Unfolding King Lear A Model

I’m struggling to remember the last time a show as small as this, in a venue this obscure, gathered such a rapid buzz about it. From one comment left by Chris Goode on Lyn Gardner’s What to See This Week blog (“mind-stretching, disorienting, harrowing, exhilarating”), to Lyn’s subsequent Twitter report (“Terrifying, painful and utterly compelling”) and then by word of mouth by friends and Facebook (“you might want to keep tomorrow clear, and just reassemble yourself piece by piece”) by the time I entered the tiny space in the Vault (under St Augustine’s, accessed by an easily overlooked side street off ) I was surprised that there wasn’t a queue round the block with everyone who’s anyone in the avant garde lining up for returns. So it’s safe to say I had quite high expectations.

High expectations are not a useful thing to go into a theatre with. Particularly if they are based purely on sense impressions. While I’d heard a lot about how Unfolding King Lear A Model had made other people feel, I didn’t have the faintest idea what it was, what happened, how it happened, or why it left such apparently profound impressions on them. This isn’t a good thing either. Not least, because I’m quite resistant to people trying to disorientate, harrow and terrify me. Least of all in an obvious or overt way, which seemed to be the implication. “Here is a piece that sets out to be upsetting” was what I had inferred.

Not knowing how this process was to be conducted, I was apprehensive to say the least to see that the “set” for UKLAM consisted mostly of a high wooden bench strewn with various sinister-looking apparatus. As I’ve said a thousand times, I’m *very* squeamish. I also know that there’s plenty in King Lear that can be made very upsetting indeed.

So, what is Unfolding King Lear A Model (I think that’s the correct capitalisation. The slightly wonky, wrong-looking capital ‘A’ certainly seems in keeping with the feel of the piece)? It’s a one man show. Quite literally. As well as being the sole performer, Jeremy Hardingham also operates his own distinctly lo-fi lighting and presses the buttons on his own sound desk.

[apologies if I get this next bit slightly wrong] It either opens with Hardingham simply dressed in grubby neutral-coloured top and trousers or enrobed and wrapped in a chain wearing a small slate chalkboard. Then, depending whether he started off wearing the robe or not, he either takes it off and puts it back on, or puts it on for the first time. He does this again later. The space remains dimly lit, mostly by spill from the two lights glaring into the faces of the small audience. There’s some disorientating white noise playing in the background.

The more I write this review, the more uncertain I become as to the details and the order in which they occurred.

Hardingham brutally wraps gaffa tape round the lower half of his head, and then half stabs, half cuts a hole for his mouth using a pair of scissors. Although not actually self-harm, but it is deeply uncomfortable to watch. He paints his face white, takes off his hat, fills it with chalk dust and replaces it. He opens an envelope with the number 1 marked on it, takes out a sheaf of papers and begins to read.

His voice is a surprise: full-on orotund RSC English. The disjuncture between his now hellish appearance – his eyes an angry, irritated red peering out of a chalky, funereal mask – and this voice is quite startling. What he’s saying momentarily falls by the wayside. It soon becomes clear that the words are cut and pasted from King Lear. From Act One of King Lear, in fact. The sheaf of papers from this first envelope is reassuringly slender – the show only runs for an hour after all – so we settle, unsettled, to take in this bizarre, painful-looking spectacle.

At the same time the mind does a fair bit of racing. You’re cross-referencing the snippets of speech. Who says that? Is it all Lear? Is he doing different voices? Yes he is. Do the different voices relate to different characters? Possibly. I’m still struggling with the RSCness of the accents. Also, slightly, with the apparent linearity – although I’m only guessing at that. It starts fairly close to the beginning with a flurry of “Nothings” sounding like vocal epilepsy. What follows could be in virtually any order at all. It’s not that the speech is garbled – much of it is clear as a bell – but the way it’s decontextualised, shredded and regurgitated - sometimes at speed, sometimes mumbled, sometimes with all the poetic gusto of the actor-manager that renders much of it down to jarring, fragmentary noise pierced by shards of words.

Vocally, Hardingham turns out to be something of a wizard. He skips from voice to voice, line by line, sounding like a manically spliced recording of King Lear from the mid-sixties – there’s a lot of that heightened RP, old-school posh. There are touches of, say, Gielgud or Richardson mixed occasionally with that spooky, talking-backwards voice frequently favoured by David Lynch. It’s a stunning performance but it’s often hard to discern why it is how it is.

