April 26, 2019
The
good news about director Sam Gold’s
new production of King Lear, notable,
of course, for having Glenda Jackson in
the title role, is that for all its presentation of most-or-all of the play’s
text (with a first act clocking in at two hours and a second act at 1:10), it’s
never dull. For the most part, it does seem to speed by engagingly.
The
bad news is that you don’t much care about anybody in it. It all seems like a
cleanly executed parlor trick.
This
impression starts, as it must, from the head down, that being Ms. Jackson
herself. No mistake, at 82, she remains a force of nature. Though slim and
slight, she has the quality of stardom that William Goldman (in his legendary
book, The Season) described as insistence. You’re compelled to pay attention to her. And to that the sharpness of
technique and versatility of vocal instrument that has made the great classical
actors legends resonating through the centuries, even before electronic
preservation.
But
the performance—notwithstanding what she herself may be connecting too—comes
off as being only about technique and
voice. When she tries to affect the physical bearing of a male, she struts as
if to say, Look, I’m a man. When she
growls, cries and otherwise invokes Shakespearean declamation, it’s as if to
say, There! How did you like that for fury, eh? When she shows up late in
the play as broken and mad, she seems as much in control as when she was
focused and wrathful at the start. When she saws the air with grand gesture, it
seems less passionate than didactic. I often felt I was being lectured at. (I
go back to my favorite Lear ever, Hal Holbrook. He was so connected that he wound up breaking your heart. I don’t think
I’ll ever forget sitting next to my significant other during the final scene,
at which she was openly weeping.)
Subsequently,
the rest never seems to gel emotionally, although there’s a consistent
cleanness to pacing and staging. And that
causes every collateral renegade choice to
draw attention to itself as a choice. While a huge proponent of diversity
casting, I’m not keen on thinking about logistical inconsistencies once I’ve
made my own observer’s pact with it. Yet, because Lear him(her)self is so
self-consciously delivered, there’s no relaxing into the poetry of illusion,
and awareness of things that need to
feel natural is exactly what happens. Having deaf actor Russell Harvard as Duke of Cornwall in a Scottish
kilt, needing a signer-translator screams How’s
this for diversity? Multi-ethnicity
applied to familial and blood relationships that, in real life, would only
support one ethnicity (any individual ethnicity, that’s not a
euphemism) likewise come off as effortful attempts at a broad palate. And then
there’s the notion of Ruth Wilson
playing both Cordelia and Lear’s Fool (one assumes the double casting link is
that they’re the only two characters who dare to tell Lear the unvarnished
truth to his face). I suppose you could make this concept fly, but you’d have
to stop being aware of the Fool being played by a woman; and the only way that happens is if the Fool is genuinely
funny. But Ms. Wilson imitates funny
moves, at least one inspiration appearing to be Chaplin (reflected in the
costuming as well) and simply has no idea how to land the jokes, so the lines
are weighted with academic consideration of beat-for-beat humor and it’s
deadly. (To be fair, she’s a very decent Cordelia.)
There
are, I hasten to add, some isolated pockets of potential missed. Jayne Houdyshell,
an actress who seems incapable of an inauthentic move, isn’t 100% convincing as
a man—she plays Gloucester—but guess what, kids? She doesn’t have to be and doesn’t (so far as I
could notice) try to be. Because
she’s almost 100% convincing as Gloucester.
(The shortfall is the production’s, not hers, and goes back to having a
calculated and inauthentic Lear at the center.) She’s not playing the gender, she’s playing the person. African American actor John Douglas Thompson
as Kent is similarly just simple and true. Outside the category of obvious
deviation, Elizabeth Marvel as Goneril
is, per usual, fearless about going to extremes without sacrificing humanism;
and Pedro Pascal as Edmund delivers a villain you love to hate with cool, wry panache.
I
suppose if you’ve never seen King Lear at
all, this production is as good an introduction as any. And if you’ve never
seen Glenda Jackson live, it may be worth the experience anyway. Her Lear may
not be her finest hour, but there’s grandeur even in the misconception. As I
say: force of nature. And you may even wish to attend for the event-ness of the
thing. It’s big and bold and not forgettable.
But
if your desire is to be moved by the deeply human tragedy at the center…there
are and will be other Lears
to serve you…
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