King Lear at the Shakespeare Theatre in D.C.

(It's been another year since I posted anything.  Should do better than that.)


THOUGHTS AFTER SEEING KING LEAR AT THE SHAKESPEARE THEATRE, 6/26/09:


In the end, the production was for me dissatisfying.  The dissatisfaction lay primarily in the fact that Stacey Keach’s performance, while clever, theatrical, humorous, and at times moving, wasn’t particularly revealing.  That is, the actor didn’t reveal himself or the subject of the text in his actions, beyond what is revealed by reciting the words themselves.  And even the recitation of the words wasn’t done in a way that allowed their meaning to be revealed in any fundamental way.

That said, it was an interesting production.  Most of the interest lay in taking the idea of violent destruction and following it through in the most graphic ways imaginable--that is, representing the idea of violent destruction in a demonstrative way.  The “way” involved making the acts of violence as believable as possible, even as we were never in any doubt that they were a representation rather than real in any sense.  Acts such as strangling, stabbing, fucking, shooting, or gouging out eyeballs were performed in the most literal ways possible.  This succession of violent images culminated in Cordelias naked and obviously violated body being displayed on the stage.  These acts were shocking because, given the limitations of theatre--mainly the fact that they were, by definition, unbeliveable--they were partially convincing.

But these two issues--the unbelievability of Lear’s revealing of himself and the unbelievability of the acts of violence--are really the same.  Bluntly put, they were faked.  Nothing real was happening.

The strongest, most affecting scene in the play for me was one without spoken text, uncalled for by Shakespeare, and performed in a relatively non-realistic manner:  one after another, figures wrapped in white paper and tape representing dead bodies, were dragged onstage with exaggerated effort (the effort to move the “heavy” bodies was clearly mimed) to the accompaniment of what sounded like the Bulgarian Women’s Choir; then actors who appeared to represent surgeons dressed in white with bloody aprons flung the bodies into an opening in the stage.  At the end of the scene, the blind Gloucester, who at the beginning of the scene was sitting up alive but by the end is lying dead (having recognized his son Edgar in the moment before dying), is picked up and thrown into the opening.  That final moment was instructive:  It broke what had been in a sense “real” (just because there was no attempt to make it convincing) by reminding us once again that the actor playing Gloucester’s dead body was in fact alive.  Interesting.

I actually enjoyed the production, even though it didn’t work for me.  Part of my enjoyment lay in hearing the words which were, with some exceptions, well-acted, even if the style of acting was generally intended to make them as natural and non-literary as possible, often interfering with the clarity of their reception.  The words still came through.  Part of my enjoyment came from the imagery and spectacle.

And yet:  The scale of the spectacle was the most annoying thing about the production.  I guess that’s what was meant by descriptions of the production as “operatic”:  clearly, a whole lot of money was spent on the lavish sets and effects.  Yes, they were big and visually striking.  But they seemed, for the most part, gratuitous.  I kept thinking, “Come on,” or wondering how much money had been spent.  The message seemed to be:  We’re a big professional theatre and we can spend lots of money on a production.  Rather than anything essentially to do with the play.  A spare production would have been much stronger, to my mind.

Situating the play in an Eastern European country which comes apart at the seams (clearly Yugoslavia after Tito) was clever and makes sense.  But in the end it didn’t seem to reveal much about that conflict that we didn’t already know; nor did drawing on the imagery of that modern conflict really reveal too much about what seems to lie at the heart of the play.  No, I take that back.  If a vision of utter senselessness is what lies at the heart of the play, then the setting and imagery was revealing.  But the literal style and the unavoidable sense of fakery undercut any visceral sense of revelation to a great degree.  A great, revealing performance by Keach might have overcome that sense of fakery; his wasn’t that.