Two or three thin, reedy notes are looped through the Lyric Theatre’s sound system prior to the evening’s performance of the Donmar’s King Lear, they alternate, sometimes create intervals with each other like strange, invisible wind chimes. Audience members are expectant but seem perturbed, no doubt the desired effect of this pre-performance touch. Two middle-aged men behind to the right think that it’s hypnotic; a gang of excitable girls (from Wirral Grammar School judging by the personalized minibus parked right outside the Lowry’s front entrance) seem wholly freaked out, they turn in their front-row stall seats, point and giggle, seemingly trying to identify the source of the noise; a woman in the row in front talks about how she remembers tonight’s main draw, Derek Jacobi, visiting her university back in the day.
The 7.30 pm start time approaches and the tiers of the royal purple auditorium fill up gradually to an anticipant hum as the final call goes out in the bar and lobby, virtually drowning out chimes and specific conversations. It’s a packed house, though there are perhaps three or four empty seats. The stage is sparse. Whitewash smeared boards with patches of exposed natural wood resemble a 1960s Cy Twombly, ‘Veil of Orpheus’ or ‘Nini’s Painting’. Later in the performance one of Gloucester’s eyes will be dashed and smeared across the back of this, one will be popped on the floor underneath Cornwall’s vindictive boot, both leaving smears of red. Stagehands have been unable to scrub the accumulation of dye from the set after the repetition of this pivotal scene over the weeks, the months. Already there is a faint suggestion of the violence to come.
The stage will remain unembellished by props or further details of place for the rest of the performance, save for the basics needed to drive the plot forward. The nobles carry weapons, there are frenetic fight scenes with well-choreographed dagger and swordplay. Kent’s feet are shackled by a simple, portable set of stocks and pretend pad-locks, Lear has a plain wooden chair or mock-throne to sit on in a later scene. This less is more approach forces the audience’s attention onto the great performances of this Donmar cast, who give perceptive interpretations, from starring role through to bit part players. Michael Grandage’s direction resists any social examination, going instead for emotional impact. The pace is fast and the cast works from a heavily cut script, making the near three-hour performance seem much shorter.
Gina McKee’s icily ethereal, seductive Goneril rocks on her feet and tugs at Lear’s right arm during the opening entreaties. She speaks softly, delivers her lines in a mesmeric lilt that occasionally breaks into louder chastisement, her voice turns a little husky from overuse. She relies heavily on flaunting her sexuality as she attempts to consolidate her new-found authority through seeking marriage with Edmund, unbuttoning her dress from the neckline to the very base of her sternum, gasping as he gropes her breast. Some of the audience gasp too, or make other suppressed noises expressing shock.
Edmund, played by Alec Newman, wouldn’t be out of place in Manchester city centre, browsing the racks of its several department stores before hitting the bars on the pull. He projects a youthful attitude in what looks to be a grandad shirt under a cotton top, his jeans have been tucked inside trendy boots that reach way up his calves. Edmund struts to the front of the stage, raises his hands high above his head, looks you right in the eye as he dismisses the old order, ‘This is the excellent foppery of the world[…]’. Newman ably embodies just one of this play’s essential contradictions, a character eager to have power who simultaneously admonishes those whose shoes he seeks to fill.
There is a rebelliousness to all this that creates a contrast and tension with the establishment sensibilities of Edgar. Gwilym Lee’s convincing performance in this role conveys his character’s pious duty and the restorative process he undergoes. Whether dressed in a three piece suit, wrapped in a loin cloth and daubed in clay and soil as ‘Poor Tom’, or disguised by a roomy hood and a snood that has been pulled up over his nose like a surgical mask, he delivers his lines with a commitment to respect, properness and order. The scenes in which Edgar’s accent almost betrays his true identity to Gloucester as he leads him to the cliffs, (Methinks thy voice is alter’d, and thou speaks’t / In better phrase and matter than thou didst.’), are superbly playful, both actors display an endearing cageyness.
The overall approach to dress, by costume designer Stephanie Arditti, is a cross between the classic and the contemporary and therefore mirrors the pacing of the play; like the stage and use of props it is restrained and muted; dark colours prevail. Gloucester, Kent, Lear, Albany, the more senior nobles, sometimes wear heavy, military-chic overcoats. The female characters look elegant in fitted dresses.
Justine Mitchell’s Regan, in comparison to her stage-sister, is more stand-offish with her father but a more verbally commanding presence, she appeals to his ego and then to Edmund’s forethought and logic – Cornwall is dead already unlike Albany and will provide no obstacle, physically or emotionally to their union. Both women wear heavy mascara which creates a nice continuance into the blacked out eyes of Paul Jesson’s Gloucester and The Fool’s coaly, vertical tear-smudges.
