Cal Shakes Review: King Lear
Sep. 18th, 2015 04:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjWednesday it almost looked like we'd be two for two in terms of getting rained on for Cal Shakes performances this year, which is distressingly ironic given the ongoing drought. Evidently the first preview performance Wednesday was rained on, which must have made the refrain With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain and the storm scene particularly amusing. But instead the Thursday night show had glorious weather.
It's no secret that King Lear is a tragedy in the "all die" tradition, though somehow I always forget just how high the body count gets by the end. With its themes of dysfunctional family dynamics, the obsoleting of the elderly, madness, and betrayal, I can't really say that Lear is an enjoyable play. The darkness of the theme also seems to make it easier to identify structural aspects that grate on me. It is, in many ways, a very misogynistic story. One of the underlying themes seems to be that if women are given power it will corrupt them even more than it would men, and that women with power will first emasculate the men around them and then reject them for being unmanly. To me, the frenzy of adulterous desire and murder that is provoked in the reigning sisters by Edmund (bastard son of Gloucester) comes out of nowhere without motivation. Edmund's own actions, in contrast, seem to derive naturally from anger at the undeserved position his bastardy puts him in. Though, curiously, he gets a lovely speech about how ridiculous it is that people blame their personalities and actions on the circumstances of their birth...and then goes on to demonstrate by his life that a bastard is necessarily a villain and a traitor simply because of the fact of his condition.
But on to the specific performance.
The "small cast" approach of Cal Shakes often makes for some interesting casting doublets. Sometimes the echoes across characters bring interesting alternate readings, sometimes they bring confusion. The choice of having Kjerstine Rose Anderson play both Cordelia and the Fool worked very well, in my opinion, not least because, within a script where both the Earl of Kent and Gloucester's legitimate son Edgar spend a great deal of time hanging out with Lear while disguised and unrecognized, one can appreciate an alternate storyline in which Cordelia--rather than spending most of the play safely off in France--has actually chosen to disguise herself as a fool to accompany, protect, and educate her errant father.
In my experience, the thing that keeps Shakespeare's language accessible to modern audiences is the ability of the actors to inhabit their lines as if it were a mother tongue. It's a reminder of how much of successful communication lies in extra-textual factors: cadence, emphasis, expression. When the lines are spoken by someone who makes you believe that you're simply hearing an interesting regional accent, it's easy for your brain to fill in around the specific vocabulary that may be unfamiliar. (I think the best example of this effect that I've heard is the prologue to Henry V in the Brannagh movie version.) But conversely when the actors aren't as comfortable, the audience too will stumble over the meaning. While I acknowledge that one must make allowances for previews, I had regular problems following El Beh as Regan, simply because the easy cadence wasn't there. Especially during the second act, I had similar issues with Charles Shaw Robinson's Gloucester. And every time the script fell into the rhymed iambic couplets that Shakespeare is so fond of using as dramatic punctuation, I felt they were being telegraphed as, "Hey, here comes a rhymed couplet!" rather than adding a near-invisible rhythmic emphasis and elevated tone to the speech.
The costuming was delightful in a dark, leather-goth uniform sort of way. Goneril's military-style jacket was swoon-worthy. Yeah, I could imagine being led to internecine war by someone with that sartorial flair! The set went for a kinetic industrial effect, with several large metal-framed "cages" being continually moved, spun, and recombined to signal change of setting and provide a both a frame for entrances and exits and a scaffold for various activities. Except for one brief scene with a temporary hanging, there were no curtains--in effect, no back-stage. In many cases the Orinda hillside provided the scenic backdrop. As a staging technique it worked except for one extreme annoyance. Lighting relied on a number of large floodlights, and in the final scenes a circle of floodlights were pretty much the only set. And most of them were set at ground level and pointed at the audience. This meant that we got a blinding glare throughout a number of scenes that not only made it impossible to see the actors but came close to being physically painful.
Overall, I have to say that while there were a number of bold choices for this King Lear, it was far from my favorite Cal Shakes performance.
