Elsewhere
Elsewhere
✭✭✭✭✩
by Tom Lanoye, trans. Rainer Kersten, directed by Kay Voges
Schauspiel Frankfurt, Schauspielhaus, Frankfurt am Main
September 10, 2016-January 30, 2017
Lear: “This isn’t about feelings – it’s about business”
Schauspiel Frankfurt is currently presenting the German-language premiere of Queen Lear (Königin Lear) by Flemish author Tom Lanoye. Like Edward Bond's Lear (1971) or Howard Barker's Seven Lears (1989), Lanoye's adaptation is a new work that seeks to relate Shakespeare's play more closely to our own time. In doing so Lanoye paints a bleak portrait of the present in which family ties mean even less than they did Shakespeare's day. The play receives a fantastic production by Kay Voges that places the actors in a world created almost entirely by video projections.
Lanoye wrote his play in 2015 as a showcase for the talents of the great Dutch actor Frieda Pittoors. The play thus provides an epic role for a middle-aged to elderly female actor with a dramatic arc matched by few female characters in world drama except Brecht's Mother Courage or Shakespeare's Margaret in his First Tetralogy of history plays. Lanoye, who has previously reinterpreted Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy (as Ten oorlog in 1997) and Hamlet (as Hamlet vs Hamlet in 2014), also merges the Gloucester subplot in Shakespeare with the main plot thus enhancing two more roles. Lanoye blends Gloucester with Kent thus creating a very rich role for a middle-aged male actor. Lanoye also lends some of the aspects of Shakespeare's Edgar into Cornald, his male Cordelia, giving that actor a role with a greater range and more stage time.
Lanoye has written his play in blank verse but relocated the action from a mythical British period of kings and castles to the present day with CEOs and corporate headquarters in skyscrapers. Though the play premiered in Amsterdam, it seems uncannily appropriate to Frankfurt, a European banking city whose American-style skyline is pierced with skyscrapers. In Lanoye’s version Elisabeth Lear has turned the company founded by her late husband into a global business concern in part through the advice of Kent, her husband's best friend and right-hand man. Now old and racked with a hacking cough suggestive of cancer, Lear wants to retire and split her huge empire among her three sons – Gregory, Hendrik and Cornald. Kent's notion is that such a split makes good business sense since the three new companies will have the potential to grow even more quickly.
As in Shakespeare, Lanoye's Lear desires to spend alternate months with her two remaining children who will also put up her team (instead of a train of 100 knights). By the time she arrives at Gregory's house, he has already wasted all of the inheritance he received and says he literally cannot afford to put her up for a month. By the time she arrives at Hendrik’s house, he has had to declare bankruptcy because none of his business schemes have succeeded.
Unlike Shakespeare’s Lear, Lanoye’s Lear is as furious at her sons’ spouses as she is at her sons. The feeling we get is that this female Lear is like a possessive mother-in-law who thinks neither of her daughters-in-law are good enough for her sons. Gregory’s wife Connie, the most obviously unfriendly of the four, receives much of the abuse that Shakespeare’s Lear heaps on Goneril. The same is true for Alma, the mousy wife of Hendrik, who received Shakespeare’s imprecations against Regan. The two couples represent opposing but equally repulsive views of the purpose of human reproduction. Gregory and Connie already have two children and Connie is pregnant with their third. For them having children means having heirs to inherit and continue their businesses. Hendrik and Alma, in contrast, have no children and do not intend to have any since they want all the money they have for themselves.
In this way Lanoye expands on the question of the purpose of children inherent in Shakespeare’s play but never made so explicit. Shakespeare’s and Lanoye’s Lear have followed the point of view of Gregory and Connie in viewing children as embodying a continuance of power. In Shakespeare none of Lear’s children have children pointing to an end to the continuance of power. In Lanoye, Gregory’s gambling away his fortune proves that children mean nothing in a material way if they have nothing to inherit.
