Leery of Lear

Pic borrowed from Bell Shakespeare Company's website

King Lear is, of course, at the intellectual forefront of the western canon, so it was both a duty and a pleasure to see. John Bell is now of the appropriate age and is playing Lear for his third time. He talks of coming to a greater understanding of the play, given his experience and years. I felt comfortable with Bell as Lear. But it’s a complex plot, and even though I knew the basic plot and had seen several movie versions, I still found I was struggling to follow the details. My ears aren’t the best and I had to concentrate to just to catch the words, let alone think through their import in the first half. Sometimes there was percussion accompaniment; sometimes the enunciation or volume was difficult; at one time the voices were amplified over loud percussion, but they were distorting with a too-high gain setting. The second half was much better. Perhaps I’d settled into the middle English by then and the plot lines were resolving, so I knew what to expect. Whatever, the ending was easier, more like how I’ve found Bell Shakespeare to be in the past.

I left knowing that this was a great work but feeling somewhat unmoved. I’d eaten with some friends a few nights before who were iconoclastic enough to admit that they could take or leave the Parisian masterpieces, that visual arts just don’t do it for them, even the uberpop impressionists. I felt something like this. There’s obvious profundity there, but it’s distant from my experience. I couldn’t accept Lear’s anger with Cordelia in the first scene, and I equally couldn’t warm to Cordelia’s strangely punctilious and distant response to her father’s demands. OK, she was being true rather than obsequious, but too teenagerly literal in it all. Why not just humour him? Similarly, I found other responses were too extreme or unlikely. And then why the soppy characters winning in the end; how come the change in simple, honest Edgar to warrior superman; OK that the scheming sisters fell for the lithe and naughty Edmund, but would the honourable Albany really have been married to the tyro Goneril? 100 to 50 knights was OK but the drop to 25 and then 10,5,1 was too sudden. Cordelia just didn’t seem young and frail enough, and I didn’t quite catch the intent of the all-important letters. It’s a busy plot and nicely mirrored with the two misunderstanding fathers, but it takes considerable comprehension to follow the details. The plucking of Gloucester’s eyes was harrowing (but I’d seen worse in Titus Andronicus at Stratford on Avon). In the end, the stage was littered with three sisters and the bad son Edmund, and then Lear drops off, as becomes a tragedy, leaving a few admirable characters, Albany and Kent and Edgar.

Gigs can be lonely and distant for a band, and so I like to hoop it up a bit to show some involvement and support. Theatre isn’t quite like that, but at least a few chuckles for jokes or gasps for particularly distressing scenes can be expected. But the audience here was strangely quiet, as if they were having the problems I was. We value this great work, but we don’t particularly understand it or assimilate it. So in the end, Lear was a strangely truncated experience, not due to the play but rather to the audience and our distance from its world. Now, will I get any comments for this post???

Tallyho, Pinkerton

… was one of the favourite books I used to read to my kids when they were little. But I saw that other Pinkerton last night, and what a cad he was! This Pinkerton was the debaser of Madame Butterfly, of course, in Puccini’s opera. He was a nasty piece of work, and she was the dignified and faithful spouse and mother. This Butterfly was a two-act version. I guess this is the original text from La Scala that was poorly received; Puccini subsequently rewrote the work in three acts and several further versions to much success. This one was performed in English, with a cast of ~9 and a small (~12 piece) orchestra. I was a bit non-plussed by it all, and disappointed, especially given MB’s renown. The music seemed pretty samey, especially through the first act, although I felt it was more dynamic and passionate in the second. I could only catch a few words, despite the presentation in English, and sometimes I felt the phrasing was forced, presumably to fit the lyrics to the music. The sopranos were plenty loud when they hit their higher range, but there were several voices that were lost, even with this small orchestra. I can understand this is not kosher, but some subtle PA work may have helped here. I found it all a bit ho-hum. The cute puppet that was MB’s toddler just about stole the show. It was only the final scene with the hara-kiri that finally affected me, and that ended so, so abruptly, along with the whole performance. No epilogue here. I only recognised one aria, by MB in the second act, although the humming chorus is apparently famous too. You couldn’t miss the Star-Spangled banner references, but … wasn’t he a cad. Thank god for that nice Sharpless who represented the honest side of the yanks. This production is set in Nagasaki in 1946 (think: Fat man, A-bomb). I didn’t see any particular relevance for the A-bomb connection, but we enjoyed the show well enough. As I was leaving, I heard some women chuckling that they had been thinking “Die, bitch” during some lengthy passages in the second act. I didn’t quite feel that, but I don’t expect it will be long remembered by me. Probably not as long as my memories of that cute book, “Tallyho, Pinkerton”.

Madame Butterfly was directed by John Bell and performed by Opera Australia. I’d have some pics, but in these days of obsessive concern with Copyright, they are strictly VERBOTEN.