After Phyllida Lloyd was done with Julius Caesar down the street and Fiona Shaw had gotten Eugene Onegin in shape across the river, they got together at BAM for their one-woman + dancer staging of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. As we saw in Julius Caesar, Lloyd likes to mess with audience perceptions.
So as the audience was entering the Harvey and getting settled, I was up in the wayback reading in the program book a profile of the late Richard B. Fisher, major arts donor whose name adorns two buildings – I’d met him once at a wedding reception at the Elks Lodge in Hoboken (no, really), but that’s another story – when a familiar voice next to me asked a bunch of college-age kids across the aisle if they wanted to come and sit down front. You wouldn't refuse a direct invitation from Fiona Shaw herself, so off they went.
But there was a price, they had to go up on stage and try on hats.
There were two hats, a tall, elegant, beaver one, for the Wedding Guest, and a beat-up felt one, for the Ancient Mariner, and that one came with a staff. Shaw would choose someone, put the Wedding Guest hat on them, then the Mariner hat, and she’d hand them the staff and position them in a stoop. She’d assess. After a few rounds with different audience members, she chose another, a lanky young man, to go through the same drill, indicated to the still-settling audience that this one had the right stuff, there was a ripple of applause, and suddenly the narrative began.
“It is an Ancient Mariner…”
He was a plant, of course, the dancer.
The stage was bare except for some crates stage right, a toy ship downstage, and a canvas sheet hanging at the back that looked like it had seen some heavy weather in its day. The state of the sail – raised, lowered, billowing or slack – along with shifts in lighting and Mel Mercier’s soundscaping (his was the indelible, Wozzeck-like noise crescendo in Medea a few years back), underscored the subtle changes and key events in the narrative.
The hats traded off between Shaw and the dancer, Daniel Hay-Gordon, as the narrative shifted between the Mariner’s tale and the Wedding Guest’s reactions. So Hay-Gordon got to dance both Mariner and Wedding Guest, albatross in flight or hanging, the crew dropping dead by ones or the dead reanimated, slimy things and undersea spirits, and pin-stepping, skeletal Death of the rictus grin. Kim Brandstrup’s choreography was an epic in itself, and held the stage well against Fiona Shaw’s fierce way with the language.
That language is 3D and tactile, so Shaw’s approach wasn’t a reading but an embodiment, lyrical and abrasive, dry-throated and terrorized. Beyond sailing the lines with their shifting tone and meter, she had her own amount of rope-hauling, zombie-fighting and self-crucifixion to do, and she had Wotan’s own skill with a staff – she slammed it on the stage and the bay split and the ship went down like lead, as indicated.
The denouement, if you recall, is the Mariner’s description of his compulsion to tell the story over, not just to anyone but to one he knows on sight to be the right one. The actor has the Mariner’s hat, the dancer the Wedding Guest’s, and he sits slumped on a crate, still listening. The sounds of the ending wedding encroach, and the Wedding Guest rises to go in but the Mariner turns him “from the bridegroom’s door”, so, sadder and wiser, he goes back to his seat in the audience. He picks up the coat he left there and leaves, slope-shouldered and slow, through the exit at the back, while the actor chooses another from the front row to try the hat and staff.
Between the actor and the dancer, the Mariner and the Wedding Guest, it was a full evening’s performance packed into a swift three quarters of an hour.
Indomitable hunts those damned mounseers all the way to Brooklyn: Michael Grandage's Glyndebourne Billy Budd drops anchor on Lafayette Ave for four performances only (!) in February.
Closer to now, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music students tackle Werther, with live videocasts tomorrow (Oct 25) and Saturday (Oct 26) at 8pm here.
Oh hey, a Mahler 2! The Boston Symphony with Camilla Tilling and Sarah Connolly, from a couple of weeks ago (audio only):
So, for reasons too blah blah woof woof to expound upon, people keep asking me if I'm moving to the Left Coast, and I keep having to tell them "Hell no, I got tickets to stuff." A reasonable response when:
Olympia Dukakis gets her Thirty Years War on, July through August, in Shakespeare & Co's production of Mother Courage, and
Donmar Warehouse in London sends its all-women Julius Caesar to St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn in October, and
The Testament of Mary may have suffered an abrupt decanonization at the hands of Broadway (despite having the best print ad ever), but Fiona Shaw buttonholes the wedding guests for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner at BAM in December as part of its 2013 Next Wave Festival.
