Dudley Squeam reviews Spandra Bus Company's 1960s take on King Lear.
There’s nothing new about messing around with King Lear: for most of its history the play has been thought too long and disturbing for the stage. Nahum Tate’s Restoration version – where Lear regains his crown, and his temperate daughter Cordelia winds up married to the heroic Edgar who originally has her executed – still stands as a byword for misconceived bowdlerisations of the Bard. Though it prunes the play to some 40% of its length, Spandra Bus Company’s abridgement is thankfully more respectful.
The result is a quick canter through the main events, with minimal speechifying and no trimmings. It strikes you that a similar approach could work well with some other Shakespeare plays: Hamlet might make a snappy little thriller, for instance, if you didn’t mind losing Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and most of Ophelia.
With Lear the approach is more questionable. I, for one, was relieved not to have to sit through the blinding of Gloucester again, which tends to be unbearably gruesome or laughably hammy. On the other hand, when only a few crossed words with his daughters sends Lear raging to the heath, it puts you more in mind of a teenage strop than a grand invocation of nihilist despair. And the sense of gravitas isn’t aided by the '60s setting, with scene changes incongruously marked by clips of The Beatles, Dylan and Hendrix. The point is to draw a parallel between the disorder onstage and '60s social upheaval, but the analogy seems a little far-fetched.
The casting is sound on the whole, with Lear played by two actors to represent his transformation through madness: Chris Bearne, in particular, is convincingly craggy as the disintegrating monarch. Presumably Thomas O’Malley is meant to seem catatonic as Poor Tom, but to me he simply sounds bored. I would've liked to have seen more of Shauntala Ramanee, who is just the right mix of sultry and acerbic for Regan.
The play’s famous opening is left relatively unmolested, so when the final scenes are rattled through with terrible dispatch, it seems as though the actors are keen to retire to the bar downstairs (one of the undoubted highlights of a visit to Rosemary Branch). Before you can catch your breath, Edmund is having a sudden change of heart and sends to have Cordelia spared. Tragedy is nearly averted but, of course, there just isn’t enough time.
Photo Credit: Joel Washington
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