King Lear
Gate Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
For the past 400 years or so, cultural critics have been declaring Shakespeare’s windiest play close to unstageable. The despair is too exhausting. The spiritual tumults too sudden and too irrational. None of this has stopped King Lear remaining among the most quotable and psychologically dense of his tragedies.
Roxana Silbert hasn’t quite solved the age-old problems in her propulsive new production for the Gate. As you would expect from this venue, the staging is smooth and attractive. Ti Green’s production design, featuring hanging fabric constructions that sometimes suggest shrouds, sometimes cocoons, pitches the show between the earthbound and the fantastic.
The costumes, inheriting the look Star Wars inherited from Akira Kurosawa, have the virtue of consistency. Paul Keogan’s lighting – making good use of a background that allows silhouetted groupings – is up to that professional’s high standards.
But this take on Lear, short on big ideas, has a few too many shallows among its satisfactory heights. As the king, Conleth Hill, hitting the right age after decades of varied work on stage and screen, is at his best when the storm is up and the brain is befuddled.
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If you were the wind you’d do what you were told as, during the famous storm scene, he suggests the cracking of cheeks and the drenching of steeples. He is better still, bedecked with flowers, as madness brings him oblique wisdom. There is a particular poignancy to seeing a burly man mumble the sweet sadnesses this wronged despot has uncovered.
Elsewhere, a few of the greatest hits are flubbed. It may be infantile to expect video-nasty relish in the gouging of Gloucester’s eyes, but something more than the perfunctory scuffle here would be nice – or gratifyingly horrible, anyway.
The opening sections do good work with awkward normality. Northern voices – some from southern actors – add a satisfactory abrasiveness to the familial disharmony. (Kudos to Eavan Gaffney, as Regan, for her “let him smaiaiail his way to Dover!”)
We all know the story. Lear asks his three daughters to butter him up in exchange for land. The ballsy Goneril and Regan (Jolly Abraham is smoother than the abrasive Gaffney) oblige. The always insufferable Cordelia – no blame attaches to an intelligent turn from Emma Dargan-Reid – does not and is driven from the fireplace.
The poor old fool is then shifted from sister to sister like the sort of inconvenient elder who insists on making everyone watch Antiques Roadshow. He is eventually flung on to the heath and the whole world sets to shaking itself to pieces.
The actors find a few new directions. Aidan Moriarty’s faux-deranged Edgar is a little more robust than is usually the case. Michael Glenn Murphy’s Fool has the weary sadness of a music-hall player past his time.
The standout of the satellite cast is surely Ryan Hunter as the charismatic, Scottish Edmund. The man relishes the word “bastard” as if it had been served with chips and gravy.
And yet. Everyone is up to scratch. Some, like Hunter, positively excel. But one does not leave the theatre with any great revelations buzzing through the blasted mind.
King Lear is at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, until Sunday, April 27th