While doing this, Hardingham potters about his work-bench, threatening it with a hammer here, cajoling a metronome on it there. All similarly unsettling, but mapping only infrequently onto something that concretely marries to the text being spoken. The real departure from this comes in Act Three, which is mostly given over to Gloucester’s blinding. In this, “Gloucester” is “played” (can we just assume that any traditional words to do with stagecraft have scare marks round them from now on?) by a bare lightbulb clipped onto a mirror lent against the side of the space’s small archway-cum-mini-proscenium. A tape of clanking medieval torture noises, along with recorded speech from the text. This is voiced by Hardingham, I think, who recites along with the recording or engages it in dialogue. He threatens the "Gloucester" with a murderous-looking set of map compasses, before pouring stage blood over the shining bulb. It’s pretty disturbing stuff, as is his increasing playing with an axe, which he taps against the side of his head.

From this point on, the piece seems kind of galvanised by the horror. The pathos of Gloucester’s later suicide attempt, and Lear’s madness in the storm (which may or may not have been the point where Hardingham tries to perform a speech through mouthfuls of Red Bull) both make recognisable, poignant appearances.

The final coup – best not to read if you’re likely to see the show – is, if anything, even more wince-making. At the bit in the sequence where – if this corresponds to the Shakespeare, which I think it does – Lear is presented with Cordelia’s lifeless body, Hardingham eats a handful of salt and tries to do the subsequent speech without being sick. He then went out and was sick. This was proper self-abuse in the service of art. No mucking about here, you could see precisely how unpleasant a time he was having. And it made for just about as piteous spectacle as Lear should be at that point.

I realise over the course of writing this that my reading of what I was looking at has tended to lean toward the hugely literal. I’m interested in where this response comes from. Given Goode’s championing of the performance as poetic text, I found it strange – in view of the way in which it had been cut, shaped and delivered - how hard it was to hear it as the sort of poem concrete you’d imagine it would turn into. Similarly, I was surprised – given the other elements of dramaturgy present in the staging – that the text itself still ran forwards. Coupled with the RSC voices it made the piece seem strangely tamed, still accepting Shakespeare’s chronology of the text.

The piece also does little to signpost any intended effect. It’s got King Lear in the title (and as its source), so it seems fair to view it in the light of the play and as a commentary on it. But precisely what that comment is is never made clear. None of this is intended as a criticism, but as an observation. However, having gotten over my surprise at the more mainstream elements of the performance, I did find it curiously difficult to settle into a rhythm through which I could absorb it. Sure, of course this is a rhythm in its own right – the piece plays with that aesthetic of continual unease and sudden shift. But, between the disruption and the linearity, I found it hard to attach to anything in particular. Certainly moments – the obvious blinding and salt-in-mouth bits – have stayed with me, but on the whole I found the constant buffeting made it near-impossible to get close enough to the piece to find it actually upsetting or troubling. Yes, it contained troubling images, but, for me, they didn’t attach to anything enough to get under my skin. Other elements distracted from- rather than added to-. Of course the interplay of these parts was fascinating in itself, but in a far more cold, intellectual way than advance word had led me to expect.

In many ways, I feel I kind of failed the piece, rather than that the piece failed me or simply “failed”. Like taking a running jump at a high hurdle and not quite clearing the bar somehow. I’m fascinated to know how and why the piece clearly operated on some at a far deeper level, though.

Comments more than gratefully received.

Belarusian King Lear – The Globe

Belarus Free Theatre have one outstanding USP – they have a good claim on the title “the most endangered theatre company in the world”. Banned in their homeland, they have been threatened with imprisonment, rape and torture, by Alexander Lukashenko's dictatorship.

I have to confess, I wasn't hugely bowled over by their scratch performance of Minsk 2011 at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, but it was a scratch performance, so allowances can be made – even if almost everyone else decided to review the unimpeachable integrity rather than the slightly sloppy undergraduate devised piece aesthetic.

Nevertheless, apart from Eimuntas Nekrosius's Hamlet from Lithuania, thanks to massive celebrity support in Britain BFT are about the most famous company performing in the Globe to Globe season. And they've been given King Lear in recognition of this fact, one imagines. It is possibly the most poetic of all Shakespeare's tragedies. Perhaps even the most tragic.

I was about ten minutes late to this evening's performance. As I entered an grey-haired man in shabby modern dress was sitting in a wheelchair having a conversation with a violent-looking shaven-headed youth in vest and military boots. The old man is pissing from his chair into a bowl. This is Gloucester and Edmund.