What Shakespeare’s and Lanoye’s Lear come to see is that to be true, love between parents and children must have no goal of material reward. That is what is wrong with Lear’s “love test” at the start of both plays and the reason why Cordelia or Cornald does not play along. Unlike Shakespeare’s Cordelia, Cornald has no spouse. Connie even accuses him of being gay. Yet, this is Lear’s favourite and Lanoye supplies a surprising reason why. Unlike Gregory and Hendrik, who seem to have been conceived for dynastic purposes, Cornald is the love-child of Lear and Kent, who have kept this fact hidden from him all his life.
If the purpose of children is to take care of both their parents’ business and their persons, Lanoye gives this theme a further twist. He does away with the Fool in Shakespeare’s Lear and instead gives Lear a professional caregiver named Oleg, who is meant to be an immigrant about the same age as Cornald. Nowadays care can be bought like any other commodity and Lanoye’s Lear has no qualms about exploiting Oleg. He is reluctant when she wants to make their relationship sexual, but he gives in when he sees he can be easily replaced. When Lanoye’s Lear drifts toward madness, she confuses Oleg and Cornald, revealing an unconscious Jocasta complex which gives both an ironic and pathetic cast to her “love” for Cornald.
In Lanoye, their is no decent husband like Albany who turns against his wife. Here both sets of couples are equally evil. Gregory himself blinds Kent when Kent refuses to help him and speaks out about how “blind” Gregory is. Unlike Shakespeare, both couples and the Gloucester equivalent Kent are alive at the end, but in terms of their financial future, the only way they have regarded themselves, they all are dead. When Hendrik accidentally kills Cornald, who has built himself up from nothing as he said he would, Kent loses his son and both couples lose the only means to restart their businesses. The one who inherits is Oleg. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Denmark we have come to know is lost when it is taken over by the Norway of Fortinbras. In Lanoye’s Lear, the kingdom that Lear fought so hard to keep in the family, ceases to exist when it is taken over by a foreigner.
Josefin Platt gives an incredibly fierce performance as Lear. She is coldly imperious at the beginning and her rage at Cornald and Kent seems to be simply one of the tantrums she is used to throwing when events don’t go as planned. Platt does not attempt to make Lear likeable. She makes Lear’s reaction to her rejection by Hendrik almost unbearably humiliating. Yet, it is really only when she has been through the storm and meets Cornald again, who forgives her, that the humanity buried under so much posing and formality, finally breaks through. Her death scene with Cornald draped over her lap as in a pietà, is a moving as in Shakespeare’s Lear.
Both Gregory and Hendrik are quite different from Goneril and Regan. Victor Tremmel and Lukas Rüppel show from the start that both are weak and in no way a match for their mother. Tremmel’s Gregory is the more boastful and aggressive of the two, with his vicious, Lady Macbeth-like wife Connie (Francisca Junge), pushing him to be stronger. Rüppel’s Hendrik is as insipid and uncertain as his wife Alma (Verena Bukal) who is the closest the play has to a comic figure. Even Hendrik’s killing of Cornald is unintentional.
The role of Cornald was original played by a male actor, Alwin Pulinckx. Director Kay Voges has the fascinating idea of casting the role for a woman, Carina Zichner, who plays it as a trousers role. Given that Lenoye’s play has reversed the genders of Lear and his two daughters, Voges’s idea has the effect of reminding us that boys played women in Shakespeare’s day and provides a layer of historical metatheatricality to Lenoye’s version that is otherwise so firmly set in the present.
I will confess that I never read programmes before seeing plays. I expect that all I need to know will be in the production itself. Zichner’s performance as a boy was so convincing and natural that I was astounded to discover that a woman had played it when I finally looked at the programme. Zichner’s Cornald is immediately sympathetic and obviously stronger intellectually and morally than his brothers. That doesn’t mean that Zirchner doesn’t show Cornald’s doubts and anger, but she does make us feel that Cornald is the only decent, uncompromised character in the play and the only who could redeem the horrid world he lives in, if he were allowed to live.
