Director: Karl Falconer
PurpleCoat Productions | Smock Alley | 11/7/16

Shakespeare’s King Lear is a play of many layers, exploring the intensely personal hand-in-hand with the political. It tells the story of King Lear and his gradual descent into madness after dividing his property between his daughters. He does this according to their flattery of him, which leaves his honest youngest daughter, Cordelia, with nothing. This play has the potential to sharply and insightfully examine ideas around power, madness, family, love and ageing.

A good production of King Lear depends on so much more than just the text. One such thing it depends on is a teasing out of the different themes, textures and ideas within the script. There is no teasing in Purple Coat’s production. Throughout, the audience is presented with loud, brash images of incest, drug abuse and sexual assault that, in the context of the play, seem out of place and unjustified. The numerous instances of Lear groping his daughters and the violent sexual imagery that pervade the production suggest attempts at a cheap, base, and ineffective directorial shortcut to shock an emotional response from the audience.  Similarly the inclusion of a poorly depicted cocaine addiction in Edmund’s character comes across as an attempt to assert the company’s non-traditional take on the play, but once again plays out as an unsuccessful shortcut.  

Not only does the production fall short in terms of thematic execution, it also fails in numerous technical aspects of direction, performance and design.  Despite the fact that most of the ground level seating in the Boys School space is on the same level or a very slight slant, a large portion of the action in the play was placed downstage and close to the floor at a crouching level or lower to the ground. This meant that most of the audience were craning their necks and stretching to see what was happening; even though I was sitting in the centre of the second row, very close to the stage, I still struggled to see.  Though this is a touring production, not one created within or for the Boys School space, it would have taken some relatively simple modifications to effectively adapt to the new space. Showing similar lack of foresight, parts of Alisha Johnson’s lighting design broke the flow of the piece as the lights came up on a number of occasions across the stage and audience, strongly suggesting an interval and leading to the audience starting to shift in their seats and moving to clap. These are simple directorial and technical decisions that had an extensive negative effect on the production overall because of a lack of consideration of the audience’s position in the venue.

Some of the performances could have been salvageable had they not been fighting against the myriad issues with the production. However, with shouting being used in place of nuanced delivery, an over-egged Poor Tom, and Lear being confined to one tiny upstage spot for what is arguably the most powerful speech in the play, there was no avoiding the sense that so much more could have been done to produce a show more worthy of such a significant text.

Purple Coat take what they describe as Shakespeare’s “greatest, bleakest and perhaps last great play,” and deliver a coarse production that soon derails itself with cheap tropes and attempted dramatic shortcuts. To steal words from the bard himself, “Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.”

More reviews and features by Saoirse Anton can be found at www.sittingonthefourthwall.wordpress.com