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The Almeida Theatre, up near King’s Cross, is one of my favourite places. Its an ‘off West End’ theatre with a reputation for interesting productions. It was here that I was ‘The Jew of Malta’ starring the guy who played the Emperor in ‘Return of the Jedi’. That was a great production.

For this production of King Lear the audience is seated in what appears to be a large wood-panneled room. We occupy two thirds of a space, and the stage is the last third.

Goneril, Regan and Cordelia are already on stage. It seems to be about 1930, and while Cordelia sits on the edge of the stage the others chain-smoke and pace the stage.

At last the King enters, and television lights illuminate him while he announces the division of the kingdom. As the sisters fawn for their thirds, the action is displayed on monitors overhead.

This now familiar stratagem is only used here, and soon the monitors disappear into the ceiling - using them seemed to me unnecessary.

The action proceeds in the single room, the direction effectively separating actions for each space. For example, Edmund’s stratagems against his brother and father take place by a lit fire stage right, with an armchair lending a cosy domestic feel to the setting.

Edmund’s histrionics seemed to me a bit strained - of all the actors I felt his performance was the weakest - I got more of a sense of an audition performance than character. ‘Look at me, and how mean I can act’

The rest of the cast did well. Lear was let down a bit by the director’s hand at one stage. At the very start of his madness he gets angry, and tears a light fitting from the wall. This is obviously to symbolise the start of the horror to come, but it jars - it seems contrived.

Directors love to do spectacular things with sets. Sometimes they seem not to trust their actors or the words to do the work. The set here takes center stage - as the madness of the King increases, so the stage disintegrates - great panels crashing to the floor, walls splitting asunder, even the walls surrounding the audience cracking away to reveal the bare theatre ‘outside’.

The storm floods through the roof, soaking the furnishings and flooding the stage, as Lear rails against the elements.

During the interval I sat and watched as the techs reset and repaired the stage. I found it quite mesmerising, and it is perhaps telling that there seemed more mechs than actors.

The second half is the familiar end game that we know and love, and it was well acted and convincing. Since the histrionics of the stage were done with, the acting and the characters could take center stage, and on the whole the ensemble did a good job, but I felt a bit distanced from the characters, possibly because they had not had a chance to strike before the set stole their focus.

On the whole though, an enjoyable production, and one that reminded me of just how good a theatre writer Shakespeare was.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 18th, 2002 at 11:54 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.