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April 2, 2019 by billbruce Leave a Comment

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

April 2, 2019 by billbruce Leave a Comment

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

It’s a great coincidence that this play by John Kani is playing in the Swan Theatre at the same time as King Lear is playing at the small but splendid Attic Theatre. Why? Kunene and the King, set in post-apartheid South Africa, features an ageing and dying actor who keeps himself alive by his casting as King Lear in an upcoming production. Kani cleverly but subtly uses a lot of elements of King Lear in his play as well as its main plot being about the relationship between actor Jack Morris (played by Sir Anthony Sher) and his new carer, Sister Lunga Kunene (played by John Kani).

Janice Honeyman directs this two hander carefully and subtly. The play has a wonderful explosive opening when Kunene arrives and Morris goes to attack him as an intruder. Race and sexism are thrust immediately into the play as Morris is not expecting a black male to be his carer. We soon realise that ‘carer’ is both a theme and a metaphor – in Morris’s house and in South Africa. The room set with screens allows the audience to imagine the room they see leading to others and to outside and although there is a sense in which the set is the inside of Morris’s head there is also a sense of a wider environment where social and political interactions take place. Much of the opening scene of the play is comic, although there are always dark edges to the comedy. Morris tells Kunene that he has given up drink but he has gin bottles hidden everywhere and the audience is prompted to guess where the next one might be found.

The play explores the relationship between the two men but also between the two races and because much of the play is taken up with going over the lines of King Lear further parallels are made between theatre and life, being and acting and both metaphorical and literal black and white. There is a wonderful moment at the end of the second scene where Morris reaches out and holds Kunene’s hand, Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee enacted in miniature. Indeed the parallels between what is going on in the room and what went on in South Africa run throughout this fine play.

The third and last scene is about transformation, heralded by the turning round of the flats to reveal Kunene’s house in Soweto, the room presided over by the bust of Shakespeare which Morris had given him, now swathed in Kunene’s favourite football team’s scarf. Kani draws on medical sources for the final scene as Morris loses his pain and gains manic energy culminating in a kind of dance of death.

The acting is exemplary, the emotional roller coaster finely calibrated. It would be a hard-hearted audience member who was not stimulated and moved.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Anthony Sher JonKani, King Lear, Kunene and the King, Royal Shakespeare Company, shakespeare

October 11, 2016 by billbruce 1 Comment

King Lear. Review by Peter Buckroyd.

King Lear

We have finally managed to get to see Greg Doran’s eagerly awaited production of King Lear starring Antony Sher. Sher is splendid at the beginning and the ending of the play. The middle I was less convinced by. Sher characterises Lear physically by slightly hunched shoulders, a slightly forward bent posture and by bear-like heaviness, matched by his animal fur costume. Vocally, though, there is a good deal of monotone. It is not entirely Sher’s fault that I could not warm to him mad on the heath. He is elevated on an unnecessary metal structure and surrounded by an unnecessary huge tarpaulin (which muffed its lines badly on the night we went necessitating a pause in the production while the tarpaulin was removed). The best of Sher was when he was relieved of this clutter. By the end we are able to understand his Lear. Lear ‘slenderly knows himself’. He reacts with gusto to the moment but he doesn’t link those moments together and so he is perceived by others as inconsistent while he is simply responding to whatever moment presents itself to him without joining them together and without thinking in a systematic way.
The best moment in the production is when Lear and the blind Gloucester are sitting talking on an otherwise bare stage. That brings me to the real star of this production: David Troughton as Gloucester. Every phase in Gloucester’s rich characterisation is portrayed with wonderful clarity, both physical and vocal. I didn’t watch the blinding, of course, which took place in another structure – a Perspex box – but I did listen. Troughton’s Gloucester is an efficient court servant, a deluded credulous father, a self-sacrificing prisoner, a dignified victim of torture, a blind creature of insight and a despairing tragic figure. The fall from the ‘cliff’ was breathtaking in its simplicity. It is a wonderful performance.
There are other excellent performances, too. Oliver Johnstone was equally powerful and effective as Edgar. Natalie Simpson was strong, practical and dignified as Cordelia, as clear and unfussy as you could ask for. Both James Clyde as Cornwall and Clarence Smith as Albany make the most of their thankless roles and Antony Byrne’s Kent is as powerful in disguise as he was before his disgrace. I have thought long and hard about Paapa Essiedu’s Edmund because I have to admit that while I was sitting in the theatre I could not grasp why he did so little. But then it dawned on me. Edmund is completely devoid of affect. He is a heartless, conscienceless, evil bastard who smiles and smiles and is a villain. Clever, I now think, and interesting because it makes Goneril and Regan even more stupid for being in love with him. And even cleverer when you realise that he just acts in and on the moment as Lear does.
As for design, I thought the high chair on which Lear appeared in Act I effective. I thought Act I, as well as being brilliantly cut, looked stunning in black and gold while Cordelia was in white and Lear draped in furs. The hand held barren trees and what became two planets were thematically effective. The dim lighting and the preponderance of shadows are completely in keeping with the play’s mood, and the tableau of Lear with the dead Cordelia echoing Michelangelo’s Pieta, created another layer of depth and meaning.
This is a production well worth seeing. It has all the hallmarks of Doran’s contrast between movement and stillness, his lovely stage pictures, his brilliant cutting, his control of pace, his eschewing of stagey ‘acting’, his creation of intense and understated emotional moments.
Come and see it and make it an enhanced treat with a night at Moss Cottage.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Anthony Sher, King Lear, review, reviews, rsc, Rsc reviews, RSC | Theatre reviews | RSC reviews | Theatre |, shakespeare, Stratford upon Avon theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare

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Reviews from the RSC

Rsc review. The Whip.

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.

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