King Lear
By William Shakespeare
Sydney Theatre Company
Drama Theatre, Opera House, March 24 to April 30
Parramatta Riverside Theatre May 10 to 28
Reviewed by Helen Jarvis
Lear himself undeniably dominates any production of this play, but director Rodney Fisher and set designer Brian Thompson have made him larger than life with a huge white formal statue in Napoleonic pose that dominates the stage and is moved around to reflect Lear's decline.
Two other pieces, white platforms, and a black curtain backdrop make up the entire set. Its dramatic simplicity offsets the colour and opulence of Jennie Tate's costumes, which range eclectically over centuries of fashion styles, and the complexity of the drama as it unfolds.
Rodney Fisher provides unusually extensive background notes in the program, in which he looks at the politics and morality of Shakespeare's time and compares them to our own. Revolutionary developments in science, art and philosophy established new orders and hypocrisies, typified by Elizabeth I's denouncing of the slave trade while then taking a share in the profits.
Fisher goes on: "One may compare this to the lofty idealism about peace expressed incessantly by world leaders over the past 50 years while obscene profiteering in arms during the Second World War led to steady arms manufacture and voracious arms trading that have culminated in the routine bloodshed in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Somalia, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Haiti etc., and the spectacle of British Aerospace and US Lockheed Aeronautical Supplies battling each other and other countries in an indiscriminate race to sell arms to the Middle East and South East Asia. In the United States, a new weapon is produced every five seconds: the murder of each other among people of the same class, the same background, the same neighbourhood is motivated as arbitrarily, selfishly and trivially as the hunting of witches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."
To have this thoughtful revelation of the director's approach to the production gives Shakespeare's classic tragedy a compelling contemporary relevance.
The acting was strong, even though the first preview still showed a few loose ends. John Stanton (who won a Logie for his performance in The Dismissal and will be more recently remembered for his portrayal of Roy M. Cohn in Angels in America) gives a powerful performance of Lear with an unusual gentleness softening the madness of the king.
Gonerill and Regan are played in Bishopesque style by Anne Looby and Linda Cropper, and Frank Whitten gives a British school master rendition of the fool. Simon Bossell is striking as Edgar and Poor Tom O'Bedlam, while other performances reflect the depth of acting talent in the Sydney Theatre Company. This is a play not to be missed.