Review King Lear (PREVIEW)

King Lear 
by William Shakespeare

Pop Up Britain
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

Would the rain hold off? That was the question in TLT's mind as she slalomed her way through the crowd towards the edge of the Globe stage with its pillars swathed in tarpaulin for Shakespeare's play of fractions and factions.

Of course a storm at the appropriate time would be nature's seal of approbation for one of the then Jacobean playwright William Shakespeare's most famous scenes - the storm scene both inciting and reflecting the madness of King Lear in the play first known to be performed in 1606.

Kevin McNally, best known for his role as Joshamee Gibbs in the Pirates Of The Caribbean movie franchise,  takes on the title role in the Shakespeare's Globe production directed by Nancy Meckler.

He's a very neat, one could almost call him dapper, Lear with a snowy white manicured beard and designer tattoos.

This Lear dresses in a not-quite-a-military uniform as if he were a corporate man with a penchant for vodka shots who has turned to a fashion choice of freshly laundered and ironed jacket and trousers in shades of khaki brown and beige.

There's a huge KEEP OUT daubed on the nailed up doors of the stage (designer Rosanna Vize) torn down by the motley crew of performers invading the stage with their shabby suitcases and creating a makeshift pop up Britain for this King Lear.

A goods trolley roll container from a warehouse (maybe in the age of the internet it's also warehouse Britain) lies on its side ready for them.

So these squatters zip up their windcheaters, turn their baseball caps, pull their beanies down over their ears. And lay a golden cloak and golden circlet crown on the ground for Lear, King of the Britons.

The daughters of Lear stand on crates, ready for their father to address them while the King's Fool (Loren O'Dair)  is a delicate Pierrot musician with a tear painted on her cheek, playing the violin.

Gloucester (Burt Caesar) is a credulous complacent astrology-believing  senior courtier in an Edwardian red velvet smoking jacket whose good and bad sides are embodied in his sons, all-too-gullible Edgar (Joshua Jameson) and driven, bitter illegitimate Edmund (Ralph Davis). 

The Duke of Kent becomes "Our Lady Of Kent" (Saskia Reeves), a bespectacled sensible woman politican in white jacket, skirt, blouse and court shoes, holding a large black book of accounts or minutes of the Royal court proceedings  or maybe a version of the Domesday Book, a book of land deeds.

She narrowly avoids a throttling when her position is ripped from her after she dares to question Lear's wisdom in giving up his kingdom in favour of his daughters and, more pertinently for a patriarchal monarchy, his sons-in-law.

There's Goneril (Emily Bruni), thin and sallow with pursed red lipstick lips, hair scraped back in a bun, a small cape around her bony shoulders.  Regan (Sirine Saba), black hair streaming down her back, is fleshier, more voluptuous in a silky white halter neck, a fur pagan pelt stole and long velvet skirt.

They pile on the flattery.  Cordelia (Anjana Vasan) famously says nothing, a small figure in over sized, virginal white high waisted robe and silver adornments,  all ripped from her by her angry father to reveal a plain slip which could pass equally for a 1960s dress.

This is a solid, vigorous flat cap production with clear verse speaking - ideal for exam students who, despite cuts, want to hear the text. At the same time, it didn't blow TLT or her own automotive courtier away.

The use of  the cage-like warehouse roll goods container for the tearing out of Gloucester's eyes by  Cornwall (Faz Singhateh), the changing of Edgar and the pitting of sister against sister over their deceitful lover Edmund felt rather laboured.

The best things about the production?

Saskia Reeves's sturdily loyal Kent with extra resonance when disguised she answers the question, "How now, what art thou?" with "A man, sir".

 And  Joshua James's loose-limbed scampering Edgar, the only character who via a lunatic vagrant disguise, really gets low down and dirty truly gaining the sympathy of the audience and credibly transforming into a thoughtful statesman by the end.

Otherwise it's altogether too clean and laundered and  a lacklustre mash up of the traditional and the modern in dress and delivery.

This otherwise conventional production of King Lear does extract a fair amount of comedy out of Lear's contradictions and his realisation of his two elder daughters' treachery, but it does feel this is at the expense of power and pathos.

Having said this, there is a gesture towards homelessness in a corporate Britain, with a courageous military soul drained into pointless voilence, and the Kingdom's division did make us think of the union, Brexit and the implications for the island of Ireland.

