A modern King Lear with military precision

Paternal anguish: Greg Hicks as King Lear
10 April 2012

It is all too easy sometimes to lose the human element of Lear behind lowering clouds of mythic waftiness, of old Albion and kingdoms in schism. Rupert Goold’s fine modern-dress production at the Young Vic last year swung the focus very firmly back onto the family, and his fellow RSC associate director David Farr follows a similar, sensible course here.

This may not be the Lear we remember when we’re 90 but it’s a very well spent three and a half hours now.

Farr’s forte is clarity, with each stratum of the plot cleanly delineated and familiar lines made to ring out afresh, as the sins of two fathers are visited upon a true son and daughter.

The opening scene boasts particularly skilful detail. We get a strong idea of the wilfulness of Greg Hicks’s Lear before he has spoken a word, from the fact that he enters down a different passageway to the one where everyone kneels expectantly.

The three sisters are each provided with a soapbox on which to stand and make their land-grabbing declarations; it’s but a small imaginative hop to picture these women as helpless lots in the auction of their father’s whimsical affections.

There’s near universal excellence in the performances of those lined up for and against Lear, from Samantha Young’s avenging angel of a Cordelia and Darrell D’Silva’s marvellously earthy Kent, to Kelly Hunter and Katy Stephens as the elegant faces of evil, leading us every step of the way on Goneril and Regan’s inexorable descent into depravity.

Fine verse speaker though he is, Hicks is more problematic, tending to verbal precision rather than gut-tearing emotion. Worrying hair and floral headdresses are not enough to convey the paternal anguish and fractured mental state of this "ruined piece of nature"; Hicks need to let rip far more.

The era of the production is, for no clear reason, the First World War, with a super-abundance of military uniforms. Jon Bausor’s towering, dilapidated set loosely suggests some sort of hyper-real armaments factory, and is better at conveying a general sense of disintegration and dislocation rather than the specifics of any particular location.

We must take it on trust that we’re on heaths and clifftops — but Farr makes these leaps of faith well worthwhile.
In rep until 26 August. Information: 0844 800 1110. www.rsc.org.uk

King Lear
Courtyard
RSC Stratford-Upon-Avon

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