: Tix on the Square (780420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca) Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, its rollicking companion piece in the Freewill Shakespeare Festival’s 25th-anniversary season, King Lear is a wonderful play to take outside, where all its paradoxes about nature and human nature can flourish on location.
Edmonton has its own tangible kind of scholarship to offer the world of Shakespearean metaphors, as our festival has always known. If there ever was any doubt that Lear is turned out into a raging storm that is his own madness, and of his own making, nature dismissed all that Friday night as the serene and cloudless summer sky gradually turned gold, then mauve, then pewter, and not a leaf stirred anywhere in the park.
With guest director Jim Guedo’s exciting, streamlined production of Lear, the sun gradually sets on a king whose own folly and ungovernable ego crack the bonds of nature, and unleash chaos, both in himself and in the world around him.
In the brilliant and sinister opening party scene, with its thudding Dave Clarke score and hints of a mafioso regime, we meet John Wright’s Lear, vigorous, vain, demanding, not without charm. Dangerously, he’s taken it into his head to have the trappings, without the responsibilities, of kingship. And what he demands from his daughters, under the imperial gaze of his own outsized portrait, is a performance piece.
In this theatre of adulation, two oblige; Goneril (Annette Loiselle) and Regan (Belinda Cornish) even do the sycophant’s knee-bend. One, the loyal Cordelia (Kristi Hansen), will not join the cast of the charade. Lear’s massive error in judgment will explode in his face — everything happens very fast in this fleet, cunningly abbreviated version. And it will reduce him to helpless fury, and the world to a battleground, before he understands — too late.
Wright’s affecting and vulnerable performance takes Lear precipitously from a commanding middle age into oldage fragility. It also reduces his audibility, alas. But Guedo’s is an active sort of production (the characters stay close at hand when they’re not onstage), and you do grasp the arc of Wright’s heartbreaking declension, from the storm into a new vision of mortality, compassion, human consequence.
Besides, in his tumultuous journey to clarity, Lear is surrounded by vivid supporting performances, John Kirkpatrick’s fine, plain-spoken Kent for one, genuinely dismayed by the baleful sight of majesty stooping to folly. I was much taken with Dave Horak’s performance as the Fool, whom he plays as an acidic, fearless, capering comic whose worst suspicions are always being confirmed. His relationship with Lear bristles with the sense of his dual existence as Lear’s conscience and critic. As Edgar, the dispossessed son of a morally blind father, and Edgar’s mad alter-ego Poor Tom, Nathan Cuckow adds another intelligent, inventive performance to his catalogue. And Sheldon Elter’s Edmund is scary because he’s believable, briskly opportunistic, able to enjoy his own powers of manipulation; you could almost call him well-adjusted that way.
Goneril and Regan are as sleek and hard as Cory Sincennes’s design, a silvery fortification with hidden sliding doors, that comes into its own with this second festival production. The opening scenes make clear that however terrifying their excesses later, they are their father’s daughters, charm that explodes into tantrums when crossed. The two daughters don’t stumble into gross evil; it’s there all along under their comely surfaces, and requires only the prospect for power (and sex) to be activated.
Both performances, calibrated for differences, are excellent. Loiselle, gimlet-eyed and crisp, is ice; Cornish has a carnivorous smile, as she combusts. The scene in which Regan not only calmly signs off on the blinding of Gloucester but ups the ante, and gets aroused by the results, is audaciously psychotic. “Monsters of the deep,” indeed.
It’s usually a bit disconcerting to see Cordelia in charge of the French army later in Lear. But from the start Kristi Hansen is an unusually sparky, substantial, defiant Cordelia, who shows up at the Scene 1 cocktail party in combat boots. It’s an ungoverned world, but it doesn’t have to be.
In the end, vast grandeur isn’t the sweep here, or its counterpart in nihilism. Wisely, Guedo’s al fresco production of this huge play doesn’t opt for a restraining “concept” or major bombast. And the political resonances are spare, not least because manpower is limited. One of the production’s signature scenes, beautifully played by Wright and the excellent Julien Arnold as Gloucester, Lear’s counterpart in erratic paternal folly, is two old guys sitting together downstage, discussing the absurdity of the world, and their part in it.
One is mad, the other blind. You can’t quite tell whether they’re laughing or crying. It’s probably both.