With Antony Sher carried in—hunched over in heavily monarchic regalia atop a glass box that resembles something from a Francis Bacon canvas—Royal Shakespeare Company director Gregory Doran signals that old age ending in death is going to be stressed (pun intended) throughout this sometimes thrillingly inspired, sometimes workmanlike revival of King Lear, arguably William Shakespeare’s greatest play.
Doran has also listened closely to Lear’s sudden recognition of the “poor, naked wretches” populating the kingdom he’s only just ceded to hard-hearted daughters Goneril (Nia Gwynne) and Regan (Kelly Williams). The director underlines this situation—a not too subtle allusion to, among other things, today’s global immigrant problem—by placing several defeated-looking, black-hooded figures on a grimy tarmac for audience members to wonder about as they file in to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey auditorium.
Similar “wretches” sit or lie on concentration-like racks that serve as the hovel in which the fugitive Edgar (Oliver Johnstone) shelters when he’s masquerading as Poor Tom. Usually, Edgar is alone in the wilderness refuge he’s taken to after being betrayed by his half-brother, the conniving bastard, Edmund (Paapa Essiedu).
Doran makes his point about the dispossessed of the world succinctly, while tapping at greater length Shakespeare’s fabulously concerned lines about deterioration of the body and the mind—his many mentions of madness and the fear of its impending approach.
Sher depicts that horrifying but riveting descent from his compromised entrance to his interpretation of Lear’s demise after hoping against hope that the daughter he turned on and finally found again, Cordelia (Mimi Ndiweni) was still breathing. His “never never never never never” is deeply wounding.
Although much of Sher’s performance is marked by unadulterated shouting, he first rises to magnificence when calling out Goneril and Regan over their cutting his rowdy followers to none—or, as Regan puts it in three of Shakespeare’s most memorable words, “What need one?”
As he begins his “O, reason not the need!” retaliation, he’s in full throttle, but as he continues the affronted tirade, he indicates that he’s waging a losing battle against his daughters’ inflexibility and against his own capacity to remain mentally stable. Reaching the rebuttal’s conclusion, Sher does something physically that suggests he’s having a stroke. It’s a piece of acting impossible to turn away from.
In the second half of the play, Doran carries on with his illustration of debilitating senior decline as Lear and the now blinded Gloucester (David Troughton), watched only by the distressed Edgar, commiserate on the deserted plain.
Fascinatingly, Doran stages the sequence as if it presages Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. While Lear and Gloucester become heart-breaking versions of Vladimir and Estragon, Doran underlines the allusion by including the one scrawny tree Beckett requires as the only necessary Waiting for Godot furnishing. The scene through which the men literally and figuratively discover their ability to see for having lost their sight and foresight is the kind of interval through which spectators hold their breath for fear of missing a syllable or gesture.
(Sher has said that Lear is the last Shakespeare character he’ll portray. Whether the actor—also author and illustrator and recently seen on Masterpiece Mystery in Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery—will stick to his declaration could be up in the air. He has said he’d like to play Cleopatra, but maybe that was meant facetiously. Incidentally, I first saw Sher as the Fool in the RSC’s 1982 take with Michael Gambon as Lear.)
Throughout this King Lear there are eye- and ear-catching performances from Troughton as self-deluded Gloucester, Ndiweni as a lovely but determined Cordelia, Graham Turner’s Fool (who exits carrying the rope by which he’ll hang himself), Antony Bryne’s furious Kent, Clarence Smith’s authoritative Albany, and Byron Mondahl’s vituperative Oswald.
Less commanding when they should be are Gwynne and Williams as, respectively, Goneril and Regan. Though in their unadulterated meanness they should be torrid, they are all too often tepid. As Edmund, Essiedu (most recently the RSC’s latest Hamlet), has chosen (presumably with Doran’s approval) to be a rather off-handed menace. It’s almost as if for him Edmund’s continual cunning is an afterthought. It’s an odd, not particularly effective choice.
Given his usual first-rate work, the rest of RSC artistic director Doran’s Lear is something of an in-and-out affair. Niki Turner’s set is mostly black—bleak—as are her costumes. Though Goneril and Regan are resplendent as they insincerely attend to Lear’s foolishly dividing the realm between them, their later black “what thou gorgeous wearest” outfits only look sufficiently warming.
Sound designer Jonathan Ruddick and lighting designer Tim Mitchell are up to snuff on their assignments. Certainly, the storm on the heath—with Lear and the Fool hovering on the top of that glass box—is scarifying. Behind them, someone (Mitchell?) projects cascading water that heightens the inclement weather’s fearsome nature.
What audiences leave with, as a result of Doran’s clear intentions—Shakespeare’s, too—is the need we all have to learn how to live sagely before we die. It’s a potent message, achieved brilliantly by way of Lear’s and Gloucester’s unfortunate old and slow-to-wise-up travails.
King Lear opened April 13, 2018, at The BAM Harvey Theater and runs through April 29. Tickets and information: bam.org
