This year's foreign guest troupe at the reconstructed Globe Theatre is the Annette Leday/Keli Company from India. Its repertory draws on the centuries-old tradition of Kathakali dance-drama that originated in the Kerala region of southern India. The current offering, first mounted a decade ago, is David McRuvie's adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear. By concentrating on Lear and his three daughters, with a jettisoning of the whole subplot involving Gloucester, Edmund and Edgar, McRuvie feels the tale "stands out in its powerful simplicity." The actors, who do not speak, wear elaborate costumes, headdresses and makeup requiring as much as five hours to don. Each has a symbolic dominant color: a royal green for Lear and the King of France, dark blue for Regan, black for Goneril, orange for Cordelia. All the performers are barefooted, and most of the dancing is vigorous and full of stamping.
The positions and movements of hands, face, eyes and body are subtle and highly intricate. Some improvisation is usual, so no two performances are alike. No scenery is used. The performance is accompanied by four percussionists who stand throughout, all with bare torsos. Two of them, upstage center, also sing the text.
At stage right stand the two main drummers -- one plays a cylindrical drum (centa), mostly with beaters; the other plays both sides of a larger barrel drum (maddalam) with the fingers. This pair exhibits dazzling vigor and virtuosity; during the storm scene (the fifth of nine) they temporarily move forward and closer, challenging each other in an exciting drum battle. At the end of the last scene, Lear kisses Cordelia's corpse, rises, suffers an attack, picks a flower from Cordelia's chest, replaces it, and collapses dead over her body. To most western observers, the performance may seem a bit monotonous, but a native audience would find much emotion and variety in it.