Meanwhile, in the Wonders of Technology vein, NTLive has Helen Mirren reprising HMQ in The Audience some time in the next month (depending on where you are), and they've added Kenneth Branagh's Macbeth to the schedule for sometime in July (likewise check local). I find Branagh's Shakespeare tends to shrugworthy, but Alex Kingston's Lady M could be fun.
Also coming down the pike: September it's Othello with Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear, directed by Nicholas Hytner; and in January 2014 Coriolanus browbeats the fickle masses in a production directed by Josie Rourke, with Tom Hiddleston and Mark Gatiss, from the aforementioned Donmar Warehouse.
Finally, the RSC gets in on the game sometime in November with David Tennant's Richard II. Are you sensing a theme?
It’s started before you arrive. At the door, the usher
herself tells you to turn off your cellphone, because the play has already
begun. You look up and realize there’s a street party on. A band is playing
township jive, and there’s dancing and singing and waving of flags, and
hand-screened posters with Caesar’s image on them. It’s a d.i.y. political
rally, ANC-style.
The unit set is a stepped concrete structure, like a
development project from some heyday of international aid, now crumbling at the
corners, rebar and wire exposed, with a tunnel entrance in the center. Here
it’s the streetscape where the citizens gather to celebrate the victory of
Caesar over Pompey. Next it will be the stadium where the hero of the hour will
be offered a crown. (Later it will serve for Brutus’s house, the senate, the
hills of the battleground of Philippi).At its height looms a giant bronze statue, facing away toward the People, right hand raised in blessing or salute. We’re in the Democratic Republic of Rome, some time
after its liberation. There have been challenges survived, other things
endured. The present seems stable and the future seems bright. The only hint of
the gathering disaster is in the crowd, among the dancers, the one painted in
ash, the one who talks to spirits.
When
Flavius and Marullus arrive, they arrive as uniformed men armed with sjamboks
-- men bearing the hallmarks of officialdom, but no friends to this regime.
They berate the crowd for being so quick to change allegiances. Weren’t they
celebrating Pompey not so long ago?It’s our second indicator, beyond the palpable structural decay, that we
haven’t begun at the beginning. Flavius and Marullus break up the crowd. The
next thing we hear about them, they’ve been “put to silence”.
Caesar
(Jeffery Kissoon), dressed in tropical white linen, arrives for the victory
games – the set is now the exterior of a stadium – with the senators and Mark
Antony (Ray Fearon, incidentally also the first Marquis Posa we ever saw). When Caesar hears his name from the crowd, no one has spoken.
It’s in his head, that summons, but the ash-painted dancer – “He’s a
soothsayer,” says Brutus (Paterson Joseph), wryly dismissive -- watching from
above, gives the warning. Caesar doesn’t take it seriously either. Not really.
This
is just one of the points in this production where director Gregory Doran’s
approach works hand-in-glove, this intersection of tradition with a fraught
modernity. Brutus and his fellow conspirators, stoics and skeptics in the Roman
frame of reference, are here more representative of a kind of postcolonial
westernization, underscored in some cases by a particular costume shorthand:
reading glasses, Malcolm X frames. You can imagine these men feeling that the
country is theirs to save by right of the advanced degrees they hold and the
articles they write. In that world, problems are solved by the application of Reason
and Engineering. There is little room for spirits.
Caesar
occupies an area more grey. For him the Soothsayer’s warning isn’t an affront
to Reason, it’s an affront to Image, and Image is everything. His clothing in
that first scene is an ostentatious degree of white. His actions at the games,
as Casca relates them, are all political theater.He continually refers to himself in the third person,
working to create a public image of Caesar as solid as the bronze monument that
ostensibly represents him (more solid and enduring, it turns out, than the man
himself, although pulled down, Saddam Hussein-like, in the political chaos of the second act).
When Caesar abandons this
rhetorical strategy, it’s when he feels he’s on the ropes. He tells Antony a man
like Cassius (Cyril Nri) – overintellectual, overengaged -- is to be feared,
but then is quick to say that he himself, of course, is not afraid of him.
Often this conversation is staged as a sidebar, but here Caesar rates Cassius
publicly, speaking of him to Antony in everybody’s hearing. It’s an unmistakable
display of power: Cassius has also been officially third-personed -- turned
into a public image, though not one to be celebrated -- and he is visibly
terrified.
