The current STC production of King Lear shifts the action to the Balkans in the present era (some notes I read specified the early 1990s, but given the costuming and some of the music choices I think it’s actually more current).  There has been quite a trend placing Shakespeare in modern settings, but I think it works well for King Lear – Shakespeare himself leaves the setting somewhat flexible: it reads in a style and setting fairly contemporaneous to his more recent history plays, but the chronicles place Lear before the time of King Arthur.

At first I was a little annoyed about this choice of setting, mainly because I read in the company magazine some notes where the director said, “I was not really aware of the genocide and that a civilized European country was destroyed and divided up.”  How could you not know?  However, despite his early ignorance (or simply a badly worded interview) it worked really well.  In the end, King Lear is a rather timeless play, and the choice of setting did not impinge on the action too much, beyond the opening scene, which was just perfect, with garish, tarty clothes, drunken dancing, guns, dreadful Balkan rap, and a guy lying passed out on the floor throughout the scene with Cordelia’s suitors and Edmund’s first machinations.  There was also Oswald (who took over some of the general servant/messenger lines as well, a successful directorial decision) in a football jersey, and some hilariously awesome outfits for Regan, giving her exactly the right brand of Eastern European serious sluttiness.

The only other really obvious nod towards the setting came right at the end, after the battle, when many white wrapped ‘bodies’, some of them child sized, were brought on stage, and then thrown through the trapdoor, as if into a mass grave.  Gloucester also died on stage at this point, slightly earlier than in the text, so that he could be thrown into the grave too – overall this production seemed to want all the deaths to take place on stange.

I felt that, other than the choice of setting (and as extension of this, strongly overt sexuality – and indeed even sex), this was a fairly traditional production, and I am glad that they did not go for too much quirkiness, as this is such a powerful play that the text should be left to speak for itself.  (Although they did cut my favourite line, Goneril’s “I would breed from hence occasions, and I shall, that I may speak.”)

The star of the play, was, of course, Stacy Keach as Lear, and, in spite of the large ensemble cast, he really carried the show.  The descent into madness was really well done, despite the short time available, and he managed to keep the character strong and consistent even in the depths of Lear’s madness.

Somehow I had always imagined Kent as an attractive young man, but I suppose that playing him older is more in keeping with the fact that he is about to die at the end.  Kent is not the most exciting part, but I felt that Steve Pickering did a good job with the balance between loyalty to Lear and determination to do what is right, and his affection for Cordelia was a nice touch I had not considered before (they played it rather like an affectionate older uncle.

Albany and Cornwall were also not quite as I envisaged, but were well played.  Further to the weakness of the character, Albany (Andrew Long) was given an added layer of sleaziness which made his realization of the need to do right at the end even more of an effort, and Chris Genebach gave a really strong performance as Cornwall.  His Cornwall delighted in violence, and really was the embodiment of a menacing evil in a character that can be overlooked – really disturbing.

Joaquin Torres and Jonno Roberts as Edgar and Edmund respectively were both great.  Torres definitely deserves respect for being able to leap around the stage completely nude and uninhibited when Edgar is disguised as the mad beggar.  Lear at least was mostly back view or clutching a blanket, but Edgar was letting it all hang out full-frontal for quite a while.  I liked the way the director chose the outward representation of the characters: in the early scenes Edgar was the sedate, sensible one (aside from Cordelia, the only one not getting drunk at the party) while Edmund was a louche playboy (in orange trousers and a red jacket) – a complete representation of their inward characters.  Even when he began plotting Edgar came across more as a sleezy politician, which made the revelation of his true evil even more effective.  In fact, Edmund retained his air of control throughout; even when interacting sexually with Goneril and Regan he maintained the sense that everything he did was considered and for his own gain – a particularly frightening kind of evil.

I was not sure about the decision to have Edmund murder Cornwall, however, rather than to die off-stage as a result of the injury inflicted by his servant.  I don’t really think this added anything to the interpretation, as there can be no doubt as to the level of Edmund’s depravity.  Also cut were the lines just before his death when Edmund sends to the prison to try to save Lear and Cordelia – this production was without any sense of redemption.

I also liked the direction of the fool (Howard Witt).  Mostly I find Shakespeare’s fools pretty annoying to the modern perspective, but playing him seriously, as a rather sad old man worked well.

The only real weakness in the cast was Laura Odeh as Cordelia, but I think that this has as much to do with the character as anything.  Cordelia is just pretty wet (after all, it’s Cordelia about whom Shakespeare wrote the infamous, “her voice was ever gentle, soft, and low, an excellent thing in woman”) so it is hard to act her in an appealing way – I would try for gentle but steely underneath, by Odeh rather came across as gentle but ineffective.  Initially I wondered why they brought out Cordelia’s body almost in the nude, as unlike Edgar and Lear this seemed like simply gratuitously.  However, given that she kept her bra but lost her underpants, I wonder if this was supposed to suggest rape, which would be especially fitting given the Balkan setting.

The villainous Goneril and Regan are much better female parts than Cordelia, and Kim Martin-Cotton and Kate Arrington made the most of this.  I thought that the contrast between the two women’s relationships with their husbands was particularly effective: Goneril walked all over Albany (the relative good guy) but Cornwall dominated and manipulated Regan.  However, they are united in their downfall by their obsession with Edmund: whereas he always puts himself first, the women are done in by their desire for him

I wonder if it was because this production is a revival of one that ran a couple of years ago at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, but it seemed to have a bigger budget than most STC productions – there was a larger ensemble cast and more, and more complicated, sets – it was the first time I saw a car driven onstage in an indoor production.  I thought that the post-apocalyptic wasteland after the interval was especially well done; the back lighting compounded the sense of destruction and desolation.

Altogether, I think that the Shakespeare Theatre Company closed its season with its best production: there were not any individual performances that quite stood up to Michelle Hurd in The Dog in the Manger, but overall King Lear was extraordinarily effective in conveying it’s message about war and human nature.