It's no secret that King Lear is a tragedy in the "all die" tradition, though somehow I always forget just how high the body count gets by the end. With its themes of dysfunctional family dynamics, the obsoleting of the elderly, madness, and betrayal, I can't really say that Lear is an enjoyable play. The darkness of the theme also seems to make it easier to identify structural aspects that grate on me. It is, in many ways, a very misogynistic story. One of the underlying themes seems to be that if women are given power it will corrupt them even more than it would men, and that women with power will first emasculate the men around them and then reject them for being unmanly. To me, the frenzy of adulterous desire and murder that is provoked in the reigning sisters by Edmund (bastard son of Gloucester) comes out of nowhere without motivation. Edmund's own actions, in contrast, seem to derive naturally from anger at the undeserved position his bastardy puts him in. Though, curiously, he gets a lovely speech about how ridiculous it is that people blame their personalities and actions on the circumstances of their birth...and then goes on to demonstrate by his life that a bastard is necessarily a villain and a traitor simply because of the fact of his condition.
But on to the specific performance.
The "small cast" approach of Cal Shakes often makes for some interesting casting doublets. Sometimes the echoes across characters bring interesting alternate readings, sometimes they bring confusion. The choice of having Kjerstine Rose Anderson play both Cordelia and the Fool worked very well, in my opinion, not least because, within a script where both the Earl of Kent and Gloucester's legitimate son Edgar spend a great deal of time hanging out with Lear while disguised and unrecognized, one can appreciate an alternate storyline in which Cordelia--rather than spending most of the play safely off in France--has actually chosen to disguise herself as a fool to accompany, protect, and educate her errant father.
In my experience, the thing that keeps Shakespeare's language accessible to modern audiences is the ability of the actors to inhabit their lines as if it were a mother tongue. It's a reminder of how much of successful communication lies in extra-textual factors: cadence, emphasis, expression. When the lines are spoken by someone who makes you believe that you're simply hearing an interesting regional accent, it's easy for your brain to fill in around the specific vocabulary that may be unfamiliar. (I think the best example of this effect that I've heard is the prologue to Henry V in the Brannagh movie version.) But conversely when the actors aren't as comfortable, the audience too will stumble over the meaning. While I acknowledge that one must make allowances for previews, I had regular problems following El Beh as Regan, simply because the easy cadence wasn't there. Especially during the second act, I had similar issues with Charles Shaw Robinson's Gloucester. And every time the script fell into the rhymed iambic couplets that Shakespeare is so fond of using as dramatic punctuation, I felt they were being telegraphed as, "Hey, here comes a rhymed couplet!" rather than adding a near-invisible rhythmic emphasis and elevated tone to the speech.
The costuming was delightful in a dark, leather-goth uniform sort of way. Goneril's military-style jacket was swoon-worthy. Yeah, I could imagine being led to internecine war by someone with that sartorial flair! The set went for a kinetic industrial effect, with several large metal-framed "cages" being continually moved, spun, and recombined to signal change of setting and provide a both a frame for entrances and exits and a scaffold for various activities. Except for one brief scene with a temporary hanging, there were no curtains--in effect, no back-stage. In many cases the Orinda hillside provided the scenic backdrop. As a staging technique it worked except for one extreme annoyance. Lighting relied on a number of large floodlights, and in the final scenes a circle of floodlights were pretty much the only set. And most of them were set at ground level and pointed at the audience. This meant that we got a blinding glare throughout a number of scenes that not only made it impossible to see the actors but came close to being physically painful.
Overall, I have to say that while there were a number of bold choices for this King Lear, it was far from my favorite Cal Shakes performance.
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Date: 2015-09-18 08:19 pm (UTC)Lear is not my favorite play, even though Lear is why a friend of ours will forever be "her Grace, the Duke of Albany". The director of theatre at Cornell decided to cast all the roles with opposite genders except the Fool, to make...some point. I am not entirely sure whether her point was that Shakespeare does not have to be gendered, or what--it was 20 years ago, so my memory might be a trifle faulty. Kate was a pretty good Albany. The men playing Goneril and Regan were...less good. If nothing else it was a demonstration of how little those men knew about how to play women, and how little the director knew about how to direct them to play women, although I suppose it might have been a lot of work to get them to the point they were at.