The rain held off and, while this wasn't top notch for us, this brisk and admirably clear (and maybe televisual?) version of Lear is still an excellent upper range amber light introduction for those coming fresh to the Bard.

Review The Plague

The Plague
after La Peste by Albert Camus
Adapted by Neil Bartlett

The Cycles Of History
http://www.arcolatheatre.com

A couple of days after Marine Le Pen, French presidential candidate, denied French state culpability for the rounding up of Jews and imprisonment in the Vélodrome D'Hiver in 1942, the French cycling stadium, TLT and her four wheeled buggy went along to Dalston to watch Neil Bartlett's adaptation of the 1947 novel The Plague.

It was rather eerie watching and hearing this tribunal-style drama and chronicle of contagious disease, written as fiction by Albert Camus,  a metaphor for amongst other things, the step-by-step poisoning of the atmosphere before the occupation of France and its colonies and the reaction of the population including post-war denial.

Of course there is always the question "What would you do?" and there is currently a play touring a about the occupation of Jersey where some UK citizens hardly acquitted themselves with glory.

But TLT knows for a fact that it was far more step-by-step -  refugee Jews were already rounded up in 1940 before the German army invaded Paris under the pretext that they were originally from "Greater Germany". In reality the were mostly stateless Jews and the women were put in the "Vél' d'Hiv'".

While this round up was more hysteria by the authorities after the invasion of France than  direct murderous intent, it was the first step towards isolating a portion of the Parisian population. 

We say this not to boast about our knowledge (although maybe that's part and parcel of being a reviewer ;)) or to condemn the French. In this play (we haven't read the novel), Camus, a Franco-Algerian was probably reflecting on the fate of the Algerian city of Oran. But it also seemed to us to trace the steps towards and then away from what had happened to Paris during the Second World War, the capital of France and a symbol of something much more than France.

The play begins like a modern press conference or, superficially, public enquiry: five citizens sit at a long table with microphones in front of them. Doctor Rieux (Sara Powell) , Mr Grand (Burt Caesar), the town hall registrar of births, marriages and deaths, Raymond Rambert (Billy Postlethwaite), a journalist, Jean Tarrou (Martin Turner), a seemingly affluent outsider with Spanish friends who lives in a hotel and Mr Cottard (Joe Alessi), a doomsayer who discovers an unexpected talent for profiteering during the plague.

The Doctor leads the enquiry from her notes, setting the agenda, as she relates the initial signs of dying rats, the first victims including an infected landlord and eventually how the city becomes a closed off ghetto and a police state.

We couldn't help thinking, despite a well-paced production directed by the book adaptor, Neil Bartlett, using the lighting of Jack Weir and sound of Dinah Mullen to maximum effect, this felt like a radio play. In a way that we never felt, for example, when many years ago we watched Peter Weiss's verbatim courtroom drama The Investigation with Rwandan and Congolese actors.

We also felt that some of the ironies and ambiguities, which surely are present in the novel, are lost on stage.

For example, the armed police entering the poorer areas, where "Arab" immigrants also live, and dragging out people, to the pleas of their families. Surely it is also about the potential for the abuse of and settling of scores with some of the uninfected under a pretext of being infected?

The rat may also well be a carrier of plague but its association with Jews and Soviet Communists would not have been lost on a 1947 readership.

Maybe it works better in musical adaptation as a trawl of youtube uncovered a 1960s' choral work The Plague using some of the novel's words.

Still the sincerely intense diverse cast gives the sense of a modern city. In fact, the term city state, with many cities now separate business entities, does not go amiss in our times and the carrying on, having to stop for some kind of hell and then resuming business as usual has a clear resonance.

We wondered whether we could even detect a more literary antecedent in its ironies with the 17th century La Fontaine satiric fable Les Animaux Malades De La Peste (The Animals Sick Of The Plague).

There's certainly a poetic rhythm to the play at the Arcola  Dr Rieux has seen the writhings of the dying, joined a committee, kept knowledge back along with other doctors, watched as the panic circulated in rumours and eventually emerged in the newspapers, the setting up of quarantine camps and experienced the failure of a pharmaeutical serum, seeing a child die in agony.

Finally she expediently recites scripted blandishments to aid the psychological reconstruction of a society and to fit in with the world status quo, saying:  "... when you live through the time of plague, ... there is more to admire about people than to despise or despair of." This is an intense and thoughtful play, even if as a theatrical experience, not totally successful and we award an amber/green light.

