Lear played by a woman? At 80, Glenda’s got it
GLENDA Jackson, 80, makes a memorable return to the London stage – as King Lear – after her long, self-banishment to Parliament.
The sometime Oscar-winner, one of the actresses of her generation, became a Labour MP in 1992.
For 23 years she forsook her art for a humdrum career in politics (MP for Hampstead and briefly junior minister for transport). It was an exile, you could say, of Shakespearean proportions. Now she has returned in his epic about senseless suffering caused by political impetuousness.
Miss Jackson’s casting, like much else in Deborah Warner’s Brechtian production, could be seen as a cheap stunt. Ah, alienation technique. Director shouts ‘look at me, not at the playwright or the human story’.
There is plenty in this show that irritates: baring of chaps’ bottoms, a Fool (Rhys Ifans) dressed in a Superman outfit and singing a Bob Dylan tune, a French king’s accent possibly borrowed from ’Allo ’Allo. The eye-gouging scene is so feeble that some people laughed, particularly when one of the eyes was thrown to the stalls like a toffee at a Christmas panto. There was further unintended comedy when an actor skidded on some stage blood and nearly took a wonderful purler.
‘Alack, I have no eyes,’ moans Gloucester. Should we not feel pity? The audience gig- gled! And when Oswald died with the words ‘oh, untimely death’ there were snorts of mirth.
Yet thanks to its magnetic star this show is undeniably theatrical. Lear played by a woman? Daft, but you are forced to take notice. This is show-business, after all.
She makes for a shrivelled Lear, lined as a walnut, scuttling, hobbling, flicking her unisex fringe and waving two distractingly large, washer womanish hands as though in semaphore. Her performance tastes oddly overrehearsed, almost every sentence seemingly with its designated gesticulations and vocal inflections. This is also true of Harry Melling’s Edgar, who at the finale, when talking of Lear’s death, keeps whacking his own heart. He should let the verse speak for itself.
Miss Jackson’s changes in tone frequently feel pre-designated rather than organic. The cigarettey voice is deep, often as deep as many a male Lear, and at times assumes a strangulated, fishtank-ish quality.
She is tiny, short, skinny, gums and teeth prominent. Albert Steptoe? Rosa Klebb? Dot Cotton? The opening scene, when Lear tests his three daughters’ love, lacks any palatial grandeur. It becomes a family row in a front room. Miss Jackson skilfully suggests that Lear is delighted to be retiring from the daily toil of rule.
Before the start, cast members lounge about while stagehands – hammering, drilling, vacuuming – apparently prepare for the evening’s spectacle. The set makes use of large white panels on which we see characters’ elongated shadows. In the storm scene these panels carry projected images of sleet and scudding night clouds.
That moment – a sparrow-like Lear lit by the Fool’s close-held hand-light – is one of the few when emotion creeps into proceedings. Another is the final speech after the death of Cordelia, she and Lear having been dragged on stage on a carpet.
A patchy cast includes Celia Imrie and Jane Horrocks as a slightly silly Goneril and Regan, Karl Johnson as a decent Gloucester, Simon Manyonda’s underpowered Edmund, and William Chubb and Danny Webb rather good as Albany and Cornwall.
This ‘Lear’ places spectacle above emotional truth. All the depth of fatherhood and men’s relationship with their daughters is sacrificed for the newsworthiness of casting a great actress as the king.
All the same, it’s good to have Glenda back on stage. As she took the curtain call she looked a lot happier and more fulfilled than she ever did in the Commons.