On ‘Lear,’ Laughs, And The Indignities Of Age
Simon Godwin Goes For The Groundlings In An Oddly Funny Take On A Tragedy
King Lear By William Shakespeare Directed by Simon Godwin At the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Klein Theatre through April 8
As an alt-weekly theater critic back in the day, I was rarely in the business of bottom-lining the shows I reviewed. I usually had the luxury of noodling on texts and themes at some length — of describing performances and stage pictures and directorial approaches until readers had enough information to make up their own minds. And whether I was praising a production or puncturing its pretensions, I’d always try to do it colorfully enough that even the dubious could find an image or argument that would make them think, I should really check that out for myself.
There were exceptions, as when I suggested selling a child or two to snag a seat to see Roger Guenveur Smith in A Huey P. Newton Story. But they were relatively few.
I don’t think I ever felt moved to declare something “The best _____ I’ve ever seen,” is what I’m getting at. And despite what others have said about Simon Godwin’s eccentrically calibrated new staging of King Lear at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, I’m not going to start now.
What I will say are these things:
Patrick Page, in the title role, is possessed of a voice like a Bösendorfer Imperial, encompassing notes and colors, especially in the lower register, that lesser instruments simply can’t produce. And he plays the thing like Horowitz at his Moscow homecoming — which is to say with a virtuoso’s sly relish at his own range and power, but always with impeccable style; with an occasional showy flourish and more than one ear-pinning roar, but always with utter clarity.
The twinned reunion scenes toward evening’s end —in which the humbled Lear reconnects with the blinded Gloucester (Craig Wallace) and then with the wronged Cordelia (Lily Santiago) — play with surpassing grace. In the former, I gasped at one wryly lyrical bit of stage business involving a paper crown, a red nose, and a posture shift that suddenly frames Lear as a figure out of commedia. I lost my composure entirely in the latter, recognizing my own 80-year-old father in the frailty of the figure on that medical-tent gurney, thinking about my own fractious relationships with family, wondering if I’d have Cordelia’s generosity of spirit.
Wallace’s Gloucester, Todd Scofield’s Oswald, Matthew J. Harris’s Edgar/Poor Tom, and Michael Milligan’s Fool all contribute nuance to the layer of the play that’s always struck me as most interesting: its portrait of power-addicted elders fending off challenges from ruthless heirs tired of waiting in the wings; of throne-gamers finding or forgetting their better selves in a nation whose ordinary people watch shivering on the sidelines; of a political elite coming to grips too late with the consequences of its choices.
And yet.
Simon Godwin, the (relatively) young new artistic director of the STC, has stripped his Lear of much that fills out that portrait. His brisk edit tilts the drama toward the soapy and interpersonal, away from the heady and political. And even on that more limited canvas, the strokes he applies are broad to the point of coarseness.
Lear’s elder two daughters (Rosa Gilmore as Goneril, Stephanie Jean Lane as Regan) are left to drive much of what conflict remains, but here they read less as cunning antagonists than cartoon vipers — an impression underlined by the Cruella de Villainess* ensembles they’ve been saddled with by costumer Emily Rebholz (Broadway’s Jagged Little Pill).
In the same vein, Gilmore, Lane, and Julian Elijah Martinez have been encouraged to play the deadly three-way courtship dance between the sisters and the unscrupulous Edmund for smutty laughs — a directorial choice that extends nearly, and awkwardly, to Edmund’s literal last gasp. Martinez delivers a dying line that’s usually played straight as an audience aside instead; the text, unfortunately, requires that he try to pivot immediately to pathos with his next words. The turn is way too much of a hairpin for him to negotiate.
Look, Lear is a beast of a play, an intricate and idiosyncratic mechanism that’s part pseudohistory, part political manifesto, part sociological study, and part domestic tragedy. It’s no small accomplishment to make all those parts move smoothly together; Tony-winning director Sam Gold famously couldn’t figure out how to unify the 2019 Broadway staging in which he set the wildly charismatic Pedro Pascal, the mesmerizing Ruth Wilson, the formidable Elizabeth Marvel, and no less a Shakespearean than John Douglas Thompson to spinning haplessly around the voracious gravity-sink of Glenda Jackson’s Lear.
And I can certainly understand why a motivated theatermaker, keen to goose a complacent audience into thinking of an established company in new ways — especially when every company and audience is still languishing in the post-Covid doldrums — might want to come at Shakespeare with a lighter touch, with a casual air, at a speedy clip.
In this instance, though, it feels like Godwin has lost sight of something crucial: For all its rococo qualities and its tasty soap-opportunities— the famous eye-gouging, the doubled disguisings, the brotherly backstabbings and the sweet sisterly poisonings — King Lear is centrally and evermore the tragedy of King Lear — crowned fool, clay-footed monument, master each moment of less and less of everything he surveys.
In Patrick Page — star of Broadway’s Hadestown, green-clad villain of both How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, an actor I’ve seen play Claudius, Iago, and Macbeth without breaking the faintest sweat, a genuinely terrific human being whose own character arc has given him real insight into faltering bodies and struggling souls — Godwin has been blessed with a Shakespearean so gifted, so confidently rangy, so attuned to language and line and tone and the deeply human qualities of even the playwright’s most wretched characters, that there was never a question of his rising to meet the occasion.
That this isn’t the best Lear I’ve ever seen** is entirely because the occasion hasn’t risen to meet him.
*I take that back. The reference I was grasping for isn’t so much the puppy-stalking fashion victim of 101 Dalmatians as the tightly clad, formidably curved Natasha Fatale of Rocky and Bullwinkle. If either of those mental images work for you in the context of parricide (and sororicide!), you may enjoy this production more than I did.
**Stacy Keach anchored a 2006/2009 staging for Robert Falls whose complexity, ambition, and grubby, sweaty nihilism absolutely blew me away. But that whole “best” thing still makes me queasy.