NOTE: This production was viewed live via satellite feed in a theater at the Historic Asolo Theater, Sarasota, FL.
Here is one of those partly brilliant, partly ordinary, partly stupid modernizations of a Shakespearian tragedy--this one described once as bound to be better read with imagination than staged. King Lear in director Sam Mendes’ hands and its title character embodied by Simon Russell Beale takes place in a dark, modern, militaristic country ruled by a dictator with ever-present large retinue all in black.
King Lear sets himself up on a ramp facing a table of three daughters, two sons-in-law, and courtsmen to decree he’s dividing his kingdom. He’ll place it under his daughters’ rule. How much each gets will depend on how much each will convince him she loves him. Goneril (Kate Fleetwood, smashing in more than one way) cleverly plots out her devotion, whereupon the sadistic Regan (Anna Maxwell Martin, strikingly torture-loving) agrees to same and then ups it. Great scenes!
When Olivia Vinall’s truly loving but unprepossessing Cordelia, Lear’s favorite, refuses to flatter, he brings his wrath down upon her. How he marries her off, like a bad child at auction, is well done. Trusty Kent (blunt but always proving loyal Stanley Townsend) also gets banished--soon to be chained to a Soviet-or-Sadaam-like statue of Lear instead of the usual stocks. Clever. In a parallel subplot, the illegitimate Edmund (Sam Troughton, always a poseur yet truly smarmy) woos Lear’s awful daughters, plots against his father Lord Gloucester, and covets the fortune given the legitimate son Edgar. Tom Brooke plays him as a bit of a slacker and has a weird accent, like a Cockney, until his sightless father hears his real voice and recognizes him. Good thing he doesn’t see Edgar’s almost silly tatooed-in-dirt, alter-ego Poor Tom.
Dignified Stephen Boxer becomes a shockingly, pitiably blinded Gloucester who yet finds real insight. His attempt at suicide and rescue are rightly full of pathos.
I initially missed Adrian Scarborough’s Fool, as the camera caught his back on the runway too far from the activity. He is the most low-keyed Fool I’ve ever seen or imagined, but the means by which he disappears before Lear to become an unaccommodated man certainly doesn’t become director Sam Mendes! It’s a total shock and completely unwarranted by Lear’s consistent liking of and willingness to listen to the Fool. Simon Russell Beale is a Lear who never seems quite mentally right, either in the way he stages his abdication or as he overturns tables in anger at Cordelia. The text has Lear wondering if he’s descending into madness, which would be normal considering his treatment by his ungrateful spawn, but Mendes seems to have him acquiring Alzheimer’s. How, if Lear’s not in his right mind--at least at the start--can he be a tragic hero? That takes someone who is capable of making at least one important completely rational choice.
It’s been said that most of King Lear is a denouement, but here it’s a mostly mental sickness getting fatal, though Beale also diminishes physically. In the end, his white garments, that in the text likely denote a spiritual rebirth, are a straight jacket and hospital gown. Am I supposed to believe that, so clothed, he snuck out of bed at some point and, with renewed strength, killed the slave who was hanging Cordelia? And that then she was brought to him, hunkering back in his bed, to be grieved over? (With a beautiful speech given little emphasis, by the way.)
Beale, an acclaimed actor, seems to do what he can with the concepts he’s been given. He also looks older than he really is. So maybe he’ll get another opportunity to play Lear that can’t be diminished by some stupid additions to and cuttings of the text or by a tendency to make a “disease play” out of a tragedy.
