Being in London in August is always fun. Most of the most unbearable people who live here pack their protesting progeny off to the south of France and it is eerily easy to get parking spaces and tables in restaurants. The weather could be warmer and the commentary on the Olympics a little less inane but Dominic Dromgoole’s production of King Lear at the Globe Theatre makes 2008’s August a good ‘un.
David Calder is superlative throughout, both in voice and body, as the King’s bluster and bombast fade and falter into the feeble shuffle of a vulnerable old man. The final scenes are very moving, particularly Lear’s reunion with Cordelia (Jodie McNee).
It is all too easy to treat Regan and Goneril as incarnate harpies but Dromgoole has delved a little deeper. Kellie Bright and Sally Bretton are surprisingly sexy sisters struggling in political marriages to weak husbands and exasperated by their father’s whims. Dromgoole’s depiction of the behaviour of Lear’s hundred knights would try the patience of any hostess and the sliver of sympathy for the sisters makes it all the more appalling when they throw their father on the mercy of the storm and proceed to attack Gloucester’s eyes. The other sibling rivalry, between Edmond and Edgar, is also well handled. Daniel Hawksford and Trystan Gravelle are both easy on the eye and, while Hawksford profits from the comedy in villainous Edmond’s lines, Gravelle does extremely well with worthy Edgar’s ‘Poor Tom’ scenes: some of the most difficult in the play.
The presence of costumed musicians in and around the action lends an extra shade of mood: they seem sorrowful, ghostly figures who can only lament Lear as he declines. The music is excellent: it is performed on simple, wooden instruments, which, like the tombola thunder machine, are a pleasing echo of the original Globe. Dromgoole has also revived another lost tradition: the melancholy and loss at the end of the play are dispelled by a rousing bergamask for a curtain call.
It is a shame this season has to end.