In some ways, of course, this is Shakespeare’s most relevant
play to our own age and you don’t need to be a student of Shakespeare, or
contemporary African history, to understand what’s at work in Doran’s
conception of it. He places particular emphasis on Mark Antony’s manipulation
of public perception -- the famous speech that is the crux of the play – and
the naivete of Brutus, who, like any Aaron Sorkin dream of liberalism, believes
that the People can be counted on to prefer substance over style. In the end, of
course, they don’t. Brutus speaks his complex rationalizations in elegant prose,
Mark Antony speaks simple lies in magnificent verse.
Did the play need to be placed in a modern African context
to accomplish this degree of contemporary relevance? Maybe yes, maybe no. Guns and olive drab are universal tropes. But
it ends up working brilliantly in the broad spectrum as well as in the details:
things like the “necklacing” of Cinna the Poet, and Lucius serenading himself
to sleep with a kora (which kind of ups the ante on Brutus leaping to save it).
Moreover there is something in the way
the actors employ the language, as well as in their individual performances
(and this was very much an ensemble production), that softens up the text and renders
it crystal clear. I’m not sure whether this was more that the accents used lend
themselves to the particular rhetorical mode of this play, or if it was just
a matter of an ensemble cast inhabiting their lines so completely that
the text comes out lean and unhurried. Probably both. But the end result is it really doesn’t get better than this.
So April is Giulio Cesare month at the Met, since -- apart from the Saturday radio broadcast / HD transmission on the 27th -- they are (according to their schedule) audiostreaming live performances on the 4th, the 9th, and the 22nd. Start times vary, so check the schedule. In between those last two we get a 2nd cast Rigoletto (Gagnidze, Oropesa, Grigolo), and all this, I'm guessing, to avoid overexposing the Ring for once.
Meanwhile, Les Arts Florissants brings Charpentier's David et Jonathas to BAM April 17 - 21. Ticket availability at this point is a bit better than it should be, so if you're in the tri-state that week and think this French baroque thing is behavior that should be encouraged, don't be leaving it all to Handel.
A Room for London, that riverboat artspace lookout post above the Thames, is streaming some of its musical goings-on on its website. Check out Andrew Bird solo. Laurie Anderson moves in this Sunday, and goes live at 5pm GMT, which I think is 1pm ET at the moment is actually noon ET.
According to audited attendance figures, the Opéra de Lyon has been attracting a seasonal average of 96 per cent, of which 45 per cent are people younger than 45 and 25 per cent younger than 26.
Damn! FT interviews Serge Dorny, chief of the properly subsidized Opéra de Lyon, on the strategies of his success.
Plus
Somebody go to this, wouldja?
I got a seven inch incision and that stairway to heaven at the Harvey just ain't happening for me.
Across the stage hangs a curtain and one word projected onto it, Now. It's the first word of the play, of course, "Now is the winter of our discontent...", but it foregrounds the past, marks the beginning of the play as a turning point in a story that has been going on for long years and seven plays previous. All these things have happened, and now... A word that points in both directions. "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York."
But if you're coming in here, at the point where it seems like the wars are all done, you've missed all the context. "...This son of York," he says, and he points over his shoulder to the still image in the newsreel he's turned his back on. He's wearing a paper crown from a cracker and he's armed with a noisemaker. Woohoo. "Grim visag'd War hath smoothed his wrinkled front..." Then he gets up from his chair.
Arduously. He's got a brace on his left leg, which, as it is, is twisted near half way out of its socket. His spine's a mess, too, and his left hand. He uses a cane, it seems to give him extra limbs and moves him like a malevolent insect. He leans on irony a bit too much. Well, actually, more sarcasm. You wonder why anyone would believe him. Sometimes you know they don't,that they're just following form and hoping it'll all come right in the end. Odds aren't good.
If there's an overarching theme to this production, it's the notion of spin, of manipulation of the public image, starting with newsreel footage of King Edward triumphant. Later the focal point of the play will be Richard's engineering of his accession to the crown, which is done via live link, a script, and an audience primed by the Duke of Buckingham (Chuk Iwuji) -- half motivational speaker, half televangelist, all Boar Party operative -- to respond in a particular way. Give the people what they think they want, and you will get what you think you want.
And after that, who cares what anybody thinks. "Thus high, by thy advice and thy assistance, is King Richard seated," says Richard, addressing not Buckingham (as the text would indicate) but us, the audience, who have been his co-conspirators from the beginning. Now, and briefly, confident in his position, Richard announces his new queen's impending death as she sits by, gazing catatonically into the middle distance.
