King Lear: Not business as usual
The usual bluster gets traded in for a nuanced study of parents and children who work together.
Gate Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
At the beginning of King Lear – Shakespeare’s tragedy of family and regret – a preoccupied nobleman is in such a flow of palace-strategising that when his son makes an unexpected entrance, he can’t help but be frank. Gloucester describes his son Edmund as a constant embarrassment, using an astonishing lack of tack. “I cannot conceive you,” says a colleague, with surprise. “This young fellow’s mother could,” says Gloucester, with the warmth of a glacier.
That bone-dry voice, in Stuart Graham superb performance, sets a certain key for the Gate Theatre’s production to sing in. Director Roxana Silbert understands the play’s fathers as insensitively matter-of-fact, more practical than emotional, delivering a stinging comment before promptly returning to work. When King Lear arrives to make official his daughters’ succession, he smiles at their compliments but doesn’t take much time to drink it in. He’s too busy swishing past them, distributing maps of their kingdoms.
Fascinatingly, Conleth Hill’s Lear is focused more on efficiency than vanity. Some may recall the spectacle of machismo in director Selina Cartmell’s production for the Abbey Theatre 12 years ago. The excess of men enjoying hunting and brothels has been seriously reined in. Here, Lear’s too busy running a kingdom.