With its lies, deceptions, power grabs, treachery, generational and national divides threatening disaster, surely King Lear is the perfect allegory for Brexit.
The weakening and mentally fragile Lear divides his kingdom between his daughters. Undone by his newly fractured state, his is a terrible warning of isolation and despair.
The Bristol Old Vic is to be congratulated on its approach to this production in which great ‘old hands’ play alongside hitherto unknown students from the Old Vic Theatre School. The experiment not only worked, it turbo-charged the play with some exceptional performances. Timothy West (Lear), Stephanie Cole (The Fool) and David Hargreaves (Gloucester) were the rocks on which the rest of the cast could build. The three sisters, Poppy Pedder (Cordelia), Michelle Fox (Regan) and Jessica Temple (Goneril) brought swathes of convincing passion to their respective roles, while Alex York as the dastardly and scheming Edmund and Tom Byrne as his wronged brother Edgar gave the play yet another impassioned schism to savour.
Many of the direction and production staff were also from the Theatre School, including some powerful and flexible sets from Anna Orton, costumes by Aldo Vazquez Yela, and lighting and sound operation from Daniel Jones and Lauren Bullimore. How Lauren must have loved the reprising of the Old Vic ‘Thunder Run’, which impressed during the storm scenes.
The play begins infuriatingly. A king, on the face of it much blessed with power and the attentions of three loving and devoted daughters, calls time on his reign and prepares to divvy up his kingdom between them after demanding from each of them in turn that they declare the quality of their love for him. His most beloved daughter, Cordelia, the youngest, decides in her modesty and good sense to herself, that she has no need to profess that which she believes is inherently understood between herself and her father. He flies into an extraordinary and unexpected hissy fit of piqued ego, and thus sets in train a sequence of events that ends in devastation to all.
You can blame Shakespeare’s lack of any context before introducing Lear’s wobbling mental stability, this perhaps why West seemed a little dry of delivery in the early passages. That he built his performance to a visceral boiling point later was therefore all the more noticeable. For a man of 81 years the role is an Olympian feat, and one wonders what he makes of this production as opposed to the three times he has played the part previously in 1971, 1991 and in 2003. West ultimately looked to be man and actor in perfect symmetry, where person and part seemed to share a symbiotic blood flow.
As West’s performance grew throughout the evening so David Hargreaves’s Gloucester provided some of the night’s most convincing moments, none more so than when led on through the night with his disguised son Edgar. I wasn’t so won over by Stephanie Cole’s Fool, who seemed a little unanimated of face to carry it off with aplomb, yet there were noticeably (and in particular) enough female laughs of approval from the audience, proof enough that a gender blind approach here was more than warranted. But Cole’s speech from the front of stage, and when helped by more subdued and spot lighting, helped finally to propel her to the fore.
Tonight’s direction was spot on. Tom Morris has pushed the strictures of the Old Vic’s architecture to its limit with every inch of the acting space and available exits and entrances utilized with great effect. The flying in of Orton’s simple and highly effective walls, barred rooms and chandeliered lighting all added to a simmering atmosphere. Jonathan Howell’s fight sequences were full-on, with sword sparks flashing in the shadowy light, and real menace brought by the whole company to impending war.
None could deny West was in his element tonight. His rousing “Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, you cataracts and hurricanes, spout till you have drenched the steeples, drowned the cocks!” rumbled physically through us every bit as much as the rolling balls in the grooves of the Thunder Run above our heads – truly sensational theatre. ★★★★★ Simon Bishop 29th June 2016
Photo – Simon Annand
Click here to read interview with Timothy West
