King Lear. - Stratford, Ontario - theater reviews

National Review, Sept 2, 1996 by Linda Bridges

MY Shakespeare professor told his classes that he had never seen a satisfactory performance of King Lear and did not expect to. This is not because Lear poses the sorts of nearly insoluble questions of motivation that Othello does (theatrical legend has Shakespeare saying to Burbage, a propos of Othello, "There, you whoreson, I've written a part even you'll not be able to play"), but simply because the casting difficulties are so great. Not, again, at the top: Lear requires great depth and power, but there are actors in every generation who have those qualities (just as, although I have never seen a good Lady Macbeth, I'm confident that someday I shall). No, the problem in King Lear is that, to a greater degree even than Hamlet, it has a huge number of characters who must be well cast if the play is to work. I've now seen it work for the second time, both at Stratford, Ontario, and thereby hangs a tale.

The key is the nature of a repertory company -- which of course is what Shakespeare himself was writing for. How, on Broadway, could you persuade an actor capable of playing the Duke of Albany --capable, that is, of showing this rather weak and ambitious man's growing disgust with his wife's ruthlessness -- to take a role in which he gets to say only a handful of lines? But in a repertory company the man who plays this small but important part tonight may well have top billing in something else tomorrow night. Similarly, Cordelia, one of the most famous roles in all literature, has fewer than a hundred lines (theatrical legend, again, has it that on the Jacobean stage, the boy who played the Fool doubled as Cordelia). And yet, if the actress cannot, in those lines and in her bearing, convey pity without sentimentality, and real forgiveness, then the redemption that precedes the final horror will fall flat, no matter how great the actor playing Lear (or, for that matter, those playing Kent and Edgar). Finding the right girl for the part is immeasurably easier if she will be playing it only one night in four, with bigger (even if less great) roles the other nights.

In this season's Lear, directed by Richard Monette (who played the bastard son Edmund in Robin Phillips's marvelous production a dozen or so years ago), William Hutt's Lear is as powerful as one would hope. Mr. Hutt is not especially well known outside Canada, but he is a treasure of the English-speaking theater, who seems to gain depth with each passing year (he is now 76). In this play, from the initial anger tinged with petulance as Cordelia shatters his complacent certainty that she will do exactly as he expects; through the increasingly heart-stricken but still self-regarding realization that he has fatally misjudged; through the desperate attempts to hold onto his sanity; through the rage on the heath; to the glorious happiness of his penultimate scene with Cordelia; to the final despair -- this is every inch King Lear.

Cordelia (Colombe Demers, new to Stratford) is not the only one in this play to give the lie to the cynics who say that goodness and selflessness add up to literary boredom. Kent (Lewis Gordon, who will be playing Lear in some performances), the Fool (Jordan Pettle, in his second Stratford season), and Edgar (Peter Donaldson, who as Jamie in Long Day's Journey was a very different kind of son last season) are each in his highly individual way characterized by their unstinting love for the play's foolish, sinning, but -- yes, after all -- more sinned-against old men, Lear and the Earl of Gloucester (Eric Donkin).

My only quibbles are over the love (or, really, lust-and-power) triangle of Edmund (Geordie Johnson), Goneril (Diane d'Aquila), and Regan (Martha Burns). The sexuality is awfully coarse, even for these brachs; and whereas Mr. Monette, under Robin Phillips's direction, gave Edmund real shading, showing the bastard son's pain at his father's ill-placed jocularity, Mr. Johnson under Mr. Monette's direction plays him as preening in his own evil from the start. The text can pretty much support both readings, although "I pant for life. Some good I mean to do, despite of mine own nature" and "Yet Edmund was beloved" seem to flow better out of the former. Bleak as this play is (as my professor put it, "The gods, Lord knows, are no bargain in this play"), I can't fully agree with Mr. Monette's reference in the program to the events in King Lear as ones "in which I see nothing redemptive in Christian terms." Edgar does save his father from despair, even if he can't save his life; Edmund does try to countermand the terrible denouement; Kent remains loyal to the end. Upon such sacrifices, the gods themselves throw incense.

ANY region that has one such repertory company is blessed; southern Ontario is twice bless'd, with the Shaw Festival less than three hours away in Niagara on the Lake. This festival's mandate is to perform "the plays of Bernard Shaw and his contemporaries." Since artistic director Christopher Newton knows that "contemporary" and "coeval" are not synonyms, and since Bernard Shaw lived from 1856 to 1950, that gives a rather wide range, which the Festival exploits fully.