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William Shakespeare's King Lear by William Shakespeare William Shakespeare’s King Lear by William Shakespeare (review) Patrick Maley, Richard Halpern Theatre Journal, Volume 72, Number 1, March 2020, pp. 81-83 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2020.0006 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/752388 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] PERFORMANCE REVIEWS / 81 PERFORMANCE REVIEWS Patrick Maley, Editor WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S KING LEAR. ate. Lear is King of Britain, not of England. And By William Shakespeare. Directed by Sam the disunity of Britain was a burnng issue for King Gold. The Cort Theatre, New York City. James I when Shakespeare penned his play. Casting May 11, 2019. an Irish actress as Regan and clothing Cornwall in kilts reminded us of that. And this is a play more generally about the dangers of division, after all— The term “gender-blind casting” is always some- dangers that haunt contemporary America as well. thing of a misnomer, and never more so than in The Trump-y resonance of Gloucester’s line “’Tis Sam Gold’s King Lear. There was nothing “blind” the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind” about it; Glenda Jackson’s gender was precisely the provoked a collective shudder in the audience. The point—a banked-on novelty if not quite a gimmick. casting of Cornwall and Oswald also brought out The part of Lear is one that few women actors have important, related questions of social communica- thus far chosen to take on. And yet there’s a way tion and its breakdown. When Cornwall’s servant in which the scarcity of female Lears is puzzling. balked at enucleating Gloucester, he also stopped Advanced age has a way of softening binary gender translating, and so there was a period in which he distinctions anyway. Once the flow of sex hormones and Cornwall both signed furiously with no expla- slows to a trickle, old men can sprout breasts and nation for the audience. In the context of Glouces- old women facial hair. Men’s voices grow higher ter’s imminent loss of sight, this was powerful. and women’s, sometimes, lower. Lear is convinced he’s possessed of a womb at one point, and the On the question of talent, casting was uneven. aging Falstaff is replete with maternal qualities. Unfortunately, on the night I saw the performance Shakespearean theater made full use of the ambi- an understudy, Therese Barbato, subbed for Ruth guities of the prepubertal state, casting young boys Wilson in her duel casting as both Cordelia and the as grown women. So why not take equal advantage Fool. Barbato gamely played a somewhat Chaplain- of the post andro- and menopausal? like Fool with effective notes of menace but fell flat as a pancake in the part of Cordelia, especially in Admirably if somewhat programmatically di- the play’s first, crucial scene. Pedro Pascal was an verse casting was a trademark of Gold’s production. exuberant, Vice-like Edmund but Sean Carvajal Female Lear and Gloucester? Check. Black Kent, proved strictly meh as Edgar. And then there’s the Albany and Burgundy? Check. Latinx Edgar and all-important question of Glenda Jackson, which will Edmund? Check. (Edgar spoke his lines in Spanish require some setting up before I address it. at one point.) Deaf actor to play Cornwall, com- plete with servant who signed for him and trans- First, though, some other matters. Goneril and lated his signings back to English? Check. (Russell Regan were made into more than the brittle masks Harvard’s Cornwall was a particularly compelling of hypocrisy they can sometimes be reduced to, performance.) In Gold’s view, the gods may kill us and this was refreshing. Elizabeth Marvel as Gon- for their sport, but they’re apparently woke as well. eril was anguished at betraying her father—but did Gold’s impulse toward heterogeneity extended less it—and lusty in the presence of Edmund (the two compellingly to dialect. Cordelia inexplicably spoke actually had brief, comic intercourse on stage). Ais- with an American, Goneril with an English, and Re- ling O’Sullivan was more problematic as Regan. She gan with an Irish accent. Perhaps these three sisters teetered on the edge of hysteria throughout, and her were sent to different boarding schools. delivery was consequently so choked as at times to be almost indecipherable (though I suppose this fact For the most part, the play’s diverse casting fits into the larger motif of miscommunication). The worked well and was also thematically appropri- Theatre Journal 72 (2020) 81–113 © 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press 82 / Theatre Journal Glenda Jackson as King Lear. (Photo: Brigitte Lacombe.) PERFORMANCE REVIEWS / 83 production was scored, with admirable