As Kent, Peter Schröder gives a wonderfully rounded performance. His Kent is a man who has been unstintingly loyal to King Lear and now to Lear’s wife and put their success above his own. Yet, he is acutely aware of his failings and his single betrayal of King Lear’s trust. Schröder lets us know that Kent has a special sympathy for Cornald even before we know why and Schröder fully expresses the pain of having hidden his relationship to Cornald for so long.
Owen Peter Read’s Oleg is a mystery as he should be. Oleg may be the substitute for Shakespeare’s Fool, but he is in no way humorous. Read has Oleg stolidly do whatever he is ordered to do without warmth. He gives the impression that Oleg does care about Lear, especially when she becomes more helpless, but that he also struggles to keep himself emotionally detached. This alone means that Lanoye’s Lear lives in a much colder world than does Shakespeare’s. As a powerful woman in a man’s world her self-defeminization is a question that naturally never arises in Shakespeare’s play.
The entire thrust of Voges’s production is to emphasize the sense of alienation of the modern world in which Lanoye has placed his characters. Set designer Daniel Roskamp has placed an all-black stage upon the stage which Robi Voigt’s video projections have divided into a forced perspective of rectangles rather like the holodeck on Star Trek. When Lear divides her kingdom Voges has her address her sons via a stage-sized image of herself that at once depicts the oversized power she holds and its immateriality and the distance that exists for this businesswoman from any real feeling of motherhood.
Moving projections of a skyline of skyscrapers keep the action placed somewhere high above the streets below. The cliff that Kent-as-Gloucester wants to jump off of here is the side of a building. The storm scene is completely disorienting as Voigt’s has the lines we had thought were rigid move in shockwaves in response to Lear’s speech “Blow winds, crack your cheeks”. Lanoye turns this speech about nature into Lear’s curse that humankind and everything it has built should be destroyed.
Towards the end all the actors except Cornald start to wear white greasepaint on their faces. Why does this start to happen, when they have been acting all along? Then approaching the final scene, Ulrich has the wives suddenly appear in black dirndls rather than modish dresses, puts Gregory into lederhosen and garbs Hendrik in a long black leather coat suggestive of an SS officer. In a play like this, there really is no need to emphasize that Gregory and Hendrik and their wives are bad people or to do so in such a terribly clichéd way.
This flaw aside, Voges’s visual production is undoubtedly stunning. Nevertheless, one does wonder if the play would be better served by a more minimalist style. Lanoye has, after all, made it possible for a cast of only eight to tell this epic story, so perhaps a reduction rather an expansion in production values would be both more appropriate and more effective. Lanoye’s Queen Lear is a thought-provoking work on its own. It uses Shakespeare’s story to critique the inhumanity of a world driven only by money which has corrupted all ties between people including familial bonds. People in Lanoye’s Lear judge each other only by their usefulness as commodities. This means that everyone lives in isolation without any real sense of familial let alone communal purpose. At the same time Lanoye’s version creates a fascinating dialogue with Shakespeare’s that illuminates both works. Lear as mother necessarily has resonances that Lear as father can never have and vice versa.
In 2007 Tom Lanoye won the highest honour for a writer in Dutch or Flemish, yet Queen Lear has not yet been translated into English. While it would be hard for any production to outdo Voges’s in visual style, there is still room for productions to explore Lanoye’s text in other ways. Queen Lear is a powerful and controversial play the English-speaking world needs to discover.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Josefin Platt (on screen), Franziska Junge, Viktor Tremmel, Peter Schröder, Carina Zichner, Lukas Rüppel and Verena Bukal; Josefin Platt as Lear; Carina Zichner, Josefin Platt, Owen Peter Read (in foreground) with Viktor Tremmel, Franziska Junge, Lukas Rüppel and Verena Bukal; Owen Peter Read, Carina Zichner and Peter Schröder. ©2016 Birgit Hupfeld.
For tickets, visit www.schauspielfrankfurt.de.
2016-12-03
Frankfurt, GER: Queen Lear