Sam Mendes’ modern-militaristic revival
of
King Lear has been
anticipated as one of the theatrical events of the year, if not the
decade. Simon Russell Beale is so routinely lauded as the finest stage
actor of his generation that he has rightly grown bored of the
adulation. Now, more than a decade after his coruscating
Hamlet on the same stage, he
tackles the other great Shakespearean peak. And although he reaches the
summit with his usual skill, the view is simply not as spectacular on
this occasion.
The black uniforms may be the same ones used in the 1990 Richard
Eyre/Ian McKellen production of
Richard
III, but this is less a fascist state than a Prussian one, with
impressive statuary and rigid codes of conduct; consequently,
Cordelia’s refusal to play Lear’s game of flattery in the opening scene
(“Tell me, my daughters… Which of you shall we say doth love us most?”)
is a public act as well as a familial one. In this scene, as in the
later revelry at eldest daughter Goneril’s place, the by-now-retired
Lear’s retinue of a hundred knights feels quite real (in fact, there
are 30-odd supernumeraries onstage). As the evening goes on, the sense
of personal wisdom gained even as the nation around these figures
crumbles is palpable.
Mendes’ cast is uniformly top-flight, but for the most part they are
unsurprising in their performances. Sam Troughton’s Edmund is
serpentine, even a little prissy; Edgar is cast against type as an
initially feckless young man, but Tom Brooke is not playing against
type in this characterisation. Kate Fleetwood is adroit at being icy as
Goneril, and Anna Maxwell Martin as second daughter Regan plays the
calculating vamp from her very first lines. Adrian Scarborough is
deferentially tentative as the Fool offering his barbed criticism to
this dictatorial Lear. However, Mendes comes up with a shocking idea to
explain the character’s disappearance halfway through the play: Lear,
in his maddened state in the hovel during the climactic storm, batters
the Fool to death.
Even the naturally superb Beale in the title role does not transcend
this sense of
reliability for
more than moments at a time. He largely steers clear of bellowing,
relying instead on pathos as in his whispered “Oh, reason not the need”
and his admirable damping down of self-congratulatory audience laughter
at the empty threat “I will do such things – / What they are yet, I
know not; but they shall be / The terrors of the earth!” Conversely, he
surprises us on his final-act reunion with Cordelia, and halting return
to sanity, by playing it angry rather than bewildered. And he takes
full part in Mendes’ skilful cutting and tweaking of the final sequence
to give the action a more natural flow than the standard hybrid form of
the text offers. But the thrill of a landmark production remains
elusive. It no doubt seems perverse to mark a production down for being
merely very good, but for actor and director alike, “very good” is
indeed a “merely” level of achievement.
Written for the Financial
Times.