Play review: King Lear

The Dutch theatre system knows four major, subsidised, national theatre companies, five medium-sized theatre companies, including Toneelgroep Maastricht, and a whole series of smaller companies. Toneelgroep Maastricht is based in Limburg, the southernmost province of the Netherlands, although it also tours the Netherlands and Flanders. When Toneelgroep Maastricht announced they were doing King Lear, this did not immediately cause a great stir, despite that King Lear is one of the most popular Shakespeare plays on the Dutch stage. Although Hamlet holds an almost untouchable number one position, having over sixty professional productions by Dutch theatre companies after World War II, King Lear ranks second, together with productions of Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Twelfth Night. What did cause a stir in the Netherlands was that the Dutch actor Huub Stapel would be taking on the title role. Stapel is ranked among the five best actors in the country, lauded for his natural way of acting, devoid of any grand gesturing. Although he had never yet taken on a Shakespeare role, his decision, at the age of sixty-three, to play Lear, arguably the most challenging of Shakespeare roles, caused quite a buzz in the Dutch media. Stapel himself admitted that the very idea seemed to cause him the occasional panic attack, as he wondered if he would be really up to it. He argued that for him the complexity of playing Lear was caused by the fact that he found it incredibly hard to fathom what really went on in the man’s mind:

With Lear I am always thinking, why does he do that, why does he cast away his daughter Cordelia, the only one who is being honest with him? I have played the role now some seventy times, and it still puzzles me. Is it dementia that is taking over? How can you be such an idiot? However, then his actions are followed by regret and madness. So I suppose that is the challenge of the role, you have to be able to switch very quickly, from one mood to another, from utter insanity to deepest sorrow.

While the dementia was certainly visible in the production, with Lear’s forgetfulness, suspicion, and mood changes as well-known aspects of the disease, the production went beyond that. The director, Servé Hermans, was fascinated by the topic of children fighting their fathers and in the process hurting them much more than strictly necessary. For him, King Lear represented ‘the blackest, the most horrible tragedy which Shakespeare ever wrote, in particular, because it is about family; it is about severing those ties that are closest and that makes it an incredibly ruthless play’. The opening scene immediately reflected this grim outlook, as the stage was dominated by a huge, concrete, two-storey bunker on the left-hand side, based on the black and white photo series Atlantic Wall by photographer Stephan Vanfleteren. Lear was standing in the bunker, addressing his court and daughters, who were all dressed in grey and black, most of them wearing long, dark trench coats. One of the most striking aspects of the production was the average age of the actors. Except for two relatively young actors, who, respectively, played Cordelia and the messenger, the age of the other actors varied between fifty and sixty-five. It was a stage filled not only with grey coats but also with grey hair and bald heads. It made for some textual oddities, as when Lear cursed a lined and weathered Goneril, barely younger than himself, and told her she would not carry any children. Or when he accused her of ‘being ashamed when you see my grey hairs’. However, the effect of an elderly cast was mainly intriguing, as it moved the visual effect of production away from the more traditional approach of ambitious children wanting to take over from the older generation. The apparent age of Goneril and Regan highlighted that it was not so much youthful ambition, but something seemingly deeper, decades-old family frustrations which had ripened and soured in time, and now coming to the fore in horrible force. As such, the theme of destructive family relationships that the director was aiming for came across much more strongly in this production.

Within this context, it was logical that the production, unlike many other Dutch adaptations of King Lear, chose not to reduce the importance of the sub-plot of Edmund, Edgar, and Gloucester. Initially, the dramaturge was asked to cut the play by half to allow for a production which was lengthwise still palatable for the audience. In the end, he only cut about one-third of the lines, leaving the sub-plot mostly intact. A particularly powerful moment in the relationship between Edgar and Gloucester was a mini-narrative on stage after Gloucester’s foiled suicide attempt. Gloucester and Edgar slowly started jumping up and down and were increasingly enjoying what they were doing, without looking at each other though; as they slowly moved leftwards, accompanied by some jazzy music, Goneril, Edmund, and Albany entered. Edgar and Gloucester remained on stage, seated on a small bench near the side, and kept moving their arms to the rhythm of the music and shouting ‘yeah’ now and again, mainly when Goneril, Edmund, or Albany made an abusive or vengeful remark, as if urging them on in their vindictiveness. They were two separate individuals, father and son, in their ‘enjoyment’ of what was happening and nowhere acknowledging the other’s presence, except for the one, almost accidental, moment where Edgar and his father briefly touched. It made for an extraordinarily moving and fleeting moment of tenderness in an otherwise bleak world, reminiscent of Debussy’s Des pas sur la neige. In this world, the Fool was not very funny either, and the actor, Wilfried de Jong, who is also a well-known cabaret artist in the Netherlands specifically opted not to make the Fool humorous, but somewhat cynical and darkly philosophical. In the end, Edgar took on the kingship in total reluctance, while his body spasms demonstrated the lasting and continuing damage to his person. There was no good ending, no humour, no catharsis; there was madness, loss, darkness, cruelty, hopelessness, and a sense of what might have been in a better world. But it was not this world. Although I was impressed with the production, I was happy to leave the theatre.