![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainCrazy-busy and not about to be any less busy -- as this is the semester when I have to do all my tenure-portfolio stuff. But I thought I would check in. I'll try to do some proper travel posts with photos at some point, but for now, here are some notes and thoughts on the Globe's touring production of King Lear, since I'm guessing there are a few people here who would want to hear about it.
(Sadly, making it to the Hamlet Festival at Elsinore meant I missed the Festiwal Szekspirowski in Gdansk. Apparently, all of Europe decides to have Shakespeare festivals on the same weekend. Who knew?)
-- Like the other Globe touring production I've seen (The Comedy of Errors in 2009), they did it all with eight actors and a lot of doubling: Cordelia / Fool, Oswald / Edmund, Cornwall / Edgar, Gloucester / Albany. Mostly, they signaled who was who with costumes -- Edgar, for example, wore glasses in all of his incarnations, including Poor Tom, while Cornwall did not. They also didn't hide the machinery at all -- you could see the actors shaking thunder-sheets just behind the curtain in the storm scene, and just about everybody doubled as a musician whenever they needed mood music.
-- OK, so the Globe's house style means a lot of comedy, and a lot of playing to the audience. I'm cool with that, generally. But -- and this is a big BUT -- having Cornwall throw Gloucester's eyeballs into the audience during the blinding scene JUST DOES NOT WORK. (Although it is an interesting kind of not-working, since it's totally in character for Cornwall to do that; it just wrecks what should be a harrowing moment from the audience's perspective.) But otherwise, I appreciate that this production brought out just how funny Lear is; it would be a redemptive tragicomedy like Cymbeline or WT if not for that cruel twist at the end.
-- Also, Regan and Cornwall were totally making out all through the blinding scene. That I bought, completely.
-- The play was translated into Danish, using one of those light-up signs above the stage, which is how I learned that the Danish word for beggar is "tigger." This amuses me to an unreasonable degree.
-- The Fool kept trying to cover Lear with her own clothing in the storm scenes, which was sad and sweet (although there was also obviously an element of "PLEASE put on your clothes!" in her reactions).
-- At the very end, the actors playing Goneril and Regan double as attendants / pallbearers; they come out and sing a sort of wordless dirge over Lear and Cordelia's bodies, and then they take their places for the final dance, Lear and Cordelia rise up and join them, and the whole company bursts into "Hey, ho, the wind and the rain." And I kind of got this sense of barely-repressed joy through the whole production, but here at last it bursts out.
-- Pretty much every time I see a Shakespeare play in performance I notice something new about the actual text, and this time it was about Kent. Kent is so plainly having fun with his role as Caius, saying and doing all the stuff he couldn't say as an earl, right up until the moment when he realizes Cornwall is really going to put him in the stocks -- it isn't play-acting and he really has lost his identity as a nobleman and can't get it back. And then it abruptly stops being fun. I think that's the moment that really breaks him -- I don't know why I never got that before, except the audience doesn't realize he has been broken until the very last moments of the play.
(Sadly, making it to the Hamlet Festival at Elsinore meant I missed the Festiwal Szekspirowski in Gdansk. Apparently, all of Europe decides to have Shakespeare festivals on the same weekend. Who knew?)
-- Like the other Globe touring production I've seen (The Comedy of Errors in 2009), they did it all with eight actors and a lot of doubling: Cordelia / Fool, Oswald / Edmund, Cornwall / Edgar, Gloucester / Albany. Mostly, they signaled who was who with costumes -- Edgar, for example, wore glasses in all of his incarnations, including Poor Tom, while Cornwall did not. They also didn't hide the machinery at all -- you could see the actors shaking thunder-sheets just behind the curtain in the storm scene, and just about everybody doubled as a musician whenever they needed mood music.
-- OK, so the Globe's house style means a lot of comedy, and a lot of playing to the audience. I'm cool with that, generally. But -- and this is a big BUT -- having Cornwall throw Gloucester's eyeballs into the audience during the blinding scene JUST DOES NOT WORK. (Although it is an interesting kind of not-working, since it's totally in character for Cornwall to do that; it just wrecks what should be a harrowing moment from the audience's perspective.) But otherwise, I appreciate that this production brought out just how funny Lear is; it would be a redemptive tragicomedy like Cymbeline or WT if not for that cruel twist at the end.
-- Also, Regan and Cornwall were totally making out all through the blinding scene. That I bought, completely.
-- The play was translated into Danish, using one of those light-up signs above the stage, which is how I learned that the Danish word for beggar is "tigger." This amuses me to an unreasonable degree.
-- The Fool kept trying to cover Lear with her own clothing in the storm scenes, which was sad and sweet (although there was also obviously an element of "PLEASE put on your clothes!" in her reactions).
-- At the very end, the actors playing Goneril and Regan double as attendants / pallbearers; they come out and sing a sort of wordless dirge over Lear and Cordelia's bodies, and then they take their places for the final dance, Lear and Cordelia rise up and join them, and the whole company bursts into "Hey, ho, the wind and the rain." And I kind of got this sense of barely-repressed joy through the whole production, but here at last it bursts out.
-- Pretty much every time I see a Shakespeare play in performance I notice something new about the actual text, and this time it was about Kent. Kent is so plainly having fun with his role as Caius, saying and doing all the stuff he couldn't say as an earl, right up until the moment when he realizes Cornwall is really going to put him in the stocks -- it isn't play-acting and he really has lost his identity as a nobleman and can't get it back. And then it abruptly stops being fun. I think that's the moment that really breaks him -- I don't know why I never got that before, except the audience doesn't realize he has been broken until the very last moments of the play.