She's lost already, but he won her quick, and not altogether convincingly. "What though I kill'd her husband and her father...", but this is one of the hardest scenes in Shakespeare to manage, you either surf the subtleties, or skim them and shoot for as much unsettling comedy as you can squeeze out of this abrupt, unlikely situation. Actually there are a lot of scenes in the play like that, and Mendes chooses the latter strategy for nearly all of them. I'm not sure whether that indicates lack of commitment or a directorial aim that doesn't quite come off -- like if the production of what is essentially an ensemble piece is built around the title character, and everyone else ends up being secondary.
If that's the case, what's arresting is how much that spotlight throws the women's shadows long: Lady Anne, forced to choose; Queen Elizabeth, forced to lose; the old Duchess, who has seen it all before; and Queen Margaret, like a force of nature, who, seeing it all coming, brings it all into being, cracking bones together like the summoning of war, marking an X on every doorway shut by Richard's bloody policy, until there's only one way out.
Of these tell-tale women, then, Maureen Anderman's old Duchess had the truly hair-raising moment, when she lays a mother's curse on her tainted offspring to his face, and he withers a little bit more under its vitriol: "Bloody thou art and bloody will be thy end; Shame serves thy life and doth thy death attend." There's no more final casting off than this. Thanks, ma.
Elizabeth Woodville, Edward's Queen, probably has the most to do in this play -- Margaret might get the hot speeches, but her course is set. Elizabeth has to manage the slow devolution of her power, and all that entails, including the death of her husband, the murder of her sons, and the targeting of her daughter, in which she is forced to collude. Haydn Gwynne was entirely up to the task.
When it comes to Margaret of Anjou, we're always glad when she's there at all. She has the sharpest poetry to speak, and yet it's not unknown for the role to be eliminated altogether. (As witness the Ian McKellen film version, though here they gave at least some of her lines to Maggie Smith -- those who like her as the Dowager Countess of Grantham should check her out as the Dowager Duchess of York, paragon of badass.) And it's a strange role, no question. What is she still doing there, wandering in among the squabbling victors so long after her own defeat? It can be tough to bring any kind of coherent answer to that question.
Mendes solves it by making her inhabit two worlds at once -- on the one hand, a kind of spirit world where she can observe and move and serve as the conduit of fate; and on the other, when she needs to, materialize and speechify. Gemma Jones, in old army greatcoat, tarnish-crowned and strega-headed, walks the fine line this production gives her and makes it believable, in a way most Margarets aren't though given less to do.
As Lady Anne, Annabel Scholey has the trickiest scene in the play and if, as stated above, it doesn't quite come off, the fault doesn't lie with her. She puts up a serious fight to win that scene, but she never gets the space to work out Anne's transformation of conviction in any kind of reasonable way. In spite of that, she holds her own against a monster, even as the character she plays is caving in to his.
As physically demanding as Sam Mendes' production makes the title role -- when at the end the slaughtered Boar is hoisted up, feet first, like so much bacon to exsanguinate, after three hours of watching him, as they say in Thomas Hardy, "bent round all twisty-ways", it's sort of a relief to see him get in a good stretch -- as physically demanding as it is, Kevin Spacey takes it all at an intense clip from the starting gate. I'm not sure why, and I'm not sure it altogether works, but it's certainly entertaining to watch. In short, don't hope for subtlety, this one's all about the fireworks.
A reminder came down the pike today that tomorrow is Bayerische Staatsoper's live videocast of Don Carlo -- Kaufmann, Harteros, Smirnova, Kwiecien Daniel, and Pape, all if the creek don't rise -- starting at 11:00am, Eastern Time. (5pm CET)
Update: Well, that had its moments, but if you're going with glitter confetti in the auto da fe, there can be no half measures.
Update 1/23: Staatsoper reports 459,000 views of Don Carlo livestream.
Schiller and Verdi tell us power corrupts, but John Webster, Thomas Middleton and their drinking buddies would probably say what corrupts absolutely is just the act of being born, so you might as well poison, stab, and screw (in that combination or any other) as many people as possible, and anyway it's all in good fun. Andrew Dickson muses on the present theatrical ubiquity of Jacobean tragedies. The New York metro area's next opportunity for gleeful exploration of vintage vice will be Cheek by Jowl's Tis Pity She's a Whore, which comes to BAM in March.
Before the Jacobeans' reckless abandon there was Shakespeare's military-political meatgrinder. The Arts Desk has a review of the new film adaptation of Coriolanus. Reviewer Matt Wolf says it's all down to Fiennes and Redgrave. (I'm in just for John Kani, because there really is a world elsewhere.) Over at The New Yorker, Richard Brody is less enamored.
