Hubris and healing with King Lear
The performance is exemplary
It’s heading for that Leaving Cert time of year again and it’s great to see the Theatre Royal reaching out to English students with a perform/inform production of the crucial scenes of King Lear.
This programme has been running for almost a decade and judging by attendances, it’s a big hit with schools in the South East.
This morning’s performance is packed out and it’s an intimidating gig for the actors.
Imagine performing a play twice a day to a packed audience that has studied the script and the characters for two years - and are listening! However, this creative team is slick and seasoned with actors that have received Green Room Awards – Joe Meagher, Andrew Holden, Natasha Everitt and Natalie Stringer – along with excellent facilitator Edward Denniston, who exists somewhere between performance and narrator.
There’s that uninhibited buzz in the Theatre Royal ether as the young audience await the performance and the quality of the production does everyone proud. The production is slick, clever, and well-informed and resists the temptation to simply tell the story.
Instead, Director Liam Meagher and facilitator Edward Denniston invite their knowledgeable audience to probe beyond the obvious.
Edward launches significant and directional questions throughout and begins with a grenade: ‘does the director’s vision of Lear match your own vision of the play?’ How’s that for openers?
It is fascinating to watch two quite different interpretations of Edmund’s ‘now, Gods, stand up for bastards’ soliloquy that question the audience’s interpretation of the character.
"Which interpretation best represents your understanding of the character?" asks facilitator Edward.
In commentary, Denniston develops threads throughout that link theme, images and plotline between the scenes that must add significantly to the students’ appreciation and understanding of the work.
The School of Humanities in SETU have collaborated with the Theatre Royal in this production and a King Lear booklet has some excellent articles on the play.
Contributions include a Richard Hayes article on cruelty in Lear, a scene by scene analysis from Edward Denniston and a plot investigation from Margaret O’Brien.
It may be shortened version but the cast do justice to the bard’s most profound play.
Joe Meagher is a regal and haughty Lear, who manages to fill in as Gloucester in the famous blinding scene.
The clever use of a screen to mask the horror of the blinding actually adds to the horror and the use of a visual screen to allow the characters to speak throughout gives an extra dimension to the production.
Ensemble performances are strong and forceful. Andrew Holden multitasks as Kent, Edmond and Cornwall as does Natasha Everitt as Cordelia, Fool, Oswald and Edgar while Natalie Stringer had the daunting and really impossible task of playing both Goneril and Regan.
This Theatre Royal production for schools is a big ask for any director and editor. With a play this large – the entire production would last some five hours or so – you’re always going to feel that this scene or other should have been included.
However, this King Lear production is a fine job of work that is aimed squarely at Leaving Cert students and manages to include them as equals in a collaborative approach that is a delight.
At no stage is there any attempt to impose a view on the audience. A Q&A that follows allows for some tough questioning from a knowing audience and some pretty honest answers from a cast that brings an actor’s understanding to a profoundly complex drama.
Is Lear more sinned against than sinning? Three-quarters of the audience said yes but, significantly, one-quarter said no.
That’s the great thing about drama: there are no definite and absolutely correct responses.
The magic lies in the mystery because without doubt, there is no mystery, and this production of King Lear wanted its young audience to have its own opinion.
Theatre Royal’s King Lear is ultimately a story about the magic of theatre and the mystery of how actors make a script come to life on the stage.
It was a good morning on the Mall.
