No fooling in this novel, worthwhile take on Lear
The older one gets, the more Shakespeare’s King Lear rings true. An elderly king hoping to alleviate rivalry between this three daughters after his death, divides up the spoils while he’s alive. Big mistake.
Egotistical and insecure, Lear demands professions of love before he hands over his worldly goods. Two of the daughters flatter him into thinking they dote on him. The third, his favourite, makes an honest reply, saying that she will always love him as a father, but once married, she will love her husband too. This sends Lear off on a rant. He gives Cordelia’s portion of the estate to her sisters. Fortunately, one of her two suitors, the King of France, values love over money, and sweeps her away to become his queen.
The rest of the play is a dark and unrelenting cautionary tale of greed, lust and elder abuse, all illustrating the biblical adage echoed in Shakespeare’s text, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have an ungrateful child.” Of course, for comic relief and to frame grief in irony, the Bard of Avon added a fool.
Quebec playwright Normand Chaurette saw this as a problem when he translated King Lear into L’histoire du Roi Lear, which just opened at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. So he eliminated the fool (along with a few other characters not so sadly missed), giving some of his lines to the Earl of Kent.
This is a debatable move. But Chaurette, who has translated and adapted many Shakespea replays, with varying degrees of success, during his long and illustrious career, is not to blame for the rigidly austere nature of this modern-dress production directed by Denis Marleau.
Dark as ashes, cold as dry ice, it unfolds briskly within the framework of Guillaume Lachapelle’s quasi-clinical set, aurally enhanced by Robert Normandeau’s sound- track.
In lieu of a map, three white architectural models representing Lear’s kingdom are pushed around on gurneys. Above the action, grey and white images representing the bones of buildings, the flotsam, jetsam and infrastructure of a ghostly modern empire, flow by. Also, most effectively, clouds for the storm scene.
Gilles Renaud is a solid, imposing, if not deeply moving Lear, caught up in Marleau’s life-draining quasi-robotic thrall. Movement is kept to a minimum, voices are studiously modulated. (For those of us to whom French is a second language, this is actually a boon. The diction is excellent.) When not required for a scene, actors get benched on the side, as a reminder that this world is always a stage.
To those familiar with King Lear, there are moments of illumination, and a few jarringly novel twists – like Gloucester (Paul Savoie) getting a high-heeled shoe in his eye.
Marleau’s restrained, static approach actually helps some performers, like Pascale Montpetit, who is prone to excess. As Gonoril (in English, Goneril), she’s just right, cool and deadly. Marie-hélène Thibault’s Regan is a nearmiss. Burdened with some ridiculous moves to telegraph Marleau’s idea of lust, Thibault treads the precipice of caricature.
David Boutin, as Gloucester’s love child, Edmond, gives an arresting performance. Vincent-guillaume Otis is equally riveting as the mentally deranged Edgar, the Gloucester heir born on the legit side of the bed. JeanFrançois Casabonne’s Kent and Savoie’s Gloucester both carry their weight within this crack team.
Evelyne Rompré’s Cordelia is sincere, but less than engaging, and, in her final scenes, a bit lost within the rush of incident as Marleau piles the actors together until they drop. At which point, some of us, having been fascinated with this ambitious reinvention for the first hour but less so for the second, identified with the collapsing bodies. Once the two hour, 15 minutes, sans intermission, duration was complete, enough was too much. Although it still felt worthwhile.
L’histoire du Roi Lear, by William Shakespeare, translated by Normand Chaurette, continues at Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, 84 Ste. Catherine St. W., until April 7. Call 514-866-8668 or visit tnm.qc.ca.