After Cordelia’s ‘Nothing, my lord’, (an understated, quietly insistent outing by Pippa Bennett-Warner), Jacobi’s Lear doesn’t go mad, he goes mental, kicking a large unfurled square scroll that has been laid centre stage into touch, working himself into a frenzy. Lear had been using the map of Britain drawn on the scroll to help divvy up his kingdom, so this touch fits the casual way Lear throws sovereignty and power aside. Jacobi alternates between petulant nine year old and irascible old geezer; he stamps his feet, feigns voices, plays peek-a-boo from behind pretend curtains in his chamber, or crouches to simulate oral sex with his open mouth and wriggling fingers.
Ron Cook, as The Fool, has been made up like a harlequin; he hops, he dances, he throws shapes and poses, firing out his lines (‘nuncle!’) in an insouciant, nasal northern accent; yes, you guessed it, this is the Elizabethan John Cooper Clarke. Cook plays the role with a kind of skewed prescience, his physicality on stage is as noticeable as the words he recites; he cuts through, pokes fun and satirises the trials and tribulations of the tragedy unfolding before him, although his face shows at the final parting from Lear, a genuine look of sadness and regret. There is great affection between the two. At one point Jacobi places an empathetic hand of fellowship on his Fool’s shoulder. There is to be no great goodbye. This Lear relies on and empathises greatly with the world’s waifs and strays, The Fool, ‘Poor Tom’, the disguised Kent (Michael Hadley’s appearance and work in this guise is highly disconcerting).
The production itself relies heavily on tone and atmospherics produced through subtle adjustments to the lighting, designed by Neil Austin, which itself operates within a limited palette of varying shades of white (from vivid, searing daylight to pitch black). In one scene as the storm on the heath settles in, the set goes dark and skinny, bright chinks glare through the gaps in the stage’s boards, as if through an old fence. The sound of wind and rain accompanies this. Battle cries and drum thuds are just about audible.
Later, during the exchange between Lear and the fool, (‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! / You cataracts and hurricanoes spout[…]’), the stage is eerily still, the sound of the storm stops, the fool freeze-frames when Lear speaks. Jacobi is wearing a concealed microphone and his words grow from an amplified whisper into a boom. All of this reverses when the fool speaks: the storm winds up again, he and Lear are thrown around the stage by the gale, achieve ungainly contortions, you have to crane your neck to hear Cook’s regular voice. This set-up seems to emphasise the play’s well-known paradox of blindness and sight. Lear’s furious invocation of nature takes place in the clear, yet the fool’s enigmatic but actually quite reasoned answers are nearly inaudible. The technique also emphasizes Lear’s mental and psychological isolation during his breakdown, there is an indisputable sense of aloneness as Jacobi delivers these celebrated lines.
In his final scenes Lear appears in a dirtied, white linen nighty and holey socks, his head adorned by a ceremonial or sacrificial crown, twisted together from what looks like straw, daisies or snowdrops. The analogies are to Christ, a pre-christian minor fertility deity or maybe childhood daisy chains, (after all, the play makes senility and childhood, innocence and guilt, sexuality and impotence complicit). At Lear’s death the actors play musical statues. The Knight and Albany’s man stand off to the sides, Lear is cradled on the floor in Kent’s arms, Edgar kneels next to him, Albany close at hand, and the scene resembles a cut from the Bassae Frieze or Michelangelo’s Pietà. By this point Jacobi’s performance has become one fantastic mess of contradictions, his range of grand emotional expression coupled with the ability to pursue little nuances of character is wonderful. The stage lights go through a full cycle, brightening and brightening so that it hurts to look at them and gradually dimming as the performance is brought to a close, recorded birds chirrup softly overhead.
The ensemble complete two curtain calls during which a man places a bouquet of white irises wrapped in green paper and the usual cellophane at the edge of the apron for nobody in particular. He instigates a standing ovation that spreads gradually and sporadically from the front row of the stalls all the way to the upper circle. People clap effusively hands aloft or out in front.
In the UK the clocks jump forward by an hour tonight onto British Summer Time, signaling the start of spring, the lengthening days and lingering evening light. So it was with the same sense of thankfulness and appreciation for these fundamental features of the calendar that the audience went away from this performance, filing out of the double glass doors, chatting enthusiastically.
Some crossed the small square with its mini Greek orchestra and stone steps that are also for sitting on, descended the escalators into the sprawling car park in the belly of the Lowry Outlet Mall; some made their way along the pavements that skirt the old canal network, the brand new Media City sound stages and tall, flashy new builds, disappearing into the mild Salford night. Old Trafford stadium would be only minutes away on foot for anyone. Just like the continued presence of top-flight football there, touring Shakespeare of such intelligence, as high a standard and theatrical integrity as this Donmar production will hopefully continue to be a regular in this and many other UK theatre’s cultural fixture lists.
Simon Haworth