King Lear (review)

"Shakespeare wrote too many lines for that play," said the 15-year old schoolboy sitting in front of me, as the actors left the stage. ("Dude, I know," was his seatmate's reply.) And while adolescent males are hardly the prime audience for Jacobean tragedies delineating the ruins of age and grief, the kid had a point. Even at its best, Lear is a long play, and by the time its protagonist ascends, Gloucester-like, toward death, audiences have been engaged with his weakening bombast for the better part of two acts. Watching the diminished, frail King cradle his dead Cordelia in his arms, audiences should be equally exhausted, spent with the effort of watching his slump toward inevitable pathos since his "Nothing will come of nothing." Lear should, in fact, feel exactly as long as it is. But just as Gloucester never really ascends Dover and never truly falls, neither did William Webster (Lear) in Joseph Ziegler's Lear; rather, he began and ended the play on the same, time-ravaged note, a doddering, petulant old man who can no longer get his way. Right from the start, Webster's Lear appeared less than majestic, his gravitas immediately marred by a shrillness accompanying his pronouncements of Cordelia and Kent's banishments. Five acts with such a Lear is too long indeed.

The seeming over-length of the production found its root in Ziegler's conception of the play as a domestic tragedy. His casting of a middle-aged Goneril (Nancy Palk) and Regan (Brenda Robins) to tyrannize the visibly-younger Cordelia (Patricia Fagan) hinted at a bitterness that found its origins in blended family life. In an interview, Palk admitted that the actors conceived of Cordelia as the product of Lear's second marriage, offering an effective and powerful motivation behind Goneril and Regan's step-sisterly invective: "Lear's bias toward her is an annihilation of our mother's memory" (NOW Magazine Vol. 25 No. 53). Goneril's desperation for her father's affection was palpable, and scenes between her and Lear bore the weight of a lifetime of disappointment and rejection, making Lear's comparisons between his daughters a matter of recurrent abuse rather than a new phenomenon. The production's take was compelling, but uneven pacing and casting ultimately buried the domestic emphasis of Lear as a story of a broken family. A prime example was in 1.1.268–283, where the subtle effects of Palk and Robins's combined talents offered a powerful contrast to Lear's nascent senility, making the most of this short but vital scene between the sisters. As they were left downstage by the rest of the court, the polarized relationship between the three women could be seen in the two elders' immediate linking of hands and their indifference to their younger sibling's exile; Goneril and Regan had bonded with each other as a result of Cordelia's monopolization of paternal affection. Through this staging, Cordelia's haranguing disapproval of her elder sisters seemed a childish response to not being included, her self-righteousness as much a defense against bullying as a genuine claim to a higher morality. But enhancing Lear's sibling rivalry requires a light hand to avoid obvious Cinderella parallels that strain against the text. It takes a strong, not a precious Cordelia to withstand Regan's menacing "Prescribe not us our dutie" and respond with a withering couplet—a Cordelia capable of leaving the stage a fatherless child only to return later at the head of an army. Unfortunately, Fagan...