Snark Attack

I'm trying to write a reasoned, well-structured and snob-free review of the production of King Lear I saw last night, and it's proving incredibly difficult, both to structure and to sanitize. To get it out of my system, I'm going to vent about it here, and then maybe a) I won't feel the need to be so cruel and b) I can have a starting point from which to edit my thoughts. Huzzah.

First, a confession. Well, two confessions. The first is that, while I firmly believe Shakespeare is meant to be performed, I vastly prefer reading the tragedies to seeing them. They are very, very difficult to perform in a way that sustains interest, or so I am led to believe by the productions I have seen. Second confession is that I have seen less Shakespeare than I should at this point in my Shakespeare-loving career, and as a result this is only the second Lear I've encountered. The first was the superb and all around sublime RSC production with Ian McKellen. That production proved that the play is capable of being performed in a compelling and nuanced fashion, but so that I don't come across as a total snob I'm going to try and refrain from referencing it in my thoughts on the STC's.

Ugh. Where to begin? This production was set in 1990's Yugoslavia, which immediately presents a difficulty since so much of the action of the play is driven by letters being intercepted or going astray. Lear's daughters can afford luscious fur coats but not land-line telephones? Questionable. A minor detail such as this could be forgiven in a stronger production, but when so many problems pile up it just gets added to a very long list.

My major complaint is that the production violated what should be the cardinal commandment of Shakespeare: Thou shalt not be boring. It draaaaaaaaagged through its three hours, devoid of any spark or energy that such a wonderfully complex play is capable of. I asked Gracie, if this was the way you were introduced to Shakespeare, would you want to see more? Her answer was "not really," and that cannot be excused from a company like the STC. You are placing yourself as a premiere company for Shakespeare performance,! You have a responsibility!

Furthermore (and I've ranted about this before), you are doing a straight-forward production. Okay, so you have lots of sex and violence and cars and white body bags (oh, we will get to those my friends). That doesn't mean you are being particularly creative, it just means you have a big budget and a poor editorial eye. It is my strongly held opinion that, if you are doing a traditional (in terms of story telling) production of any Shakespeare play, then you better damn well do a good job of it because you are not saying anything new. We already know that Lear is about war, and destruction and bad things happening to good, bad and generally neutral people. That can't be your "in." The "in" is making those things resonate in a way we haven't or didn't expect to feel, and this production did not do that. It rested on its body bags and oral sex and eye-frying and then gave itself a big ol' pat on the back for being cutting edge, without actually making any audience impact at all.

And it's Lear, for God's sake. It's all there for you! Sex, violence, madness, humor, disguises, war, betrayal, duplicity. Yes, it's a dense play and yes, it's one of the more difficult. In my mind, that doesn't give you a pass. I'm looking at YOU, Robert Falls. You decided to pick one of Shakespeare's most difficult plays, it was your job to live up to the material. You'll get no "A for efforts" from me.

And I'm not even sure what effort was put into this. Two years ago, I saw the Rupert Gould directed Tempest, which took place in the Arctic and featured a walrus, bear skins and Ariel as a trash-can-dwelling ice vampire. I did not like, but still respected Gould's vision because he had one, it was clear and he was committed. I may not have agreed with the world he created, but I saw where his choices came from and how they fit into his overall conception. Falls gets no such respect. His bloody Balkans setting may have been consistent, but his style was not. A choreographed dance after the storm scene? A random god-mic voice over for the last lines of the play? But it was a painfully overwrought 10-minute tribute to his props department's ability to make human figures out of bed sheets that broke me. Clearly wanting us to get the already obvious WAR IS BAD message, he broke what little momentum the second half had accumulated by having members of the ensemble stagger out and pile casualties around Glouscester. It. Took. Forever. And the booming Republican scare music only underlined how melodramatic and ridiculous the whole segment was. Just when I thought it had ended, and was getting over my disappointment that the figures were NOT positioned to spell out "Lear," two army nurses came out and began to, also exceedingly slowly, pitch the dummies into the large trap at the front of the stage. Memo to Falls: I GET IT.

Aaaaand another thing. Shocking moments aren't shocking if you don't give a fig about the people involved. You want to stuff Kent into tires, douse him with gasoline and light him on fire? Go right ahead. You want to pluck out Gloucester's eyes, fry them, and stuff them in his mouth? Eh, it probably won't taste good, but don't let that stop you. Oh, you want to rape your treacherous wife from behind? Okay, but use a condom; you don't know where she's been. To incite true horror or disgust or concern or any emotion about any of these things, you have to establish some kind of emotional connection. Otherwise it's just sadly obvious that you are trying to shock me as a bid for adding "edge" to your production.

The staging is clearly Falls' fault. The lack-luster performances...I don't know who to blame. I didn't feel anyone in the production committed to any kind of character narrative, so all interactions felt superficial at best, especially among the sisters. The moment with the most potential to be affecting was the deaths of Goneril and Regan, but it could have had a lot more punch if there had been a clearer relationship built up between them. As it stood, we only saw they were close at the beginning and not at the end, and that was pretty much the extent of any relationship. Points A and Z and nothing in between.

Keach's performance, I thought, only really got going when he lost his mind, and maybe that's because madness requires no real narrative and inherently prevents connection with those around you. Until the "reason not the need" scene, I felt like I was watching the Macy's Santa reciting Shakespeare quotes at an employee's holiday party. And he was the best! I enjoyed Jonno Roberts as Edmund as well, but that's because Edmund is a sexy part and I'm prone to like him, not because I thought the performance was particularly captivating.

*sigh* In general, the evening left me depressed. This is the best we can do? This? And everyone loves it? Loves it so much that they felt it had to be done again, as opposed to another production that might have said something about something?

And we wonder why Shakespeare is trouble.