Review King John

King John

by William Shakespeare

Game of Thrones

https://www.rosetheatrekingston.org/

TLT and her loyal motorised lieutenant made all haste to the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames to see King John, a Shakespeare we had never seen before, at the Rose Theatre.

Even before reading the programme after seeing the play, and finding it was the first Shakespeare to be filmed in 1899, both TLT and her faithful equerry agreed King John has all the elements of a stonking melodrama and political mini-series!

The weak and vacillating king (Jamie Ballard) is dependent on advisers, especially his mother, veteran schemer but still careful Elinor of Aquitaine (Maggie Steed). But the King when left to make decisions on his own, in an effort to stand on his own feet, takes a brutal and murderous misstep.

The victim of this, young boy Arthur (played on press night by Sebastian Croft), a prince by demeanour and blood, pleading for his life reduces the would-be assassin (a bluntly honourable Stephen Kennedy) to tears. 

Arthur's tragic mother Constance (Lisa Dillon) is a power player for her son but ultimately driven mad by grief and grievance. Meanwhile swashbuckling bastard son Philip Faulconbridge (Howard Charles) of Richard the Lionheart is a cynical but heartbroken looker on,  participant and commentator.

This is a production of great clarity in what could be otherwise a confusing play. The nearest we have to a hero is Faulconbridge. Yet this doesn't quite fit and perhaps the clue is in the title of a play upon which Shakespeare drew heavily, some would say rewrote in a "twice told tale": The Troublesome Reign of King John.

For this, it struck us, is a situation tragedy - the troublesome situation of "that England hedged in with the main/The water-walled bulwark" plagued by uncertainty over the throne and land rights. 

And it's rather exciting, mined for humour as well in Trevor Nunn's well-paced (even though it should be said approximately three hours long) production.

Don't look for the Magna Carta though in Shakespeare's version, although perhaps a cloth underfoot rolled out like a parchment at the beginning is a twenty first century gesture towards it.

But this is Shakespeare at his most politic, meanng the play does not disturb the Elizabethan world order, the divine right to rule of the Protestant Tudors implicitly compared with the chaos of the Plantagenet Catholics. 

Nevertheless it is this which gives the play its modern feel. The shifting alliances and plotting of the unstable in power have a relevant resonance. Pandulph the Papal legate (Burt Caesar) has all the deviousness and diplomacy of a corrupt FIFA official, whose European power politics on behalf of the Pope sets off family rifts and wars between English and French.

A seemingly straightforward Globe-like stage with scaffolding to insert more levels is given a sense of time travelling and mash up with two video screens, one on each side (set and costumes by Mark Friend with concept design by John Napier). Describing it makes it sound more clunky than it is for the audience, as the actors' phrase goes, caught up "in the moment".

The screens show stills of stone turrets, discarded amour on a desolate battlefield, medieval illuminated manuscript illustrations and paintings, stained glass figures and as the King grows more fragile, delicate blossoming trees.

There is also sparing but effective use of video - a kingly debate flashes on the screens in close up well serving a play full of competing claims. Public events are publicly broadcast and the battles are in stark black and white like some Eisenstein silent film.

An otherwise plot driven artificial incident to modern eyes,  yet, in our modern times, also too horribly true, is shown as a vertigo black silhouetted figure falling from on high.

The rhyming couplets rang out clearly and every character carried their weight in the play with the, again, straightforward but ratcheting-up-the-tension use of sound effects (Fergus O'Hare) - the drum roll, the ticking clock - and music (composer Corin Buckeridge).

Ballard's King John has stepped straight out of medieval painting with his pigeon chested bearing. Gradually as his power waxes and wanes, his nervous gestures augment and his mouth is increasingly down-turned in the manner of the best silent films. This style suits the build up to the supernatural visions of the play  but his end, in a wheelchair, drooling, also had a touching quality.

The Prince Arthur  (he's the son of John's elder brother Geoffrey so has a claim to the throne) of Croft also has the touching embarrassment of the boy whose widowed mother is fighting his corner. 

This play also provides some powerful roles for women, seasoned politician Elinor, determined yet doomed Constance and Princess Blanche of Castille (Elizabeth Hopper) who finds herself torn from her nearest family on her wedding day as events,  triggered by Cardinal Pandulph, twist and turn.

All in all, King John proved a compelling and absorbing evening, with every argument over claims to the throne, the possession of mainland France territories, the plotting and the scheming followed intently by TLT and her trusty mechanized steed. So for an evening of national and international upheaval a jousting green light