Enduring the German play at the Royal Court last night, which outlasted its welcome by about an hour (the running time is an hour), I was still pondering the virtues of the Young Vic King Lear which is fat and generous in its theatricality where The Stone at the Court is skinny and mean-minded.

Director Rupert Goold found his golden boy status under critical scrutiny when this production opened at the Liverpool Everyman last year.

Too many gimmicks, they cried, citing the unweeded football terrace, Goneril’s pregnancy before the sterility curse, the Fool “singin’ in the rain” and the ironic use of Mrs Thatcher’s St Francis of Assisi’s prayer when she took office in 1979: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony…”

I’d heard reports that Pete Postlethwaite was unhappy and that Goold was trimming the show to suit the critics. How pathetic, I thought, where’s your mettle, man? First you re-tread Oliver! wearing Sam Mendes’ boots, now this…

I was wrong. Goold’s cut only the Thatcher speech and everything else seems perfectly AOK. This is a great revival, full of flair and intelligence, not gimmicks, and it’s only ever accessible in the best possible way.

There’s some clever restructuring of the play’s second half, and two intervals which create a mythic triptych effect of Lear’s journey: family troubles, cruelty and homelessness, then death and destruction.

And although Amanda Hale is a little under-articulated as Cordelia — that was her problem to start with, I suppose — there are some really superb performances from Tobias Menzies and Jonjo O’Neill as Edgar and Edmund, John Shrapnel as Gloucester and from Caroline Faber and Charlotte Randle as a brilliantly contrasted double act of Goneril and Regan.

Pete Postlethwaite — he used to be Peter, surely he’s a Pet soon? — is the best grumpy, humorous, potato-faced pathetic old pensioner of a Lear I’ve ever seen, blazingly open to the audience, constantly renovating the role in his shortie raincoat, floral dress and parasol and the microphone delivery of Blow Winds having nearly done it “My Way” earlier on.

John Gielgud was once asked what you needed to play Lear. He said a light Cordelia. Amanda Hale’s no sack of spuds, but Pete can’t carry her on because of the awkward access to the terraces from the director’s box. So somebody else does, a real flaw in the staging, and not improved when the two of them sit propped up like dossers on the stony staircase.

A packed Young Vic audience lapped it all up on Saturday night, and I couldn’t help feeling that they’d have all got so much more out of the play than at Trevor Nunn’s grandiose recent revival for the RSC, or even the excellent Globe version last summer with David Calder finding another dimension.

I found myself sitting next to a charming young Brazilian professor of literature who knew the play inside out and was particularly taken by Tobias Menzies whom he’d seen in the television series Rome. I only had to mention Indira Varma in the same series, and he was off on a rhapsodical treatise on how she was acting so beautifully with her bare shoulders in Twelfth Night.
 
There was no such company at the Royal Court. Just Kenneth Cranham grunting at me as I pushed my way to the exit, “What the hell you gonna say about that one, then, clever dick?”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.