King Lear, The Lowry, Manchester, 5th-9th May 2015
King Lear is often thought of as Shakespeare’s best and most harrowing tragedy. A brief run through the plot points makes it easy to see why. A loyal and loving daughter banished by an angry father. The same father betrayed and belittled by the two daughters he has given all of his fortune to. A once powerful and respected king descending into insanity. Another father thinking he has been betrayed by one son, finding out too late that it was all an evil plot by his other child. More murders than we can count. Possibly Shakespeare’s most brutal scene, in which Gloucester’s eyes are torn from their sockets and he is left to wander to Dover, blind and bleeding. That’s a lot of tragedy. And in the right hands it adds up to a play that is gripping, gruesome, and a lot of other words that don’t begin with G. It’s bloody great, in fact.
Given all of that, it seems that strange that Northern Broadsides and director Jonathan Miller decided to play the majority of the script for laughs. Early in the play this could be excused, as many of the bard’s best plays work best with a slow and steady build, a lulling of the senses, an awareness that the friendly façade will crack as the final act approaches.
But there was very little of that at The Lowry. A play that started by ambling, continued to amble for the majority of the two and a half hours it took to finish.
Perhaps at the heart of this was Barrie Rutter’s rendition of Lear. Shakespeare can be, and always has been, interpreted in a variety of different ways. So there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with choosing to portray Lear’s descent to madness as that of a doddery old fool slowly getting more doddery and foolish. But when other, better, versions of the play have opted to have him raging and angry, resistant to the madness that takes him, this most recent decision sucks some of the drama out of the play. It becomes far less of a spectacle. Lear is never someone who strikes you with fear in this version – his most famous and forceful lines are too often turned into a joke. Rutter doesn’t really do anything wrong with his acting, it’s just that a floppy Lear limping around the stage doesn’t engross in the same way that a stronger kind of king can.
There were positives, though. It is admirable that Northern Broadsides chose to perform the whole production in their own Northern accents, fed up with being turned down for roles because their voices didn’t fit. It gave the play a gritty feel, even if Lear did sometimes sounds like an Ian Hislop impersonation of Alan Bennett. Finetime Fontayne put in a fantastic performance as The Fool, the whole play lifting an octave or two every time he took to the stage. He was creepy and sinister, funny and philosophising; he pulsed with energy in every scene. And the early part of the Edgar/Edmund/Gloucester plot was played very well – some of the darker elements that usually characterise the play coming to the forefront in the way that they should have throughout.
Overall, though, that was the main issue. The play’s extremely dark heart was never anywhere near dark enough. Lear was too weak and his daughters too comedic. The fight scene between Edgar and Edmund was played in such slow motion that the tension and terror was non-existent. Poisonings and hangings were so quietly mentioned that they may have well not have taken place. And, in perhaps the most disappointing part of the play, the scene in which Gloucester loses his eyes and Cornwall loses his life was played out behind the stage, invisible to the naked eye.
This wasn’t bad Lear. It was passable Lear. Lear with some good moments and some laughs. But it was Lear with the lights turned down to the lowest setting and, because of that, it won’t live as long as the memory as it should.
Fran Slater