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April 2, 2019 by billbruce

King Lear, The Attic Theatre, Review by Peter Buckroyd.

When you know it’s a great play and when you’ve already seen over twenty productions of it you can sometimes feel reluctant about seeing yet another production, particularly if you have memories, as I do, of wonderful things you have already seen.

Tread the Boards Company is doing its double act again this spring – two Shakespeare plays done by the same company, playing in repertoire. King Lear is the first, directed by John-Robert Partridge. Much Ado About Nothing is following next week.

It’s a wonderful coincidence that Kunene and the King, a play where a dying actor has the chance of his last role as King Lear, is playing at the Swan Theatre at the same time as King Lear is playing at the RSC. If you don’t know King Lear back to front you need to see it. If you don’t know Kunene you have to go to the RSC after you have been to The Attic.

Because John-Robert Partridge’s production is played with eleven actors there is a great deal of doubling. Right from the opening Robert Moore impresses with his presence as the King of France, impresses again as Edgar and then wows us with his very physical and often lightning speed Poor Tom. Matilda Bott is a beautiful Cordelia played with apparent simplicity and a vigorous Fool. I’ve been to lots of productions where it’s not easy to remember which daughter is Goneril and which Regan. Not so here. Kate Gee Finch’s lively sinuous Regan, all over her husband Cornwall when occasion allows, is contrasted by Alexandra Whitworth’s steely Goneril, stuck in a loveless marriage to the delightfully wimpy Albany . Joe Deverell-Smith differentiates his roles splendidly and is the best Doctor I have seen. Pete Meredith is chilling as the villainous Edmund.

The revelation is Philip Leach as Lear. The hardest thing an actor has to do is to look as if there is no acting. It takes tremendous skill and control and Leach does it perfectly. We never quite know why Lear does and says what he does. He’s always in the moment. It’s a most impressive performance.

Those who know the play well will enjoy some splendid touches – Regan putting on Lear’s crown once he has cast it aside, Albany’s rather insipid milky tenderness, the Fool and Kent (Philip Jennings) as attentive but unobtrusive onlookers in the storm scene, the stunning end to the first half where Partridge takes away the metaphor from Act V’s  ‘And my poor fool is hanged’, the way Georgia Kelly is used as Oswald and other servants as a thread which binds the whole play together, the Fool’s fear of lightning.

Rarely has the way Lear makes the transition between the stale court and its stuffy characters and the transformative power of nature shown by Poor Tom in the storm been so clear.

Partridge made me think again about different manifestations of madness and the ways in which image, metaphor, symbol and reality collide. I loved it.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Attic theatre, King Lear, shakespeare, theatre, William Shakespeare

August 16, 2015 by billbruce Leave a Comment

1616 at the Attic theatre, Review by Peter Buckroyd.

1616, Attic Theatre, Lazy Cow

While the resident Tread the Boards company is away performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a guest company, Trans-Atlantyk, is performing a one man show, 1616, at the Attic Theatre. Written by Anne Dixie and Gareth Somers and set in 1616, the year of William Shakespeare’s death, it presents Shakespeare’s reminiscence of his life and career. Framed by end of Shakespeare’s life, it concentrates on two key years, 1593 and 1603. The play is carefully researched, drawing material from fact, conjecture, heresay, myth, legend and with a little speculative make-believe in order to provide what the flyer calls ‘his deepest loves and erotic adventures’.

The minimalist set is placed against a black curtain backdrop in order to make Gareth Somers’s Shakespeare the sustained focus. Some of the set objects are metaphorical. The table (with its unevenly cut legs) is about to totter; the bench is in a state of half collapse; the door’s lock hangs on a string. Others are functional. One is puzzling. I had no idea what the Junoesque portrait of a white woman against the stage right wall was for. The wooden pail is there just for a blocking gag. But the audience’s focus is wholly on Shakespeare. The lighting is simple and effective, providing some changes of mood and varying visual intensity. Somers’s movement provides visual variety, well directed by Lucyna Hunter.

The thread of Shakespeare meeting up with his friend Augustine Phillips provides some coherence to the narrative and counters the idea that Shakespeare is now alone in the world, surrounded only by distractions that he no longer has time for (his wife Anne, his daughter Judith, her despised husband Thomas Quiney, even, one suspects, his daughter Susannah and her daughter Elizabeth).

Shakespeare is presented as pining for dead friends, and, at the end, expressing some guilt for his infidelities, with the surprise awareness that he is guilty for having has affairs with women and men (I thought the conjecture about Southampton unlikely) and despite his fantasy that Anne had an affair with his brother Gilbert it is probably a fantasy as he comments on her ‘duty’ to him at the end.

What do we learn about Shakespeare the man? Not a great deal, but Somers’s skilled movement and delivery make us pay attention to him and we do learn about the world which he inhabited.

The play is worth seeing. Unfortunately the flyers omit the box office telephone: 07952 819557.

Peter Buckroyd

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Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Attic theatre, Theatre reviews, Theatre Stratford upon Avon, William Shakespeare

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Moss Cottage Bed & Breakfast
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Reviews from the RSC

King John. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

A museum in Baghdad. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

The boy in the dress. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

King Lear, The Attic Theatre, Review by Peter Buckroyd.

Kunene and the King, The Swan theatre. Review by Peter Buckroyd.

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