The Shakespeare Code

A Review of King Lear at the Globe Theatre, Southwark

by Trixie the Cat.

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code…

It’s been TEN long years since Your Cat sloped up to the Globe in Southwark….

This was to see the great Michelle Terry play the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost….

Way back then, Michelle and Your Cat met at a supper given by the National Theatre’s brilliant Alexander Teacher, Sue Laurie….

 

We were both in agreement….

The Princess of France really is Queen Elizabeth!!!

(See: ‘The Princess of France is Queen Elizabeth’ )

Michelle is to take over the Artistic Directorship of the Globe Theatre in 2018…..

Great things will happen!

Your Cat has been an ardent supporter of the Globe….

And loved, particularly, Mark Rylance as Cleopatra….

 

BUT – and it’s a big but…….

……productions began to get coarse and cater for..

…..the groundlings ……

……American tourists, mostly, all too eager to be raucous and crude.

Poetry got lost in stage business….

Also the Volunteer Stewards could be overweeningly  bossy….

(Why are volunteers nearly always a pain in the neck?)

However, there was no question that Your Cat would see King Lear….

…starring Kevin McNally….

….who has won world-wide acclaim as Pirate Joshamee Gibbs in the Pirates of the Carribean films..

…..not that Your Cat has ever seen any of the films…..

….She’s far too much of a snob!

[She is, though, a big fan of Johnny Depp…..

….who sometimes drops into her local, the Old Bell in the Kilburn High Road….]

No! Your Cat has been a close follower of Kevin M. since he was a student at RADA…..

….and played a sublimely funny Young Marlowe in Stewart Trotter’s production there of She Stoops to Conquer….

To this day Your Cat remembers him twitching nervously every time Kate Hardcastle clicked her fan.

Now, such is Kevin M’s INTERNATIONAL fame, Your Cat could hardly get in to see the first night….

But the play IS going to be screened in cinemas up and down the land on Thursday, 21st September…..

So book for that if you can’t get into the Globe.

As for his Lear?

 

STUNNING! 

Kevin M. has thrown away all the traditional, monotone, delivery of the part from the past…..

Like Paul Scofield’s dire performance in Peter Book’s dire film….

Kevin M. has realised that the old King really IS…..

…more sinned against than sinning….

He is loved by his followers who are prepared to die for him….

…..Kent, the Fool, Cordelia, Edgar and Gloucester….

……and tell him to his face when he is being an old idiot.

His strength is also his weakness……

 He is a man of utter spontaneity!

His fault has been too much love for Cordelia (Anjana Vasan) – his youngest daughter – and not enough for his other two, Goneril and Regan, splendidly performed by  Emily Bruni and Sirinne Saba…..

This King Lear loves fun and jokes…..

Loves the company and banter of his fool (the highly musical Loren O’Dair)

And makes new friends with ease…..

The banished Kent, for example, incisively played by Saskia Reeves….

 

Kevin M. makes his King an everyman….

He’s EVERYONE’s old rascally father, used to getting his way…..

A bit like Old Steptoe…

 

 

The lesson that Lear has to learn is that two of his own daughters hate him in a way he has never hated anyone in his life.

And it breaks his heart.

He is a blunt old soldier, a man’s man, who has never quite got the hang of women….

Kevin M. is superb in the mad scenes where he takes the place of the Fool – even looks like the Fool –

and plays the crowd like a stand-up comic.

This really is…

…reason in madness….

…..Shakespeare’s satire on the corruption of late Elizabethan and Jacobean life.

Your Cat saw the first night and is confident Kevin M. will grow and grow to sublimity in the lyrical last scenes with Cordelia….

This is the most completely HUMAN Lear you will ever see.

And the production? Nancy Meckler has assembled an excellent cast all round – as articulate as they are ethnically diverse.

Burt Caesar made a wonderfully superstitious Gloucester….

 

A good, loyal man, he is entirely vulnerable to the machinations of his lying, bastard, son  Edmund – played as a cocky, Jack the Lad, by Ralph Davis….

….as is his legitimate son, Edgar – played by Joshua James as a nice-but-dim, camp, aristocrat.

The cast bangs drums during the action which creates wonderful effects for the storm scene and battle. 

But what an uncompromising play this is!

Shakespeare goes right against his sources and has the Baddies win.

It is The Shakespeare Codes belief that the Bard was going through a period of dark despair when he wrote the play.

He had been cast out by his patron and lover of fifteen years, the Earl of Southampton….

 

….after the birth of his son in 1605…..

….just as Lear in the play is cast out.

See: ‘Sonnet 126 Decoded’

The characters in the play think that things are so bad, the world must be coming to an end….

…..as people did in the last, dark years of Queen Elizabeth.

The play shows it just needs a handful of evil people to seize power to make everyone’s life a misery.

But those evil people will finally turn against each other and destroy themselves.

And everywhere there are shown to be ordinary, decent people willing to come out of the shadows to help….

…..even at risk to their own lives.

In fact the play and this production – and Kevin M’s towering performance – prove the truth of Philip Larkin’s great line:

What will survive us is love….

‘Bye now…

 

Brothers and Sisters of The Shakespeare Code might also like:
The Background to ‘Lear’ and the Original Ending.