restraint, by THE ORESTEIA. By Ellen McLaughlin, freely Philip Glass, and the score performed by a string adapted from the trilogy by Aeschylus. Direct- quartet seated inconspicuously upstage right. Why ed by Michael Kahn. Shakespeare Theatre King Lear needs scoring at all is an open question. Company, Washington, D.C. May 6, 2019. Like much in Gold’s staging, it felt tacked on. The bass note of the production was comedy. This Michael Kahn staged an absorbing production was, for better or worse, a pretty funny King Lear. of The Oresteia to conclude his thirty-three-year Of course, the play itself is interlarded with dark tenure as artistic director of Washington, D.C.’s humor and often walks the knife’s edge between Shakespeare Theatre Company. An intuitive and horror and laughter. Gold consistently milked the imaginative educator, administrator, and interpreter humor that was there and sometimes supplied it of classical texts from the Western theatrical canon, when it wasn’t. Which was interesting, except that Kahn has displayed a remarkable facility for surfac- it jollied up the audience to a degree that they were ing fresh resonances in works that have captivated predisposed to giggle even when it was no longer and challenged audiences across multiple centu- called for. That this happened even during the play’s ries—from The Oedipus Plays to Corneille’s The final scene points to a problem. Liar—throughout his career. His production of The Oresteia was a close collaboration with actor and If the play was going to pivot decisively to trag- playwright Ellen McLaughlin, who freely adapted edy at some point—and it had to, let’s face it—the Aeschylus’s epic trilogy, condensing the original’s burden of this maneuver was necessarily going to three plays—Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and fall on Jackson. Unfortunately, she didn’t quite pull it The Eumenides—into a two-hour-and-twenty-minute off. Part of the problem was that she, like Lear, was event. The performance at once activated debate caught up in an apparatus she couldn’t control. Part about the meanings of justice and the possibilities of the problem was that Therese Barbato’s Cordelia of democracy. It also invited reflection on the ways didn’t hold up her end of the bargain. But part of the we might continue to mobilize hope and embody fault was Jackson’s own. Her portrayal of Lear was compassion in a moment marked by immense vio- oddly mannered. Her delivery had a bellowing yet lence, despair, and cruelty. sing-song quality through much of the play, and by the time she tried to modulate it, it was already too Among the production’s most impactful innova- late. Her face was stretched into a Joker-like grimace tions was the decision to dramatize Agamemnon’s most of the time as well. Visually and audially it (a stately Kelcey Watson) sacrificial murder of Iphi- felt like she was wearing a mask of Lear, much like genia (Simone Warren), one of the two children he the masks that ancient Greek tragedians wore. But shares with Clytemnestra (Kelley Curran), in the what worked for Greek tragedy won’t work with first act. Agonizingly plotted in Euripides’s Iphige- Shakespeare. Jackson’s portrayal played into and nia in Aulis, the catalytic event precedes the action abetted the play’s comic dimensions but fell short of Aeschylus’s tragedy by ten years. Incorporating of its tragic ones. this backstory into the drama, which was presented in a highly ritualized scene that kept the filicidal act King Lear There are still passages of that, after all offstage, not only granted greater context for the an- these years, I cannot read either silently or aloud guish and rage that Clytemnestra negotiates while without tearing up. And yet in this production they awaiting her husband’s return home after many left me largely unmoved. Glenda Jackson is a senior years at war but also served to clarify the motiva- and experienced actor, but Sam Gold is a relatively tions behind her choice to murder the king. While youthful while accomplished and energetic direc- the consensus among the chorus—portrayed here tor, and I am not sure he yet feels to his bones what by a markedly diverse ensemble of eight perform- tragedy is. The play’s final lines seem to rebuke him: ers, several with long histories of collaborating with “The eldest hath borne most; we that are young / Kahn, including Helen Carey and the formidable Shall never see so much, nor live so long.” Franchelle Stewart Dorn—is that Agamemnon, who RICHARD HALPERN returns home with a concubine, Cassandra (Zoë So- New York University phia Garcia), in tow, is a hero, Clytemnestra comes to view him as a thief, one who robs her of time, love, intimacy, and, notably, the tenderness of her beloved daughter.
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