A nicely focussed King Lear at the Rose Theatre

I have still not fallen in love with the Rose Theatre, which is sad as it is the only theatre within comfortable walking distance, but I keep giving it a chance and sometimes it delivers the goods. King Lear was one of those good times.

I can usually be tempted to see Shakespeare but I had to think twice about this version of King Lear as I had seen the play twice in the last year and one of those times, at the Union Theatre, had been astonishingly good. What swung it for me was the name Jonathan Miller and it was at the Rose.

Things nearly went horribly wrong. I had to work in Reading that day and getting back from there to Kingston takes me around two and a half hours so to get back for 7:30pm I have to leave the office by 5pm and if I want some contingency then I have to leave even earlier than that.

I did manage to leave earlier than that but my bus got delayed in Reading and I ended up walking the last kilometre to the station only to miss the train by about ten seconds. That left me with a half an hour wait for the next one. Only that was delayed. I spent most of the next ninety minutes burning my mobile phone data allowance checking route options which led me to catch the Waterloo train that does not go via Richmond and changing at Clapham Junction to get a train back to Kingston. That got in just after 7:20pm (it was a couple of minutes late too!) which was just enough time to get to the theatre and claim my seat before the performance started.

That was my second close shave in a week so I must try and not work in Reading so often.

The seat I got to just in time was A28 and it cost me £25.00. As always the view from row A in the central block was excellent.

The simple stage with just a dais and a bar was a happy harbinger of things to come. This Lear was a stripped down version that let the actors paint all the pictures using Shakespeare's words. Few props were needed or used.

How stripped down it was I am nothing like qualified to comment on but there did seem to be some cuts. The most obvious one was that here the deaths of Regan and Goneril happened off stage and were merely reported whereas at the Union Theatre Regan died in the chair next to me.

The timings were slight and nothing material was removed. The result left the focus on Lear throughout, and I was very happy with that as the play is about his decent into madness and the consequences of that with the supporting characters there to help to paint that picture. Barrie Rutter was magnificent as Lear and the rest of the cast were very good too.

The other feature that I liked was the way that the scenes ran together quickly with one set of characters walking on to the stage while others were walking off. That was something that the sparse set allowed, that is no time was required to reset the stage for each new location.

I really enjoyed this version of King Lear. It both reaffirmed my faith in Shakespeare and enhanced my view of the Rose Theatre.

Imaginative and intense Lear at the Union Theatre

The reason that I go to so much theatre, especially at the smaller venues, is that it is normally good and sometimes you get to see something as exceptional as this production of Lear.

Not for the first time I had Twitter to thank for seeing it. I had tweeted my disappointment at the National Theatre's King Lear when I got a reply telling me about Lear at the Union Theatre. It was the same play but with a female lead and so the slightly different title.

I had not been to the Union Theatre before but it was easy to find. Luckily I had allowed plenty of time to find it so the horrendous delay due to the temporary closure of Waterloo Station (person on the tracks) was not a significant problem, though it did reduce my evening meal to a takeaway pasty from the station.

At least I had time for a bottle of Becks at the theatre where the box office was conveniently situated in the bar.

As I collected my reusable ticket (I like theatres that do not give out throw-away paper tickets) I was told that the play was in three parts with two breaks and that we would be standing for the first fifteen minutes. I liked the sound of that.

As we entered the small dark space that is Union Theatre we joined a reception of some sort with Lear standing next to the piano which her youngest daughter Cordelia was playing. The other guests were standing around and we joined them.

As the drama opened the cast moved through us and I had to make room for the a couple of times.

At the end of the first scene we retired to the seats that ringed three sides of the performance area in single-file.

The dark space was used imaginatively and the only significant props used were the piano and a desk where the Earl of Gloucester worked.

Incidentally, the usual actor in this role had had an accident just a couple of days before and another member of the cast had had to step up to the role and he had to refer to the script occasionally. We were warned beforehand that this was the case and it is a testament to the quality of the performance that this did not matter in the least. At the curtain call Gloucester got an especially loud reception. It was well deserved.

Clever use was made of lighting too. The most memorable was at the start of the second session where Lear and her Fool were heading for Dover and the only lighting was the electric torches that they each carried.

It was all very intense and dramatic. And then it got even better.

As we entered the theatre for the third and final time we saw that most of the stage was given over to a large table (just as it had been at the National Theatre) and there were seats at it. I was lucky to get on in the middle. The seat next to me was reserved for Regan and she died sitting next to me while her sister, Goneril, sat opposite her delighting in the work of her poison.

A lot of the actioned happened on the table itself and a few people died just in front of me. Theatre does not get much more immersive than that.

A good script and good direction still needs a good cast to make the play work and this cast was excellent. Sadly the Union Theatre's website only lists the cast and does not put names to roles so I will just name a few roles that I especially liked. Edmund, Gloucester's illegitimate son, was brash, confident and nasty as he stepped in to the void created by Lear's insanity and Edgar rose magnificently to undo the tragedy wrought by Edmund.

And Ursula Mohan did what Lear has to do swinging through moods and delusions as first she sparked the tragedy, then railed against it and final succumbed to it.

Following close on the heals of a superb Hamlet, this magnificent production of Lear showed how dramatic and relevant Shakespeare can still be in the right hands. It also showed how imaginative and accomplished small theatres can be.

Poor King Lear at the National Theatre

The last time that I saw King Lear was in 1989 at the Old Vic with Eric Porter (famous as Soames in Forsyte Saga) as Lear. I had high hopes for this version with Simon Russell Beale and the heritage of the National Theatre behind it.That was enough for me to fork out £50 for a seat in the very centre of the Circle of the Olivier Theatre (A43).

I was greeted with the promising view of a dark, brooding and modern looking set with the sun being eclipsed as we took our seats.

Things went wrong very quickly.

It always takes a few minutes to get in to the lilt of Shakespeare's language but then things are normally fine. This time there were a couple of actors who I could hardly understand at all throughout the entire performance and as a result I missed large chunks of the drama and, more importantly, Shakespeare's poetic language.

I've seen enough Shakespeare to know that the fault was not mine and all the overheard conversations at half-time said the same thing. The couple next to me did not come back after the break.

With something wrong as fundamental as the diction there is little point in saying anything about the rest of the show. But I will just to remind myself later of what the other aspects of the performance were like.

The staging was very theatrical with lots of people, things and movement. Some of this I felt was unnecessary, e.g. the ring of tall grass that appeared, and I got the impression that it was there to impress the casual theatre goer rather than to highlight aspects of the drama that theatre regulars may have missed.

Some of the acting was very good and I had no complaints at all about Simon Russell Beale's Lear.

The second half was better and I think that was mostly due to the pace of the drama which was much slower as the various tragedies deepened and with the slower speech came better diction. On its own the second half was fine, even good, but it could not make up for the loss of the first half where all the dark seeds were sown.