That tells you about all you need to know about the style. It's fast: they'd already whizzed through the whole of the 332-line first scene in which Lear divides his Kingdom in the ten minutes before I arrived. It's scatological: Gloucester's first act after relieving himself was to grab Edmund's head and grind it into his crotch to indicate his anger at what Edmund had just told him. And it's urgent: this urgency is mostly drawn from the company's “poor theatre” aesthetic and their mad dash to bring King Lear in at about two hours plus interval.

There is a generalised contemporaneity to it – Goneril and Regan are dressed in the now-regulation high heels, fur coats and tight mini-dresses of many post-Soviet bloc theatre traditions. The boots look like those issued as standard to the Belarusian army, but Lear is wearing an enormous shiny metal gauntlet on his right hand – perhaps a symbol of his kingship, but surely also a nod the the play's original medieval setting. In the main this is a Lear of suit jackets over dirty white vests, quicky stripped away to three examples of the de rigueur full frontal male nudity for the madness on the heath.

To cut the play so short, there must be innovation and cuts aplenty. Until the end, I think pretty much every soliloquy has been excised (this seems to be a common way for G2G companies to bring down running times – although the results of those which have remained have been fascinating). The action is fast and frenetic, the language into which the text has been rendered is demotic, not poetic. And the characters run about cursing one another in order to get through the plot.

The ensemble's chief virtue is energy and invention and they attack the play like angry clowns jabbering, accompanied by onstage piano and saxophone played from the balcony. The storm is played with Lear atop a large blue tarpaulin as buckets of water are thrown at him as he rages. The climactic battle between England and France is played out under a red tarpaulin with punches flying out on all sides like those cartoon fights in dust clouds.

This is a compelling, watchable King Lear. There is always something new happening. Gone are the solitary figures pacing their lonely sterile promontories doing nothing but telling us what their plans are, what they think and how they feel. Instead, no one gets a minute to themselves as the action rushes onwards. The downside of this is that we do lose here all sense of the play's tragedy. We don't really get to know the characters well enough to start to feel for them.

That said, in this production, you get the impression that they'd spurn our sympathy anyway. In a lot of ways, if this King Lear seems like the least tragic you've ever seen, it's because none of the characters ever even give way to self-pity. They're too wired. It is only at the (very sudden) end that Lear delivers something like his mourning speech over Cordelia's topless corpse and yet even here he is flanked by the entire company, alive or dead, standing, watching and singing that in that jagged, haunting Eastern European style also used by Teatr ZAR or Voix Bulgares.

It doesn't feel as if Belarus Free Theatre have taken the play and used it to say anything about the situation in their own troubled country. Instead, the political act here is the fact of their being here at all. They've certainly inhabited the play and made it theirs. This is King Lear as a strange, savage act. A relentless unfolding of brutality. As such, while not what I was expecting, that feels like more than enough of a statement.

While writing this piece I had a look back to see what other King Lears I'd seen. I seem to have reviewed more-or-less a Lear a year since 2006 (apart from when I was in Berlin).


The Russian one at the Barbican


Trevor Nunn/Ian Mckellen for the RSC


The Dominic Dromgoole/David Calder one at the Globe


The Rupert Goold / Pete Postlethwaite one for Headlong at the Young Vic (Six stars - Time Out)


and Jeremy Hardinham's Unfolding King Lear A Model


It's quite interesting (to me, at least) to see how much the way I write, or maybe my tone, has changed (also, I've got better at not making clangers like that first review where my memory of the plot is really quite embarrassing).

(all photographs copyright Simon Kane)

Postcards from Edinburgh

An unexpected by-product of this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe was that it reawakened my interest in blogging and desire to write. This year, it felt like several interesting conversations were starting and that they would need sites to take place and people setting out the new fields of engagement. Or something. Suffice it to say, Postcards... is back – hopefully with a vengeance – and fully re-engaged.

One possible reason for this was the number of conversation type events that seemed to spring up this year. Andrea Brook’s panel debate on the issue of training, held as a kind of launch for the number of young East 15 graduate companies, kick-started my Fringe. Chaired by Chris Wilkinson, with Ian Shuttleworth, Dorothy Max-Prior, Andy Field, Jamie Wood and Sebastian Lawson alongside Andrea on the panel, it felt a bit like The Blogosphere, circa 2007, Live! – with Wood and Lawson as Chris Goode’s representatives on earth.

