REVIEW
Who would Lear be in modern times? Lucy Baily, director of this summer season production, has come up with the idea that he would be a crime boss in the East End during the Sixties – think the Krays, The Godfather, The Sopranos.
It's a concept that works thrillingly well for the first half of the play. Against the tacky back projection of pubs and clubs, here are men in sharp suits and thin ties, ruling their patch with casual violence, and David Haig as Lear is the mob boss with a volcanic temper, who starts his downfall when he divides his turf between the ruthless Goneril and Regan who are the typical gangsters' molls in their designer dresses, while honest banished Cordelia wears skinny jeans and a sweatshirt.
So far so good: the EastEnders accents pose a slight problem when they meets up with Shakespearean language, but the text remains clear enough – though the American couple next to me struggled – and so begins Lear's disintegration and madness, watched over by his genuine friends, Kent, Gloucester, and his son Edgar, played by William Postlethwaite, in the second half disguised as a painted loony.
But the concept of setting the tragedy in gangland, where mad Lear joins the homeless on the streets, doesn't hold up. Without the urban setting, out on the blasted heath, the idea founders, despite a fine cast and an impressive performance by David Haig as Lear, discovering his own mortality and his terrible ignorance of human nature. He convincingly goes from suited tyrant to ragged outcast, and for once his Fool, Simon Gregor, is actually funny when played like a music hall comic of the period.
Aislin McGukin and Fiona Glascott are suitably vicious as Goneril and Regan, Fiona Button makes a down to earth Cordelia, and David Ganley as the disguised Kent – with an Irish accent to complicate things- and Paul Shelly as Gloucester provide the backbone in the cast. The putting out of Gloucester's eyes –they pop them into a cocktail glass – is splendidly nasty. And the final battle with all the gang in bovver boots and jeans and carrying meat cleavers and hammers, is entertaining, but Lear's death is somehow diminished by the gangland treatment.
Lear is a great and gruelling play that it almost impossible to get right: this version comes close and is always visually compelling thanks to designer William Dudley, whose projected images capture the menace and despair of this masterpiece.
Image may be NSFW.
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