In my ongoing attempts to go to as many cultural events as possible, I spent last Thursday evening at Scena Stu's performance of Król Lear (King Lear). The theater itself is a very intimate space, with the house holding perhaps 200 on three sides of the stage. Unfortunately, the back rows in particular feature an almost hilarious utter lack of legroom to the point where it is almost more comfortable to sit in a lotus position. I was fortunate to be able to move...directly behind a pillar downstage-right.
Lear is probably my favorite Shakespeare play, as it is complex and weaves many threads much more seamlessly than Shakespeare manages in some of his other plays. Lear features primary protagonists who are archetypical anti-heroes (Lear, Gloucester), one villain who could be treated sympathetically (Edmund the Bastard), a protagonist who could have put a stop to all of this nonsense, but was too clueless to do so (Albany), three completely evil characters without redeeming features (Goneril, Regan, Cornwall), a fool who is wiser than the king he serves (The Fool) and three people who are faithful and loyal despite being badly mistreated by those to whom they remain loyal (Kent, Cordelia, Edgar). Loyalty is a central theme of the play, but so are statecraft, senility, old age, stubbornness and the need to heed good counsel and relations between parents and children. If handled well it's a beautiful play. If handled poorly it's an absolute mess.
What was striking about Scena Stu's performance was that they made certain alterations that fundamentally changed the character of the play. Most importantly, in the original text Cordelia marries the King of France after being disinherited, then invades Britain at the head of the French army. In the Stu version, the Kings of France and Burgundy don't make an appearance, and Cordelia goes into hiding as the Fool along with Kent! It's a handy way of explaining what happens to the Fool after act 4, as in the original that character just sort of disappears. However, it fundamentally changes the nature of the characters of both Cordelia and the Fool: the loyal daughter spends half the play making fun of her old man and mocking the fact that he let flattery get the best of him.The problem with this change is it makes the ending really really confusing: the army of France shows up in Dover....why? And why are all of our heroes trying to get to that army in Dover again? In the text that's very clear: everyone is trying to get to the location of the last decent person in the play with any kind of power.
This performance also entirely eliminates the characters of Cornwall and Albany, and with it the company cut out my favorite lines, namely "O my good lord, the Duke of Cornwall’s dead, / Slain by his servant, going to put out/ The other eye of Gloucester. (IV.2.71-73)" While this may have saved on personnel, I think this was ultimately a mistake: having those characters underscores the fact that Goneril and Regan are cheating on their respective husbands by pursuing Edmund, even when Regan's husband, Cornwall, is every bit as brutal and evil as his wife. In Cornwall and Regan I also see an interesting inversion of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, a dynamic that this play lacked. I've always found Albany to be an interesting character as he epitomizes the old saying that all that is needed for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing. I've also always wondered if he was intended to be dumb or just stupid, i.e. how he could be that clueless is beyond me. Indeed, I've taken to calling him the "Dork of Albany" as that's a very suitable moniker.
Cutting Albany actually makes the very end of the play more unsettling than in the original, as after the death of Cordelia, Goneril, Regan and Lear the original implied that Albany (or in the Quarto version, Edgar) is now King. This version actually left it entirely unclear who's in charge of the country, leading to a lot of implied mayhem later. This led me to an interesting observation about both Poles and Shakespeare. In even the most tragic of Shakespeare tragedies, it is always clear who is in charge of the State at the end of the play. Though Hamlet ends with mostly everybody dead, at least Fortinbras is around as a designated successor to clean up the mess. Even when the play ends with power usurped, as it is in Richard II and Henry VI, it is usurped "cleanly" in that somebody is in charge by the end. In fact, in Romeo and Juliet Verona is much more orderly and peaceful at the end than it was at the beginning as a consolation prize for the fact that the two title characters were teenagers who just killed themselves. A possible exception to this rule is Julius Caesar, partly because Shakespeare wrote a sequel to it.
However, the Polish interpretations of Shakespeare I've seen tend to play up this idea of the State in chaos. The interpretation of Lear ends with both Edgar and Kent on stage, and it seemed to be implied that anarchy now reigned. In Macbeth, while Malcolm was left in charge it was implied that he was not up to the job. In both cases, I think these interpretations would hit very close to the bone in Poland: the history of this country is full of examples of tyranny, anarchy, and unclear political transitions. The Second Polish Republic from 1919 to 1939 was rife with strife including a Soviet invasion and a military coup. This country's last major political transition was only 23 years ago, and it's still far from completely smooth and completely finished. So while Shakespeare probably thought of anarchy as a very real threat, it was something unthinkable. Yet here, it's a recognized element of real-life drama. Aside from that, Lear was presented as mostly a drama about a family.
In general, I thought that this play was just a little bit too loud for my taste. The company as a whole seemed to have roughly two emotions: angry and crazed. Lear was read as a loony from start to finish, which is alright but I always found him more interesting as an unpleasant jerk who is gradually revealed as crazy. I thought the actor playing Lear was probably the weak link in the play, as his emotional range was simply too narrow. Goneril and Regan were good, and Gloucester was very solidly played as a kindly-enough salt of the earth type. Edmund was probably the best-played character: that actor has a career ahead of him as Richard III if he wants. Kent was just a little too hot-headed and angry for my taste. Edgar was perhaps the most disappointing, as he found himself mostly providing comic relief and acting more or less loony throughout. Though this made him a good foil for Edmund it did not make him a good foil for Lear: Edgar is the sane man who pretends to be crazy as a disguise, and in one scene he is found together with Lear, who actually is crazy. Cordelia/The Fool was well-played, though the Fool's wit was not as biting as I remember it being in the original.
All in all, I found this performance bold but not entirely satisfying, as some of the changes simply did not work from a plot or dramatic perspective. A good ensemble also did not entirely cover the weaknesses of the lead. All in all, I give this performance two and a half stars out of four.
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