But first, John Simon reviews a new book on Verdi and Shakespeare. Could be good.
And speaking of the latter (or not, if you prefer), as foretold, grim visag'd war comes to Brooklyn in January, and is coming to stay for a couple of months. If one's exchequer weren't quite so...what it is, one could catch the beginning,* then the end, and skip all that business with France in the middle.
Meanwhile Collaborators is out and about in the coming weeks via NTLive. Simon Russell Beale: could have been the next Bond villain but Sam Mendes couldn't scope the Cute and Deadly. So have him as Stalin instead. That'll do. Check your local, as dates and times tend to vary this side of the water.
Update: Suchen Sie Occupy Weimar den Protest? Hier werden Sie die Facebook Seite finden.
Timing, they say, is everything, and what better week for the Berliner Ensemble to bring Die Dreigroschenoper to New York than in the third week of the Wall Street Occupation. Thus it is no surprise that the biggest audience reaction (laughter and cheers) of the evening was for Macheath's gallows oration, and his comparison of the petty criminal to the incorporated criminal, roughly: "We small, middle-class craftsmen, who toil with honest crowbars at the cash boxes of small-time shopkeepers, are being swallowed up by huge corporations, and the banks stand behind them. What is a picklock compared to a share? What is robbing a bank compared to the founding of one?"
Not to belabor the point or anything.
One might think that Robert Wilson's production would get in the way of the piece -- certainly he's been accused of that before. Ben Brantley in the New York Times called it "frost-bitten", and it's easy to paint Wilson productions with that single brush, particularly his Noh-inspired, gesture-heavy extravaganzas of glacial movement and mostly blue color scheme (e.g. Lohengrin). But he doesn't always do things that way, and this is about the most continuously animated production I've seen of his, barring possibly Woyzeck (in which, if the actors weren't getting much of a workout, the people in the lighting booth definitely were). In fact, where Brantley saw in the actors' whitened faces the cold post- WWI irony of George Grosz, I was consistently reminded of Ren & Stimpy. That may say more about the origins of Ren & Stimpy, or it may say more about me. Or it may all be pure coincidence. But there is that heightened cartoonish element inscribed in Wilson's choreography of the characters (of which facial movement is very much a part): the put-upon thieves, the boozy Mrs Peachum, Tiger Brown's happy-dance... In the end, if Wilson's approach puts the play into an emotionally inaccessible realm, well, that's sort of the point, isn't it? The only question then is if the whole Verfremdungseffekt is ultimately undone by Wilson's intriguingly designed stage pictures (cf Atys).
A professor of mine once described the concept of alienation in Epic Theater as "If something happens to draw you in emotionally, then, to derail that reaction, someone gets up and sings a song. Badly." In his review, Brantley compares the Broadway-style misconceptions of previous NY productions unfavorably to the Berliner Ensemble's more...can we say Brechtian without sounding tautological? Right...to their more Brechtian way of doing things, and rightly so. It's surprising how much more interesting those already interesting lyrics get when not approached like it's Wicked. Then, given the strictures of Wilsonian staging, one wonders how much the haphazard feel of the delivery is, like everything else, precisely planned, and how much is purely improvised.
Brantley described longueurs, but I didn't find any, even with the first act clocking in at two hours. If I had any suggestion to make (not that anyone's asking), it would be to find a simpler translation of the text for the supertitles. John Willet's 1976 translation -- meant for performance, not for a gloss -- is funny and fantastically singable, but also wordy and thus often hard to read in fast succession. (Also, much as we love it, he does tend to over-sharpen Brecht's often very blunt language.) As happens with supertitles, this left audience reaction out of synch with the actors' delivery. Some of that is inevitable, but a lot of it might have been mitigated with a more tailored rendering.
It's up through this Saturday but tickets are thin on the ground, so call the BAM box office (718.636.4100)or go Occupy Lafayette Avenue.
It would be hard to calculate precisely the impact William Christie has had on the global opera scene since he founded Les Arts Florissants in the 1970's, so let's just call it wicked. In 1989, when he brought the original run of Atys to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, baroque opera in these parts was considered a curiosity, not a right. Yes, they had done Rinaldo at the Met for Marilyn Horne, and Samson for Jon Vickers. Yes, prior to that there were the occasional trips in the Wayback Machine for sundry singers of note (Joan Sutherland, et al.). But these were few and far between, recordings hard to find if they existed at all, and if you wanted historically informed performances, mostly you were looking at an H. Rider Haggard-style expedition into Darkest Academia. Atys put baroque opera on the map in a place where, for most opera-goers, that territory had long been designated
Our hero returns intact, but to a much altered landscape. Key about this production is the dead-seriousness in the approach to the material, and the focus on the details of period style. Les Arts Florissants have since been party to a certain amount of regie-ish messing about (Robert Carsen's Les Boreades, for instance), but being the leading edge, the Atys production was and is innocent of meta. In fact every opera-lover who finds any whiff of Konzept loathesome should be beating a path to BAM's gate for this, because this is about as untouched as it gets without turning the whole enterprise into a well-embalmed museum piece and/or festival of theatrical health and safety code violations.
