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 The TheatreguideLondon Review

King Lear
Young Vic Theatre Spring 2009

Pete Postlethwaite is one of those skilled and admired character actors who are the backbone of British theatre, film and TV, one who can be relied on to be the best thing in any show he's in.

But what of that almost unclimbable mountain that is King Lear? Would Postlethwaite bring a special reality and immediacy to the role with his everyman persona? Or would the passions and tragedy of the role be beyond his grasp? The answer to both of those last questions is Yes.

At his best Postlethwaite releases the King from the cushion of all that high poetry and passion, and shows us a human-sized old man in pain. But everything else we expect from the play - a sense of larger-than-life, heavens-threatening tragedy - proves outside the actor's natural scope.

And at just moments under four hours, the evening may be too much of too little for all but the most dedicated Shakespeareans or Postlethwaite fans.

Postlethwaite is at his best at the beginning and end of the play, making the Lear of the first act more like an old-fashioned working-class father than a king, more perplexed than enraged when his daughter doesn't play by the script he had imagined. And from the awakening and reunion with Cordelia on, he makes us believe in a man who has gone through some sort of personal hell to achieve a kind of wisdom and peace.

One of my touchstone moments comes just before the Storm Scene, when Lear attempts to curse his two elder daughters and realises in mid-sentence that he has nothing to threaten them with, and Postlethwaite captures all the shock and pathos of a strong man suddenly discovering his impotence.

But almost everywhere else in the play, Lear's anguish and anger and madness all prove too big for the little man Postlethwaite is playing. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Storm Scene, when director Rupert Goold gives Lear a hand microphone and choreographs an odd ballet around him, implicitly confessing that the words themselves are not generating the energy the moment demands.

Elsewhere, Rupert Goold casts and directs some interesting variants on what Lear veterans might expect. It is nice to see in John Shrapnel a stronger and less wimpy Gloucester than the norm, and in Nigel Cooke a more thoughtful Kent.

Caroline Faber's Goneril is traditionally cold, though Charlotte Randle's Regan plays like one of the coarser slags out of Eastenders. Forbes Masson works nice variations on what has become the expected sadder-but-wiser Fool and Jonjo O'Neill makes Edmund more a cheeky scamp than black villain.

On the other hand, Tobias Menzies' Edgar doesn't really come into his own until the late scenes guiding his blinded father, and Amanda Hale's Cordelia is all but invisible.

Setting the play in modern dress adds little, and sets up a few pointless and jarring anachronisms, like having Goneril's love letter to Edmund be a videotape and forcing the brothers to duel with toy swords. For some reason Goold makes Goneril pregnant at the start, giving birth in the course of the play. This repeatedly makes nonsense of the text, as when Lear curses her with sterility, or when the tragic ending is nullified by the reminder that there's a legitimate heir waiting just offstage.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - King Lear - Young Vic 2009