The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0620 Wednesday, 19 September 2007
[1] From: Hardy M. Cook <
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Date: Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Subj: McKellen at BAM
[2] From: Lynn Brenner <
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Date: Monday, 17 Sep 2007 10:22:02 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0614 McKellen's King Lear at the BAM
[3] From: Hugh Grady <
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Date: Tuesday, 18 Sep 2007 10:10:06 -0400
Subj: RE: SHK 18.0614 McKellen's King Lear at the BAM
[4] From: Joe Conlon <
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Date: Tuesday, 18 Sep 2007 06:25:00 -0400
Subj: Re: SHK 18.0614 McKellen's King Lear at the BAM
[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Hardy M. Cook <
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Date: Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Subject: McKellen at BAM
Ian McKellen Plays Shakespeare and Chekhov, But Nobody Wins
by Michael Feingold
VILLAGE VOICE
http://www.villagevoice.com/theater/0738,feingold,77827,11.html
King Lear and The Seagull are both plays about meaninglessness, but that
doesn't mean they don't mean anything. Quite the contrary. The
achievement of both plays is that they manage, while depicting the
meaningless, arbitrary twists and turns of fate, to create a sense of
order that supplies, by its existence, an alternate view: If plays so
full of unjust, unexpected, inexplicable reverses can make sense, the
universe can probably make sense too. We just don't happen to know what
sense it makes. Productions of King Lear and The Seagull, consequently,
need their own sense of order to a degree that many plays don't. We'll
never understand nature's way of organizing the universe, but at least
we can see how some theater artist's sensibility has organized Chekhov's
or Shakespeare's depiction of it, and take a little comfort from that.
In both plays, it's easy for artists to lose their way. With so much, of
such violence, going on, a sense of artistic focus can only be achieved
by hard struggle.
There are hints of the struggle, but regrettably little achievement, in
the two productions by Trevor Nunn, starring Ian McKellen, that the
Royal Shakespeare Company has brought to BAM. The most striking feature
of both is their overall lack of effect-a kind of topsy-turvy triumph,
given the potential cumulative power packed in these two familiar
scripts. Maybe the familiarity itself has, in Nunn's approach, bred a
degree of contempt. Both plays are handled as merely one bit following
another, this bit done this way and that more famous bit done, a little
louder and more stagily, that way. The emotional connective tissue, the
sense of ongoing life that makes both plays so incredibly vivid in wiser
hands, can barely be glimpsed. There are some "new" dabs of
interpretative gimmickry-Nunn finds wrong places to show us both the
Fool being hanged and Treplev's first suicide attempt. But without a
context to make them meaningful, gimmicks are never more than just
gimmicks. Shakespeare and Chekhov, who pointedly kept the two incidents
I've mentioned offstage, probably had better reasons for doing so than
Nunn has for dragging onstage what the authors omitted.
The situation isn't McKellen's fault. Though his previous stage work has
always been marred by his tendency to treat every role as the occasion
for a show-horse exhibition of technical skill in lieu of a performance,
here he is mellow, disciplined, strong where the context demands it
rather than show-offy. If he still seems unconnected to his roles, that
merely makes him the most visible symptom of the general unconnectedness
on Nunn's stage. At quiet moments his Lear is often moving, and his
rueful, mildly cranky Sorin in Seagull is even better. He may yet become
an actor in his old age.
Both plays have famously troubled audiences in the past: King Lear
(though always viewed as great) left post-Restoration England
uncomfortable until Nahum Tate supplied a tidier ending, in which
Cordelia lived to marry Edgar. The Seagull, premiered by a standard
Russian company of its day, left spectators baffled, a reaction that was
repeated in Western Europe after Stanislavsky's production rescued it
from oblivion. Chekhov's play didn't seem to be about anything, people
complained-just as they had once complained that Shakespeare's play
seems to come out "wrong," that it has either too many conclusions or none.
In part, the troubled response stems from the complex moral sense that
infuses the two works, because both Shakespeare and Chekhov found human
beings a fascinating, insoluble problem. In both plays, the "good"
characters lose, or die; the "bad" thrive, but only for a while, and not
very happily; in the end they'll die too. The moral is not that good has
no chance, or that good and bad are purely provisional values, but that,
all things considered, good actions generally help human life along a
bit better than bad ones. The difficulty comes in trying to determine,
given our tough world, what constitutes a good choice. If the
irredeemably evil people in King Lear do things that are inherently
vicious, the "good" people often engage in behavior that we only approve
because we've been told from the start that they're good. Regan and
Goneril are obviously lying to Lear in the first scene, but it's Lear's
excessive demand, and Cordelia's equally excessive refusal to cooperate
with it, that cause all the trouble. (Similarly, the brutal way we see
Gloucester being treated onstage lets Shakespeare downplay the fact that
he has, after all, committed treason. If he were caught funneling money
to Osama, how many Americans would scream for his eyes to be put out?)
