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Review of Shakespeare’s King Lear (directed by Gregory Doran for the Royal Shakespeare Company) at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 29 September 2016, and the Barbican Theatre, London, 21 November 2016

The production publicity materials and programme cover for the RSC King Lear directed by Gregory Doran (2016) displayed the face of the king (Antony Sher) staring out but with eyes slightly to his left, as though looking askance at some sudden and untoward event. The monochrome depiction of the grizzled head, which filled the page, gave the illusion that the alarmed, grey-bearded face was floating free from the moorings of the body; indicating perhaps that, among the many cultural works it can do, the play reveals the tragic consequences of losing one’s reason and being isolated from those, be they kith or kin, who would offer the wisdom and love that help to ground the self. Lear, though, has always been a man who has isolated himself, certainly from the “Poor naked wretches” of his kingdom with their “houseless heads and unfed sides” (3.4.28, 30). Doran sought to underscore the play’s social aspects and foreshadow Lear’s realisation that he has “ta’en / Too little care of this” (3.4.32–33) by having a number of actors shuffle on and sit around the playing area as the audience gathered in the auditorium. In their dishevelled state and hooded anonymity, these figures represented the multitude of commoners dwelling beyond the privileged site of political negotiations of Lear’s court: or rather, as the presence of some of them later on the storm-drenched heath suggested, striving to find a place to dwell. This extra-textual prologue was accompanied by a low rumbling soundtrack that suggested forces operating below the earth’s crust and hinted at the impending seismic shift that Lear’s fatal pronouncements in Act 1 would precipitate. These beggars, or “deserving poor” (Healey), were ushered away by a servant who entered in advance of Gloucester (David Troughton), Kent (Anthony Byrne) and Edmund (Paapa Essiedu) and, in this opening dialogue, Essiedu gave clues as to Edmund’s resistance to accepting his role as the “illegitimate” son and established himself as both capable of dissembling and of brooking no humiliation. Having helped his father to don his chain of office – an ironic physicalisation, considering his role in disempowering Gloucester – he then refused the hand that Kent stretched out on “I must love you and sue to know you better” (1.1.29), forcing the latter to withdraw what seemed an ambiguous gesture that combined the proffering of friendship with the expectation of deference. The imagery and sound-score of the remainder of the opening scene set up the fictive world and suggested the different threads of Christian and pagan beliefs and material and spiritual concerns that make up the texture of the play. Lear was carried on aloft in a glass case from upstage centre to choral music, and was accompanied by a procession of servants bearing not green boughs, as might be expected of such pageantry, but bare forked branches, thus raising the question of whether this was a staging of the old giving way to the new or a forbidding emblem of winter and decay. A large gold disc and a smaller black one were also brought on and manipulated strategically to express the glory of the monarch and prefigure the eclipse of his power and his sanity and the coming of darkness that overshadow the play.