Kline plays Lear for laughs
NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Just like other people wishing they were doing something else, comedians dream of playing Hamlet. Luckily their fantasies tend not to come true.But Kevin Kline, a fine and infinitely charming comic actor, did get to play Hamlet at the Public Theater, without, however, garnering laurels to rest on. So what was left for him to fantasise about? Lear, naturally.
Now “King Lear” is, in my view, Shakespeare’s greatest play, and just possibly the greatest play ever written. So it took a director like James Lapine, for the current Public Theater production, to turn Shakespeare’s best tragedy into Shakespeare’s worst comedy.
Meanwhile, Kline had redeemed himself elsewhere with a good, comic but not too comic Falstaff, which evidently wasn’t enough for him. So now there he is, helping Lapine to make a shambles of Lear, the role, and “Lear”, the play.
Lapine, like all arrogant directors, knows that you make a name for yourself by improving on Shakespeare, who, poor fellow, didn’t really know his trade. Thus, in Lapine’s production, the play does not begin with a scene involving Kent, Gloucester and Edmund. Instead, we get three little girls playing with varicoloured sand, designing a map of England. We learn that they are young Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. They will reappear near play’s end to haunt their doomed adult selves.
Of course, Lapine had to make further improvements. Things that Shakespeare tactfully left offstage, the director brings on. Hence we get, high up on Heidi Ettinger’s multi-tiered skeleton set, a couple of torrid pantomimed love scenes for Edmund and Regan. In one, they merely smooch; in another, she leaps up on him, legs wrapped around his waist. Goneril, similarly enamoured but older and more discreet, only bares part of her chest for Edmund.
Lapine also makes death more explicit. Thus we watch Regan, who here seems to have been poisoned, not by Goneril but by Goneril’s man Oswald, several scenes before (some poisons work exceedingly slowly) crawl to her death, again high up, painfully on all fours. As for Goneril, she commits hara-kiri in full view, shrieking horrendously.
To make room for Lapine’s solicitous addenda, some of the play’s best lines had to be cut, albeit, in such a production, any abbreviation may be a blessing. Possibly for the first time in its 401-year history, “King Lear” doesn’t feature a single wholly satisfactory performance. The Cordelia of Kristen Bush comes closest, but she, too, eventually gets worse, perhaps so as to, collegially, not disrupt an ensemble failure.
Michael Cerveris and Larry Bryggman, so good elsewhere, come a cropper with Kent and Gloucester; some others, in less demanding parts, manage to rise to the heights of inconspicuousness.
Three characters, however, have to be singled out for succeeding to sink even below the level of this fiasco.
They are Laura Odeh as Regan, Timothy D. Stickney as Oswald and the ever dependably poor Philip Goodwin as the Fool. He at least may have an excuse. The rest, taking the line “this great stage of fools” literally, may prove unfair competition for the one actor who actually has to play a fool.
The curse on this “Lear” is confirmed by the incidental music provided by Stephen Sondheim and Michael Starobin. The joint effort of a composer and an orchestrator of such eminence emerges so minuscule as to make the piddling products of the minimalists sound by comparison like Gustav Mahler.
“King Lear” runs through Sunday, March 18 at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, Manhattan.
