King Lear performed by the Donmar Warehouse (review)

This review is based on two experiences of watching Michael Grandage’s 2010 production of King Learfor the Donmar Warehouse, neither of them at the theater itself. The first is of the NT Live broadcast of the production on February 3, 2011, which I watched as part of an audience at the Harbour Lights Picturehouse, Southampton, jotting down some notes immediately afterwards. The second is of the recording of the broadcast held at the National Theatre archive in London, which I viewed in early 2014. The two experiences were different in numerous respects.

The NT Live screening in Southampton was one of the first such broadcasts I had seen, and I was struck at the time by the hybridity of the event. It was unlike the traditional cinema routine, and more like theater, from the start: spectators had to book in advance, our seats were numbered, and at £15, the ticket price was much higher than usual. As the Southampton audience amassed, we watched our counterparts taking their seats at the Donmar (I overheard one confused spectator behind me asking, “Is that here, or there?”). Before the play started, a documentary film tantalized us with what we were missing, describing the smallness and intimacy of the Donmar space. Then, rather suddenly, King Learbegan.

Unlike many of the other NT Live Shakespeares (notably Nicholas Hytner’s productions at the Olivier), Grandage’s King Learwas a pared-down, non-naturalistic production that drew attention to its own theatricality. Its set was composed of plain wooden boards daubed with white and grey paint, which covered the floor, ceiling, and three walls. Scene changes were achieved simply through light, sound, movement, and speech: in act three, for example, lights flashing through the cracks between the set’s planks evoked rain and lightning, just before Derek Jacobi’s Lear, with his eyes closed, delivered the famous storm speeches in a ferocious whisper (3.2.1–9, 14–24).

Robin Lough’s mediation of the production reflected this theatricality, but only to an extent. Long takes on a single moving camera (during Lear’s curse to Goneril and Regan, for example) managed to convey a sense of the space’s three-dimensionality. Sudden cuts from filmic close-ups to long shots or glimpses of the audience had an oddly dislocating effect, not unlike Brechtian alienation. The production’s signature shot—a moving camera slowly closing in on a single speaking figure—tended to work well as a means of constructing the speaker as a character deserving of audience sympathy (for example, Kent at 2.2.158–71, or Gloucester at 3.7.55–65), while the reverse movement—seen, for example, on the slow zoom out as Regan articulated her desire to marry Edmund (4.5.30–40)—had, perhaps, the opposite effect.

The broadcast sometimes understated the production’s use of its live audience. There were no shots at all of the audience during Alec Newman’s first soliloquy as Edmund, though he was clearly gesturing towards them as he asked, “Why brand they us / With base? With baseness, bastardy?” (1.2.9–10). The same was also true for most of his second soliloquy (1.2.118–33). As the latter drew towards its conclusion, however, the broadcast made use for the first time of a particular camera angle, filming the Donmar’s thrust stage from behind the heads of the spectators on one side of it. This shot, which would be repeated at various moments as the play progressed, showed the actor standing in the middle of a watching audience. It...