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The TheatreguideLondon Review
King Lear
Roundhouse January-February 2011
Greg Hicks is an actor I have admired since his days as an RSC spearcarrier more than 30 years ago. He brings a reality, an authority and a forcefulness - along with intelligent and beautiful verse-speaking - to every role, frequently stealing scenes even when he's not the central character (c.f. his Soothsayer in this RSC season's Antony and Cleopatra).
But for the first time I've found a limit to his talents. He can't play weak and generate pity.
His Lear is a strong man, both physically - he comes in from hunting in an early scene with a wild boar slung across his shoulders - and psychologically. He opens the play with a joke, quickly establishing his dominance over the court, and the love test is a confidently self-indulgent game.
His rage, first at Cordelia and then in turn at each of his other daughters, is powerful and frightening, and he stands up to the elements in the storm scene calmly daring them to make him flinch.
What is missing, though, is any sense of Lear being shaken by his daughters' mistreatment and his own growing awareness of his errors.
The Fool (a nicely loving characterisation by Sophie Russell) tries in vain to break through his confidence, and though we're told he's mad in the hovel scene, we just don't see it.
And so the whole emotional spine of the play - Lear's breakdown and then his superhuman fight back up to a new wisdom too late - just isn't there for us to believe, feel and be shaken by.
When Hicks reappears on Dover Beach with flowers in his hair and his trousers falling down, we might almost take it as a return to the first scene's clowning rather than the unbearable horror it should be.
The awakening and reunion with Cordelia and the final scene have such innate power that they would be moving if I played them, and Hicks does them expertly. But that extra quality, the sense of a man at the absolute end of all that a human can bear, just isn't there - and that's where the heart of the play must be.
(Of course I'm being unfair. No one says an actor has to be able to do everything equally well. Gielgud couldn't do macho, Scofield couldn't do stupid. Greg Hicks doesn't disgrace himself in this role. He just reaches his limits in one area, and thus doesn't succeed as fully as another actor, probably not as strong as Hicks in other roles, might.)
Elsewhere the performances are solid without being especially insightful or memorable. Tunji Kasim's Edmund twirls his moustachios in near-Panto villainy, though Charles Aitken is more successful than most in showing us the suffering Edgar beneath the ramblings of Poor Tom. Kelly Hunter's Goneril is marginally softer than Katy Stephens' Regan, and Samantha Young's Cordelia hardly registers.
As is frequently the case with updatings, setting the play in the First World War neither adds nor detracts anything.
Gerald Berkowitz
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Review - King Lear - RSC at Roundhouse 2011
