Reviews 2007
Reviews 2007
✭✭✭✩✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by Brian Bedford
Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford
May 28-October 28, 2007
"Every Inch an Actor"
Stratford’s ninth production of “King Lear” (including one revival) is curiously unmoving. Brian Bedford’s performance in the title role is a study in technique but, much like Christopher Plummer’s performance in 2002, never fully explores the depths of the character. The production is beautifully designed and lit but the text is heavily cut and the cast is uneven.
As usual Bedford is a great speaker of Shakespeare’s verse. He has such a knack for its rhythm and emphasis that he makes it feel perfectly natural and instantly intelligible. Despite this, it is clear that Bedford’s performance could have been much better if he were not directing himself. Most obvious is that his Lear’s age and physical abilities keep changing throughout the play. In the first scene Bedford presents him as a drooling, senile man of perhaps ninety who has little breath and needs to support himself first on Cordelia then on the arms of his throne. In the middle three acts, however, he has become quite a vigorous 60-year-old who can stride about the stage unaided with all the lung-power needed to excoriate Goneril and Regan. By the end he returns to the age of “four score and upwards” and his feebleness at the beginning. Another director would have insisted on more consistency. Bedford does this when directing other characters like Scott Wentworth’s Gloucester, who starts out at about age 80 and remains so in movement and manner of speech throughout.
More troubling is Bedford’s habits of line delivery. For one of the most despairing tragedies ever written, the opening night was punctuated with hearty laughter right up to the end. Partly, this is due to the general giddiness of opening audiences. Partly this is due to Bedford’s reputation as a master of comedy so that any line that could vaguely be construed as comic got laughs whether appropriate or not. Partly, though, this is due to Bedford’s use of the same patterns of significant pause and emphasis that he uses in comedy. Bedford could thus get laughs by using the pause in innocuous lines like “Am I ... in France?” or “I am four score ... and upwards”. This technique is a sign of wit since it shows the character apparently considering what words he will use. Bedford, however, uses the same technique in Lear’s moments of rage and madness when the character is meant to be speaking without thinking. Lear’s curses on Goneril and Regan should be direful not funny. The mad Lear should be pitiful not humorous since, after all, one of the signs of madness, is loss of a sense of humour. When Bedford’s Lear meets the blinded Gloucester and acts like a streetperson, I thought Bedford had found a modern correlative for Lear’s madness. But then Bedford soon lapsed into his usual method of comic delivery and undermined the impression he had created.
Purists will object to many of Bedford’s cuts. There is, for example, no Duke of Burgundy to reject Cordelia for her sudden lack of dowry. Instead, the King of France steps right up and accepts Cordelia as she is. Thus we miss the suggestion that the evil Shakespeare is exploring extends beyond the bounds of England. More surprising is the complete excision of the scene in Act 3 in Poor Tom’s hut when Lear holds a mock trial of his daughters. This scene brings together the main representatives of disguise, madness and foolery for comparison and contrast. In Bedford’s version the only glimpse we get of the mind of the mad Lear is in his short encounter with the blind Gloucester.
The supporting performances are a mixture of strong and weak. The strongest performances come from Wenna Shaw as Goneril and Wendy Robie as Regan. For once these two sisters are clearly differentiated. Shaw’s Goneril is a being of spite from the very start with a volatile, vengeful personality barely under control. In a brilliant performance Robie’s Regan is more lightheaded, taking her cues from those around her until she unthinkingly drifts into evil. As Cordelia, Sara Topham is in fine form in during the “love test”, clearly viewing it as an outrageous game Lear has set up that she wants no part of while assuming incorrectly that Lear will see her point of view. In the final scenes of the play, however, she is unaccountable cool.
Scott Wentworth is a fine Gloucester, a role he seems to delve into more deeply than does Bedford in Lear. As for Gloucester’s two sons, neither Dion Johnstone’s Edmund nor Gareth Potter’s Edgar is a success. Johnstone’s brings an added rasp to his voice but the most he conjures up is mischievousness rather than evil incarnate. When Edgar plays Poor Tom, Potter is too self-conscious to be either frightening or pitiful. Partly because his scenes are cut to shreds his character does not grow in strength as it should.
Bernard Hopkins is excellent as Lear’s Fool. In Ann Curtis’s white and pastel blue costume he looks rather like an overgrown baby, and Hopkins himself adopts a childlike voice, yet, tellingly, his eyes show that this is just a pose and that he is telling Lear truths not jests. Peter Donaldson gives us an Earl of Kent, who by the end does truly seem shattered his experience of man’s capacity for evil. Wayne Best is a fairly brittle Duke of Cornwall with an unvarying tone, while Graham Harley is a stronger than usual Duke of Albany whose moral outrage counters in force his wife Goneril’s vile proclamations. Ron Kennell artfully combines both villain and fop as Oswald, but Keith Dinicol adopts so plummy a tone as Cordelia’s Gentleman he seems comic.
Desmond Heeley, listed as “Set Consultant”, has basically restored the Festival stage to Tanya Moiseiwitsch’s original design including the often removed central pillar. Otherwise, the stage is bare save for a minimum of key items carried on and off. Those who complain that Stratford never sets Shakespeare in his period will be pleased that costume designer Ann Curtis has set the action in the time of James I, King of England when the play premiered. She uses a very narrow palette and avoids, as she says in her programme note, fashions of the period like puff britches that now strike us as comic. With a bare stage it falls more than usual to lighting designer Michael J. Whitfield to create mood and show us where we are and the time of day and kind of weather. This he does with absolute mastery, proving as so often, that creative lighting can communicate far more than can a physical set. The show is not so lucky in Jim Neil’s sound design. The offstage conflict where England defeats France sounded as if someone had suddenly switched on the battle sounds of a 1950s Crusaders film.
Bedford’s legions of fans will doubtless wish to see him essay one of the greatest roles in all drama. What they will see is a great display of acting technique but very little emotion. Longtime Stratford goers will find that, like Plummer, Bedford does not expunge memories of Stratford’s greatest Lear, William Hutt.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Sara Topham and Brian Bedford. ©David Hou.
2007-06-04
King Lear