Lear at the Guthrie

The theater event of the year is over now. We were fortunate that the Guthrie was chosen as one of three US locations for a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of The Seagull and King Lear. RSC has always been one of my favorite production companies and although I have not had more than four or so opportunities to see them on various trips to England, when I go, I always see as many of their plays as I can afford and fit into my schedule.

Originally Spousal Unit Don and I had hoped that we could make a big day of it, get a nice hotel room and eat at a fancy restaurant. Of course we hadn't counted on hunting season scaring our dog half to death and the dearth of hotels in the area. Although we had scheduled an evening performance of the Seagull and then Lear as a matinee the next day, we ultimately decided to drive back and forth to Minneapolis and check on the dog rather than spending hundreds of dollars on kenneling, hotels and such.



I had mixed feelings about the Seagull. I was sleepy and somewhat dismayed by the emotional quality of the characters in the Chekov play. The production was directed by Trevor Nunn a very dependable and in fact exciting director, but somehow the first part of the play in particular found me uninterested and dismayed. As the tragic net began to tighten things got better and I think the quality of the acting also became more nuanced. Voices warmed up and became louder and more understandable and by the end I felt I was watching the kind of production to which I had become accustomed from RSC. The pictures are links to the RTSC web site - the one above shows Nina, the "Seagull" of the title, after she has been caught and tormented by the writer Trigorin pictured below with his actress lover Arkadina.



Both Frances Barber and Gerald Kyd do a marvelous job, Barber as the overly-dramatic actress and Kyd as the jaded but young writer, who knows that the vampiric price of his temporary pleasure will be the destruction of the felicity and buoyancy of the young woman Nina who worships his celebrity and brilliance. Romola Garai's Nina semed to me to be a bit too evenly exuberant and unnuanced, but was energetically performed with the youthful joie de vivre required of the role.



Of course one of the high spots of the performance was Ian McKellen's Sorin. Here he is in all his aged glory looking somewhat like a disgruntled Donald Sutherland. Sorin's plaint throughout the play is that he has never really lived his life, Of course those around him strive to find happiness and succeed no more than he, while discovering a great more misery than joy in the world as conceived by Chekov.

Naturally, what I was really looking forward to was Lear, with McKellen playing the title role. Shakespeare is where RSC excels and I was not disappointed. McKellen does a remarkable job of portraying the poor foolish monarch who like his counterpart Sorin just wants to enjoy his life after years of government service and who, like so many of us, thinks that asking for people to speak their love will comfort us. Of course there is no life without responsibility as Lear soon discovers and no believing people whom one asks to speak their love, because they have only said so because they were asked and hope for some reward. For me Lear is the most painful and truthful of the Shakespeare plays with its message that we can only persist and hope to endure.



McKellen is powerful, but with nunace, as is his fool played by Sylvester McCoy. McCoy is very difficult to understand as he sings most of the Fool's songs. This is typical however and I almost always have difficulty understanding the Fool's words. I would like more pauses in the dialogue, but of course at 3 hours and 40 minutes it is already a lumbering mammoth of a play and needs some speeding up rather than additional slowing down.



Ben Meyjes does a creditable role as Edgar (seen above in his avatar of Poor Tom and although I was disappointed with the performance of Edmund the bastard son. I almost always am. Few seem to really understand how to have an evil twinkle when singing the praises of bastardy. The role almost always goes to a slick looking young man who needs just a little more ripening in terms of seeming to understand and believe the maliciousness of the ambitious elder son. Monica Dolan shines as Regan and Barber is a wonderfully cold and calculating Goneril. Kent played by Jonathan Hyde is the real center of the play and is strong enough to bear the weight of being the representative of moral goodness and duty upon his back. William Gaunt's Gloucester is also wonderful. He is decency and the echo of the foolishness of age, as he like Lear trusts the wrong child and pays for his blindness.

I always wonder that Edgar at the end can have so much respect for the older generation when both representatives Lear and Gloucester have been so foolish and incapable of sight. Edgar in the final lines of the play asks us to speak what we feel and not what we ought to say - Cordelia of course does this and it precipitates the tragedy. I don't know if Shakespeare is suggesting that telling people we love them would help prevent insecurities that cause disasters, but perhaps it is just a question of speaking truth to power. In either case I couldn't agree with him more and if it is simply fate that things will go wrong, then I guess we can fall back on those other truths of the play - learning to persist and endure.