In Chekhov, where there are no irredeemably evil people, the choices are
even trickier. Konstantin, trapped in a lousy situation, sulks and makes
scenes rather than search for a way out; lovestruck, starry-eyed Nina
plunges heedlessly into a life that causes herself and others no end of
pain. The sources of their agony, Arkadina and Trigorin, may be more
successful, but they're hardly happier; as in Lear, what the older
generation has that the young lack seems more the will to survive than
anything else.
Little of the mapping by which Shakespeare and Chekhov lead us through
this thicket of moral confusions survives at BAM, because Nunn's
productions, slipshod and capricious in staging, are so erratically
performed that it's hard to tell what most of those onstage think
they're doing at any given moment. There's lots of overemphasis and
shouting, usually where it's uncalled for; the company's slovenly
diction and jumble of accents makes hay of all class distinctions, while
Nunn's directing makes an even worse hash of every relationship. This
Lear starts with the king leading everyone offstage, to ponderous organ
music, for what is apparently an important religious ceremony, though
his two chief ministers, Kent and Gloucester, stay behind to gossip;
this Arkadina (Frances Barber) spends so much time fondling the doctor
that you wonder why somebody doesn't slap her. But then, Nunn's
treatment of the female characters is uniformly crude and heavy-handed:
Barber reduces Arkadina's charm to a set of Lucy Ricardo tantrums; her
Goneril is like a Disney witch, balanced by the hypocritical Minnie
Mouse of Monica Dolan's Regan. (Dolan's Masha is like a lugubrious
mallet, striking every line into a dismal moan.) Most dismaying of all
is Romola Garai, whose over-italicized, openly fake indicating makes
both Cordelia and Nina nearly unwatchable. Some of the men do better.
Philip Winchester is a strong, lucid Edmund, and Ben Meyjes, though
lacking the comic sense for Medvedenko, gives Edgar a steadily deepening
emotional growth. Richard Goulding makes Treplev a touching bundle of
nerves, while Guy Williams provides equally effective, and quite
different, portraits of Cornwall and Shamrayev. Alone among the
principal women, Melanie Jessop comes off credibly as an arrestingly
quiet Polina. The costumes for both productions have apparently been
pulled from RSC stock; Janet Bench, who did the pulling for Seagull,
knows her business. The music for both shows, credited to Steven Edis,
sounds more pulled from stock than composed for the occasion-but, given
Nunn's desultory approach, it's hard to know what the occasion is. New
York has seen four important Lears in the past three years; despite all
its good points, this one is the least affecting, and least excitingly
acted, of the lot.
[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Lynn Brenner <
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Date: Monday, 17 Sep 2007 10:22:02 -0400
Subject: 18.0614 McKellen's King Lear at the BAM
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0614 McKellen's King Lear at the BAM
Arthur Lindley <
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>It must have improved considerably since it opened in Stratford a few
months ago.
I wouldn't be too sure of that. I saw it last Tuesday, and although I
thought Ian McKellan's performance was mostly wonderful, I found the
production disappointing and very uneven. It includes amateurish
melodrama (Edmund did everything but twirl a mustache) and very stylish
high comedy (Goneril and Regan) and a Fool whose delivery is virtually
incomprehensible.
Lynn Brenner
[3]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Hugh Grady <
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Date: Tuesday, 18 Sep 2007 10:10:06 -0400
Subject: 18.0614 McKellen's King Lear at the BAM
Comment: RE: SHK 18.0614 McKellen's King Lear at the BAM
I was lucky enough to get tickets to see McKellan as Lear at BAM, and I
want to echo all those positives that have come out about it. One could
quibble about some of the supporting roles, but overall it was one of
the best performances of the play I've ever seen, and McKellan was
wonderful. It was powerful theater.
The setting really helped. The BAM theater is built into a ruined early
20th century interior of damaged marble and tiles with great
architectural soaring effects-the perfect background for this play about
things having fallen apart or, as Walter Benjamin says, of history
surviving in the form of ruins in the present.
Best,
Hugh Grady
[4]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Joe Conlon <
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Date: Tuesday, 18 Sep 2007 06:25:00 -0400
Subject: 18.0614 McKellen's King Lear at the BAM
Comment: Re: SHK 18.0614 McKellen's King Lear at the BAM
Concerning tickets: When I was there last Saturday, there were a number
of people trying to sell their extra tickets out front before the
performance. As a last ditch effort, it might be worth trying.
Joe Conlon
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