tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post8205543514579948793..comments2023-09-20T14:34:21.102+02:00Comments on Postcards from the Gods: Unfolding King Lear A ModelAndrew Haydonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05568061302451610140noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-66690974894039662962010-01-21T12:07:53.284+01:002010-01-21T12:07:53.284+01:00I know this review was quite a few months ago and ...I know this review was quite a few months ago and admittedly I have not seen this play which may disqualify me from commenting. However reading the review, it strikes a familiar cord. <br /><br />Having witnessed earlier works of Mr. Hardingham's I would say the feeling you came away with from watching this "version" of King Lear -both the fascination and repulsion towards the imagery followed by the disconnectedness to the performance itself and inability to make sense of what was performed - is classic Jeremy both wondrous and lacking. <br /><br />Everything Jeremy does is filtered through his very personal way of interacting with theatre and the world at large. My guess is this rendition is not a derivative of "King Leah" or even an interpretation. <br /><br />It is rather: <b>Jeremy Hardingham</b> <i>as</i> King Leah. <br /><br />Unlike most actors who brings their interpretation of the text into the character -Jeremy brings himself. <br /><br />If the author of the review ever returns to thinking about this "play" I would suggest contextualizing it in terms of a "one man play" or "performance art." <br /><br />It is most likely not a dissection or reformulation of a classic text, or Shakespeare speaking through a "new phenomenon." <br /><br />What it is is an energetic and tortured performer's attempt of speaking his anguish through the words of Shakespeare.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-33582205904503840222009-09-09T16:43:16.717+02:002009-09-09T16:43:16.717+02:00The previous comment describes this account of Un...The previous comment describes this account of Unfolding king lear a model as an ‘admirably honest struggle to find adequate vocabulary for a new phenomenon’, but there’s not much struggling going on in Haydon’s prose – the quasi-redescription is a mild-mannered shrug which shies from working to capture how the piece conjures up in its listeners the impression that they are witnessing a ‘new phenomenon’ when they are hearing an old Shakespeherian rag. The comment I heard from one audience member after the performance : ‘That was the worst play I’ve ever seen’ is (in an obscure way) closer in spirit to the practice of the performance than politely tepid bafflement, as Unfolding king lear a model plays at worsting a play and takes as its inspiration a play which toys with the word ‘worst’ like a yo-yo (‘And worse I may be yet. The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This the worst’’). Accounts of this piece of work might be more sharply focused if less preoccupied with the question ‘How does this make me feel?’. The work has more compelling relations than ‘old school posh’ (whatever that means) and ‘RSC voices’. Asking what else the work relates to suggests how the piece, like other monodramas or monopolylogues, takes as part of its subject the personation of relations (between, say, the voices or figments of a script we sometimes call characters, between the various different texts that make up what we call King Lear, between a solitary performer and the curiously inter-conscious unit that is an audience). Impersonation can be comic or menacing, and one person possessed of all the voices in a play can also seem possessed by them, which might tell us something about the strange act of reading a play, or the strange fact of acting like a person. The artist chose to name his work ‘a model’ which could suggest the inflated consciousness of a work swollenly believing itself to be an exemplar, or it could be tenderly diminutive, and should mean roughly both, as from its source and in its practice this work tangles hubris and fragility, but the shivers of gentleness are overlooked in accounts only keen to amplify the performer’s salt-eating bravado. But perhaps the most disappointing prejudice in this piece is in the phrase ‘a far more cold, intellectual way’. One aspect modelled by the work is William Empson’s insight that the ‘mind is complex and ill-connected like an audience, and it is as surprising in the one case as the other that a sort of unity can be produced by a play’ - when something is ‘intellectual’, in the sense that it is apprehended by the mind and requires an exercise of understanding, from my experience, it’s pretty warm.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-86130176340011817082009-09-04T15:26:49.584+02:002009-09-04T15:26:49.584+02:00This blog post is an admirably honest struggle to ...This blog post is an admirably honest struggle to find adequate vocabulary for a new phenomenon. Now that theatre has moved beyond the traditional cosy winks offered by mild frame-breaking, the visceral responses commanded by stagings such as this one are, arguably, not meant to be embraced without significant personal discomfiture. It sounds like your barriers were up for Internal, and a bit of ironic distance spared you your UKLAM gut-wrenching and nerve-jarring, albeit in the end you felt some of the means deployed to produce those effects were cheap/baffling. How many (if any?) of the UKLAM audience members broadly shared your ultimate evaluation of the performance? Audience fragmentation might perhaps be the aim here, rather than unifying/universality (which seems to exercise a more powerful grasp on you)?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4481691725314537521.post-22955386885581753412009-09-03T20:55:43.104+02:002009-09-03T20:55:43.104+02:00Barring the last paragraph, I couldn't disagre...Barring the last paragraph, I couldn't disagree with you more. However,I don't know why...Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14631471415358199679noreply@blogger.com