ALMEIDA THEATRE LONDON – UNTIL 30th MARCH, 2024
REVIEWED BY JACKIE THORNTON
4****
Award-winning director Yaël Farber’s bold and modern vision of King Lear pulls the audience in from the get go. It is as violent and gruesome as you’d expect but also sexed up, pacy and playful. Intimate staging is curtained by a chain mail backdrop, later used to tremendous effect in conjuring up wild storms. A piano with a gazelle skull aloft, is wheeled on and off not only to have its ivories tinkled but also to be climbed and mounted. Merle Hensel’s set design is well-engineered to create shady scenes of political double dealing and secret trysts behind palace walls contrasting with the harsh, apocalyptic exteriors in which Lear and Edgar both find themselves exiled.
Beginning with a press conference, a pompous King Lear (played rawly and unabashedly by Danny Sapani) directs his three daughters to express how much they love him so that he can issue land accordingly. Goneril (Akiya Henry) strides up to the mic to give an eloquent speech, followed by impatient Regan (Faith Omole) and finally, in the move which gives the play its inciting incident, a surly Cordelia (Gloria Obianyo) utters only the word ‘nothing’because words cannot do feelings justice. Cordelia is banished and it’s no spoiler to say events spiral from there. The cast have been chosen as much for their acting prowess as their musical abilities, particularly Gloria Obianyo, who despite being absent for most of the first half, returns at brief interludes to stun us with her haunting, soulful voice. The words scarcely matter – sorry William! – it’s her pain we register. In fact, the whole play is rendered with an unexpected musicality, giving it texture and variety. Violinists pluck, clash and elide their strings multiplying tension and underpinning the grave atmosphere. Star villain Edward (Fra Fee), the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, commands the stage, manipulating kin,friend, lover or foe with a wily charm which is further heightened by piano skills and silky smooth vocals on mournful ballads.
Alec Newman captivates as Lear’s brusque, loyal servant the Earl of Kent, Edward Davis perfectly captures the public school smarm and privilege of Regan’s husband, the Duke of Cornwall, and Geoffrey Lumb, as Goneril’s unloved husband the Duke of Albany, is one huff away from petulant. As Earl of Gloucester, Michael Gould plays the foolish and dithering old statesman with pathos and heart. Meanwhile, his ousted son Edgar (Matthew Tennyson), stripped to his pants, covered in chalk and streaked in oily black, slides and contorts his body conveying his own spurned turmoil while also echoing that of King Lear’s. There’s a wonderful scene where Edgar and Lear, now only a shadow of his former self – filthy, shoes made of plastic bags but still sporting a feathery crown – shelter from the storm. It’s both comic and touching. The biggest laughs, and rightly so, are saved for the Fool (Clarke Peters) whose deep American tones donate a wise, richness to his words. Even when he tells Lear the obvious, it rings with a playful yet otherworldly truth, reminding us just how witty and precise Shakespeare’s pen is. Practically every line cautions us to the folly of giving in to our conceit and allowing flattery in. Words are after all just words; it’s actions which count and tragic Cordelia knows this all along.