Having a pretty wide-ranging and comprehensive think about how work is made, who makes it, where they are coming from – particularly in terms of thinking and training – so early on in the festival was enormously helpful. The following week, during the British Council Showcase, the production company Fuel held a series of (free) lunches at each of which three speakers offered brief “provocations” on a series of pre-selected themes. I managed to catch “Global or green: international arts in the 21st century” and “It’ll do you good: why so much theatre is boring”. Again, the mixture of intelligent contributors and audience members made for some very useful conversations.

Following on from this first provocation, it is worth noting that the question of climate change loomed very large in a broadly unacknowledged way throughout the festival. Indeed, ice, the colour white and the polar bear all kept on cropping up as recurrent motifs throughout the shows I happened to see. Not necessarily connected to climate change, but nonetheless repeatedly, insistently. Aside from their place in more obvious shows like Lucy Foster’s adorable, heartbreaking O, My Green Soapbox and the much-acclaimed 6.0: How Heap and Pebble Took on the World and Won, white seemed to be the recurrent colour haunting the painter in Dea Loher’s Land Without Words, while in Kursk, quite incidentally (although quite naturally, given the setting), ice floes and polar bears were once again invoked.

What was fascinating about O My Green Soapbox was that for me it was much less a piece about melting polar ice-caps, global warming and climate change and much more a piece about emotional devastation – about the real aching, endless sense of loss you experience when a loved one leaves you or dies. Indeed, ...Soapbox was pretty much a perfect thematic bridge, linking one of the two main themes of the festival, climate change, to the other: bereavement.
This year you could hardly move for dead babies and dead parents. Perhaps this shouldn’t really be surprising – after all, the grief experienced at the death of a parent or child is about as close to a universal as humanity is ever going to get. Nonetheless, it started to feel unnervingly coincidental when several dramas on the same day all produced dead infants as a main subject and on another the death of a parent.

The other interesting thing to arise repeatedly at the festival, which I touched on very briefly in my most recent blog for the Guardian, was the idea of one-to-one performances (Internal, Live Art Speed-Dating, Adrian Howells, various other bits and pieces at Forest Fringe, etc.) and shows for deliberately tiny audiences (Guru Guru, Iris Brunette, Our Father’s Ears, Love Letters Straight to Your Heart). The main issue that seemed to arise – largely applied to Ontroerend Goed’s Internal – was the ethical questions that such one-to-one performances seemed to raise.

Ont. G. seem to be quite good at pinging British ethical sensibilities. Their last show Once and For All We Are Gonna Tell You Who We Are, So Shut Up and Listen had everyone quietly wondering about the young age of the performers and their ownership of the material – questions, in short, of exploitation – particularly when coupled with the knowledge that one of the teenage girls was dating one of the show’s 30-something creators. It all seemed a bit, oh, well, y’know. Of course, no one really said anything, but there was a bit of an atmosphere about it. This year, conversely, the concern was primarily focused on concerns over the possible exploitation of the audience.

The format of the show – if you’ve been living under a rock for the last month – is that five audience members stand in front of a curtain, the curtain is drawn back to reveal the five performers who each then select a member of the audience and take them away to a little booth at the far side of the space. Said audience member is then flirted with, asked questions about themselves, and apparently in some cases shown naked photographs of the performer and/or kissed, etc. (for the record, I was diffident to the point of frigidity and my poor ‘date’ was given precious little to work with: “I want you to close your eyes and imagine we are somewhere together,” she said. “Where are we?” “The corner of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street at lunchtime,” I replied, ever the romantic, “It’s very hard to cross the road”). After this [SPOILER ALERT] the five performers lead their ‘dates’ back to a circle of chairs and discuss them with each other.

On the particular occasion I saw the show, this was a pretty civilised affair. Everyone in the audience was attached; no one had really given very much away; no one seemed to have indulged in outrageous flirting and the subsequent potential criticism was limited to reflecting that I might smoke a bit much and didn’t like sport. I understand other sessions have been less forgiving or more full-on, with breasts being revealed, knickers slipped off and audience members subjected to wholesale character assassination.

Of course, one problem our group had was that we were all pretty much industry professionals, we all also knew each other, albeit at one or two removes, and we all had a pretty good idea of what was coming. Actually, I’d known since a post-Burst discussion last Easter. So, on one hand, we were prepared; on the other, we might have been a bit too guarded, too knowing to experience the ‘full effect’.