So yes, it's a study. And as such it is riveting. And you can see why, in an 80's NY opera landscape -- remember when nobody knew there was a big window in Grand Central Station because it was obscured by an enormous panoramic shot of the Met Turandot? -- so rare a creature as Atys would make a splash. It was opera, Jim, but not as we knew it. This tiny little orchestra with...what are those things? And the static-ness. And the gestural language. The emphasis on blocking, on physical arrangement, on the moment-to-moment stage picture. Not to mention those frequent intervals of leaping about. Perhaps it's a commentary on how quickly baroque opera in the last thirty years has been absorbed into prevailing operatic theatrical trends that on Sunday we were still talking about those things as exotic. But it is also an indicator of how much closer to the mainstream it has all become that the majority of the seven-member Thirdfloorian delegation could tell an archlute from a theorbo.
Like baroque opera, cartographic white-space was also what Brooklyn was for me back in 1989, which is why I never made it down there for the original run, nor for the 1992 revisitation (I was living farther away by then). So a chorus of huzzahs for all those responsible for hauling out the production and putting it back on the road, and particularly to that nice Mr Stanton, who ponied up the cash to make it happen. (On this day of the Granting of Genius Grants, we celebrate people who know what to do with money.) Bravi, everybody. It was worth the wait for a justly legendary production we never dreamed would come our way again.
Reviews of Kevin Spacey's Richard III at the Guardian and the Independent. (He graduates from Buckingham.) Grim-visag'd war descends on Brooklyn sometime in 2012.
So the last report on Donmar Warehouse's King Lear was way back here, from the local arthouse HDcast. Same cast, almost the same barren set for the production's transfer to BAM, but the Harvey is a bigger space than tiny Donmar Warehouse, so we were curious to see how it would translate, both to a bigger theater and to flesh and blood.
Whether it was the effect of less time in the role, or just the camera leaching out a performance, Jacobi's Lear at BAM was more defined than came across on screen. There's a supremely childish edge to this elderly king, and in his elder daughters' interactions with him we can see this isn't anything to do with the onset of old age and wavering cognition -- he has always treated them this way, resorting to juvenile mockery when other modes of manipulation fail. Once the varnish of flattery and gain is scraped away, the fact that this has been the whole of their relationship with him is evident in both the seething impatience they each exhibit, and in the way it boils over. "I gave you all," says Lear. "And in good time you gave it," Regan (Justine Mitchell) replies. The audience gasps at her audacity, but we can understand, too, what motivates such a bald-faced outburst, because they've had to hold their tongues so long, no matter what the old man's treatment of them. "The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash," says Goneril (Gina McKee), describing the "imperfections of a long-ingraff'd condition". We'd probably want to strangle him too, and his reaction to their ultimate rebellion is as non-plussed as that of the man who habitually beats his dog and finds one day it turns and bites him.
Not that one would side with them of course...because, really, Edmund? Seriously?
Among the other things lost in the shuffle between stage and small screen was the Fool as he is elbowed out of Lear's life by the Madman. I'm not sure whether that fell victim to camera editing, or if I just missed it, but on stage it proved a really effective way of explaining the Fool's disappearance from the action, as well as underscoring the descent from purpose-serving lunacy to the abandonment of all purpose. As the King his companion is gradually wrenched from his grasp, the Fool sits splayed against the wall like a disused toy. The whiteface makeup he wears serves both to obscure his features and heighten the horror on them as he watches it all spiral out of control, the face he begins to wipe off as he watches Mad Tom lead the King away to a fate he can no longer share.
Oh and the last thing, also missed in the HD (no surprise, but really, people, what is Hi-Def for?): the sound of Gloucester's gouged-out eyeball hitting the wall when Cornwall flings it. It left a red splotch on the off-white paint as a reminder for the rest of the performance, and there was speculation all the way home on what they had actually used, an as yet unsolved question. Harder than a grape -- it bounced and rolled. Ew.
