A Christmas Day party with a nervous host in novelty jumper, a dogsbody dressed as Rudolph, and a chief guest who doffs his paper cracker crown for a Santa hat. Not what one expects of the opening scene of Shakespeare’s great tragedy and the figures of Gloucester, Edmund and Lear respectively. For the RSC’s latest young people’s touring production, which plays more or less equally in schools and theatres until early December and then visits the U.S., director Tim Crouch has set the action between Christmas and New Year: “Auld Lang Syne” becomes a funeral dirge for Lear and Cordelia. In itself this neither adds nor subtracts much to or from the play; it is when the tactic combines with paring the script down to 80 minutes for a cast of nine (Regan is widowed in passing offstage, and there is no room to fit Cordelia with a husband) that the effects are felt in each direction.

Crouch’s original work is known for its direct engagement with the audience. Surprisingly little of that is in evidence here, and most of it, confusingly, is undertaken by the villainous Edmund. The performance I saw at the Nuffield Theatre in Southampton had an audience principally of primary-age schoolchildren, a useful test group to see how the playfulness of the staging worked interest-wise. Once again, it seemed to have little effect one way or the other. They grew restive after half an hour or so, then were re-engaged by the first hovel-in-the-storm scene before falling off again when the focus switched back from Lear to the more sombre, orotund Gloucester (Tyrone Huggins).

Paul Copley works well as a Lear of unheroic stature; Copley preserves the character’s through-line during what is sometimes little more than a whistlestop tour of Lear landmarks. It is a brilliant touch to have Matt Sutton’s Kent don Edmund’s discarded reindeer cossie and become the Fool; elsewhere, however, the combination of compact company and abbreviated script can lead to confusion between doubling and disguise even for someone as familiar with the play as me. Still, it brings at least the skeleton of the play to life, and the next time I have myself an un-merry little Christmas I shall think twice before griping.
     
Written for the Financial Times.