Thomas Gilbert in King Lear.

King Lear
23/04/2012 | Filed under: Latest Reviews,Reviews,Reviews,Theatre | Posted by: Ed Frankl

Better than Nothing revive DramSoc’s excellent Wardrobe Theatre adaptation of Shakespeare’s murky tragedy with an impressive production on the altar of St Andrew’s Church in the heart of London. Lear has never held out for easy interpretation, a reflective study of man’s fragility, or perhaps a troubled exploration of the failings of family, or a journey through the terror of losing one’s mind; anyhow, it’s a tough job for students to handle. Even Hamlet, which the company suggest they may put on next year (at Elsinore, no less), is an easy job in comparison.

Original director Edmund Cuthbert joins forces with James Bowsher to stage this production in a busy church on Holborn Road in the middle of the financial district, a stark architectural landmark that straddles the divide between old world and new. The church, with its medieval foundations, is a couple of hundred yards from city skyscrapers, and Sainsbury’s headquarters are just across the road. It works in that Lear is about a changing world, and this nineteenth century-set production certainly has the feeling of a time out of joint. Tash Dummelow, with excellent comic timing, plays the fool as a Chaplin-esque sidekick, dressed in black and white and a bowler hat like a silent movie star, a figment of Lear’s imagination that is a dreamlike as the movies.

Thomas Gilbert reprises his role as Lear, still a bravura performance of a man crying out to keep a grip on his own sanity while the world he knows collapses around him. Gilbert’s power is in his ability to change from a bruising, angered king at the start to become a cowering nervous wreck by the play’s close. Equal too are Miriam Battye, who made for a saddening, contemplative Cordelia, Ben Dallyn, enjoyably rural as the outcast Kent, and Imogen Comrie, Rosie Joly and Joe Newton who all delivered punchy ensemble performances. Oliver Gyani, although speaking with suitable sliminess had a tendency to stumble into pantomime at moments as illegitimate son Edmund, and Harrison Clark, one of the younger members of the cast, although and bounding up and down like his Mowgli character in Jungle as Poor Tom, needed a little more intensity and purpose when he played Edgar.

But even in its grandiose aesthetic surroundings, the production wasn’t necessarily helped by its venue. The Wardrobe might well be impractical, but it delivered a total theatre experience that wasn’t given to me in the relative caverns of St Andrew’s. With a giant hanging statue of Jesus hanging above the stage, I wondered whether the directors sought a Christian interpretation, despite the play having its origins in a veritably pagan world; if so I couldn’t see if it was ironic, or genuine affirmation of the hopelessness of a godless world. Added to that, like As Told By’s Macbeth last term (which King Lear betters), there were times where the space simply absorbed actors’ voices, and you couldn’t hear a darned thing. Only the music, composed by Josephine Stephenson, including wonderfully eerie Latin chants at the beginning of the play, made me appreciate the space for the drama that it promised.

Still, venue aside, this is a terrifically difficult play which was constantly engrossing, calmly directed and as cruelly devastating in its final conclusion as you could hope for.
★★★★★