Running at over three hours and with a cast of more than 20, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s King Lear is a fittingly epic production. Laced with a dark, sinister atmosphere, David Farr directs Greg Hicks in a physical performance that is as captivating as it is harrowing.
Set amongst the corrugated iron and heavy metal windows of a dilapidated warehouse, Farr’s King Lear exists in its own time and reality. Women sweep around the stage in medieval gowns, while messengers dress like Edwardian butlers and soldiers wear the familiar uniforms of World War One soldiers. Harsh florescent strip lights bear down upon the actors in some scenes, flickering chandeliers in others. Pistols are drawn against swords.
Amongst the sandbags, shadows move around behind the vast lit windows and the stage is frequently plunged into a spooky half-light creating a production that never allows the audience to feel comfortable or safe from impending shocks. Hicks inhabits this space with a steely anger and the point of his decent into insanity is unrecognisable, as his initial rage bleeds seamlessly into madness.
It is an exhausting performance that sees Hicks twitching and shaking, wired with nervous energy to the point of bursting as the audience waits with bated breath for his next move. Often standing centre stage, he is literally ganged up on by a cast which become animalistic in their thirst for power. Physically changing during the performance, what begins as a portrayal of a regal leader ends up as a vision of a shrunken old man.
As his treacherous daughters Goneril and Regan, Kelly Hunter and Katy Stephens are portrayed as polar opposites only united in their unsavoury desires. Hunter is cold, stern and pale as the oldest daughter while Stephens’s sexualised take on a red-lipped, vampish Regan is quietly frightening. When the grotesque eye-gouging scene occurs, her glassy eyed, calm reaction is a horrific insight into the greed at the heart of Shakespeare’s play.
Hicks receives strong support from a cast that also includes a heart wrenching Sophie Russell as Lear’s devoted fool, who, dressed in orange with a pale, chalky ghoulish face, looks like a Vermeer painting against the cold metal backdrop, and Geoffrey Freshwater as the fated Earl of Gloucester. But as with all productions of this most loved tragedy, the stage wholly belongs to Lear, and in this production, Hicks.
CM