And it’s this Full Effect that seems to raise the ethical questions. There’s an important detail that none of the reviews I’ve read has pointed out: when the audience goes to the curtained area at the start of the show, they walk past five dressing tables with what we assume are the actors clothes and personal effects. In other words, we are explicitly reminded that the people we are about to meet are performers. We, the audience, however, remain real, don’t we? Or do we? As the curtain goes back – a symbolic removal of the fourth wall, which is emphasised when each member of the audience is taken by the hand and led singly into the space – do we not become conscious performers of ourselves? Is our passivity (ok, that’s a problematic construction of a theatre audience member, but let’s leave it for the time being) not replaced by active agency? We are actually granted actual power. This isn’t just standing in the space of an “immersive” performance, like, say, Kursk, and being ignored entirely by the actors. Nor is it being co-opted as kind of co-experiencers albeit with no agency of our own as was the case with last year’s show The F*ct*ry, which ended so acrimoniously when certain audience members tried to test the boundaries of how much agency they really had.

In Internal what you say is responded to by the performer. You are reacting simultaneously to one another in the moment. Of course, they have a certain amount of elements of the performance that they want to get through. Or at least they have a few pre-prepared questions and strategies for engaging with you, but that’s about it. Perhaps they are playing themselves. Perhaps it really is them. Perhaps they are playing someone else altogether. And this is part of where the dislocation, the disquiet stems from. Having established that you have to interact with them, thus already breaking more traditional theatrical rules, you are then in the strange position of not knowing precisely who or what you’re interacting *with*. Are we meant to be suspending our disbelief and thinking ourselves into a fictional situation? Is the booth we’re sat in meant to be somewhere else, or are we allowed to acknowledge the degree of fakery that is going on? In the booth that I was in, I was offered a perfectly real glass of red wine; my ‘date’ also had one. I asked whether she didn’t find herself getting rather drunk what with the number of performances she had in a day. She looked slightly phased by the question – as if I wasn’t really allowed to acknowledge that she was doing this all day. That was interesting. It felt like there was a certain spirit of the thing we were required to enter into which had never been explained to us.

Talking to a lot of people about the show afterwards – if nothing else, and if only by dint of having such small audiences and nearly infinite possibilities, Internal certainly became a talking point of the Fringe – it seemed that the performers most wanted audiences to react entirely genuinely. To take this being flirted with as *real* in some way, so that when the rug-pulling “reveal” comes, it is actually a real surprise and quite genuinely worrying. Other friends report couples leaving the show in various advanced stages of acrimony after one partner or other goes a bit too far and then is revealed to have done so in the second part. But then this also raises an interesting question – how *real* is it to even kiss someone who is playing someone who is interested in kissing you? (Assuming *you* is an audience member) Who are you at that moment? Are you still yourself, or someone playing the part of yourself? Moreover, should your boyfriend be cross?

These were the sorts of questions that the piece raised. Because it was framed so consistently around questions of intimacy, it felt as if people’s reactions were more than usually touchy. As a counter example, in Jeremy Hardingham’s Unfolding King Lear A Model, there was a moment when he stepped over to the small audience and – completely out of character (ok, ok, or performing himself, or something similar) said to me “When I say “bastard” I want you to hit me”. He didn’t give me time to ask how hard, but when the moment arrived I gingerly slapped him. I didn’t feel especially concerned at having had to interact. If he’d asked me to really hurt him, I might have felt differently. However, because Internal was about flirting, and flirting with *us* as *ourselves*, it stuck many as intrusive. Perhaps it was also due to the show not really having any clear point or purpose, not appearing to make much of a discernable commentary on anything beyond itself, or perhaps ourselves. Maybe this is my failure in reading, but it felt entirely experiential and the experience it was offering was at once entirely random, and one which could be interpreted any way the interpreter fancied. I’d be fascinated to learn what the company’s impulse to make the piece was and moreover whether they felt it had achieved the goals they’d set themselves.

Perhaps all this talk of goals and points is a bit schematic and prescriptive, but even with work that doesn’t have such things, per se, there is usually some sort of sense of a discernable reason for its existing. Here, while feeling completely successfully staged and realised, it also seemed oddly distant – curious given how much of the show revolved around an absolute sense of presence.

Anyway. I’m going to stop this post here, but suspect that I’ll end up returning to a lot of themes in subsequent reviews and comment pieces.

For the time being, I’ve left a lot of the shows mentioned here either unlinked or provisionally linked to Matt Trueman’s excellent Allen Wright award winning reviews over at Carousel of Fantasies. I’m hoping – although I think we all know we’ve been here before with me saying “I’m feeling much better now, look forward to more posts”- that at least some of these shows will turn into reviews and or spring-boards for other think-pieces later on.

Apols in the meantime for this one being so long, rambly and baggy. I just wanted to get something put out on the 1st as a kind of marker to myself.