King Lear by Sydney Theatre Company at the Roslyn Packer Theatre (review)

Ever since Peter Brook’s path-breaking 1962 production and 1971 film, there have been, broadly speaking, two obvious routes to the summit of this mountainous drama. The first is to craft a psychological study of a great man failing due to age, madness, and undutiful daughters; the second is to play the tragedy as a study into how seemingly individual plans can have wide-reaching social ramifications. As a Shakespeare scholar, feminist, and ecocritical theorist with Marxist tendencies, I prefer the latter, enjoying dark and pointed social critiques more than productions that plumb the depths of a monarch’s individual despair. So when I heard that the forthcoming Sydney Theatre Company (STC) blockbuster production starring Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush was going to be set on a completely bare stage and be “totally psychological,” I actually rolled my eyes. The study of Lear’s innards is hackneyed; it is in the tradition of Charles Lamb and Harley Granville Barker and, more recently, of Derek Jacobi channeling Orson Welles in the painful 2012 Donmar Warehouse production. I envisaged the Lecoq-trained Rush playing Lear as a fool (given he had already enlivened the King’s Fool twice, in 1978 and 1988), using clowning to symbolize madness. I feared having to endure all five acts.

Fortunately, my concerns were completely unfounded. In fact, far from being “totally psychological,” this production managed to articulate a socio-ecological critique on a bare stage with very few set pieces. The production had all the trappings of a familiar theatricalization of Lear’s emotional state and a simplified representation of its moral universe. Until the interval, which occurred after the blinding of Gloucester, the large proscenium stage of the newly renamed Roslyn Packer Theatre was bare and black; afterwards, it was white and smoky. While the stage looked like it was symbolizing familiar tropes of Lear—a play about one man’s interiority rather than about the whole world, and about the black and white fight between forces of good and evil—something far more complex unfolded. Artful performance and a few simple yet precise theatrical decisions—a microphone, tinsel, wind, rain, black paint—enacted a far reaching, intergenerational, and social critique of inheritance, power, and privilege. Armfield’s Learwas neither a study of an individual man unjustly wronged, nor a study of the play as social metaphor, but rather a timely interpretation of the myopia and selfishness of individuals within the political class. This version of King Learmight best be understood as a studied reply to Margaret Thatcher’s maxim, “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” The production suggested that, tragically and ironically, the individualist fantasy that there is no society will lead to the ruination of both society and the individual. Rush’s performance was, of course, central to the success of this interpretation. His comic capacities brought just enough irony to the eponymous character to allow room for social critique to emanate from his body.

The play began with a microphone on a stand and a spotlight on Robin Nevin, stalwart of the Australian stage, dressed as Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mr President.” Nevin would transform into drag and become a Chaplin-esque Fool by 1.2, but she began by setting the scene for the division of the kingdom in a gold dress and blonde wig. A party! A...