Donnchadh O’Conaill reviews Seven Lears: The Pursuit of the Good – Woodplayers, Collingwood College, 8^th December 2009

To start with, I must confess that I didn’t enjoy Woodplayer’s production of Seven Lears.  Some of the blame for this can be placed with Howard Barker’s script, which I found very bitty, consisting mostly of short exchanges with very little sustained development of character or plot. The point of this style is to shake up the theatrical experience, to jog the audience out of their comfortable three-act routine by use of striking tableaux, a broad sweep across different times and locations, and a refusal to explain the characters’ actions with conventional plotting. For this to work, it requires a production with a real sense of dynamism, where tension can be created by gesture, sharp changes in pace and tone, and the feeling that violence is always lurking beneath the on-stage relationships. Unfortunately, I felt Gareth Davies’s direction did not deliver this. It very rarely gave a sense of momentum, of one thing leading into another as opposed to merely being succeeded by it. Some over-elaborate scene changes didn’t help, and the frequent blackouts rarely felt climactic. Overall, despite energetic individual performances, the production as a whole felt ponderous rather than startling. 

I must confess that I struggled to see how this play cast light on King Lear

As mentioned above, some of this was due to the script. I can’t say it was all clear to me, but I suspect that it contained hidden shallows; that beneath the philosophical flourishes which Lear in particular indulges in, there was little actually being said. Glib philosophising can serve to illustrate something about its speaker, but to do so it must occur in a context where we see why this person might be saying these things (to impress others, or to avoid facing a really difficult issue). The problem was that this play gave us no such context. Too many of the lines had a frictionless, ephemeral quality; nothing changed after they were said, which is a good working definition of superfluous dialogue. As opposed to that, some of the political satire was far too blunt and unwieldy.

The frequent references to King Lear created another problem. I haven’t read that play in some time, so doubtless some allusions passed me by. Others, such as the theme of blindness, were unavoidable. I must confess that I struggled to see how this play cast light on King Lear. The production’s website (http://www.dur.ac.uk/collingwood.woodplayers/shows.php?view=show&sid=10) flags up the importance of the relation between Lear and his wife Clarissa as a way of understanding the action in Shakespeare’s play. I wasn’t convinced; the script developed neither Lear nor Clarissa far enough to make their relationship interesting in and of itself, let alone capable of illustrating hidden themes or motives in another work.

Fresher Jamie Kitson… is an actor of great potential

The most impressive aspect of the production was the cast, which was large, well-drilled and generally solid. This was particularly noteworthy when one considers that the players were all drawn from Collingwood. If nothing else, this production made a powerful case for in-house casting. Had the casting been open, we might have been denied Andrew Kirby’s Bishop, complete with icicle stare and wonderfully cold manner towards the young Lear; or Rob Old, who adds lovely moments of downcast comedy in portraying a tramp whom Lear appoints as the Duke of Gloucester; or the wonderfully monikered Pierre McIlwee, splendidly pompous but staying on just the right side of caricature as the Inventor. Not everyone was as good as the aforementioned, but no-one let the side down, which in a cast of over twenty is no small feat. If Davies can be criticised for the pace of the production, he also deserves praise for the general level of the acting.

Fresher Jamie Kitson, who took the title role (or roles), is an actor of great potential, held back partly by the limitations of the script. He showed some nice comic timing early on in the play, but struggled to cope with more anguished passages. He was not helped by having very few scenes with a clearly defined sense of place and atmosphere, or indeed other well-rounded characters to play off. I felt his voice also lacked the richness needed to convey more complex emotions. The seven Lears of the title, incidentally, correspond to the seven ages of man which the character undergoes, and were illustrated by costume changes. I think the distinctions between these phases of his life could have been better delineated – this would have given the production a sense of structure which at times was severely lacking.

There were a lot of ideas – face paint, use of actors as aeroplane parts, front lighting – but a lack of cohesion

Hayley Parsons as Clarissa displayed a nicely mocking manner in her early scenes with Kitson, easily puncturing his youthful bravado. After their marriage, she had fewer extended scenes in which to develop the character, bar her encounter with Prudentia, her mother (and Lear’s former lover) whom Clarissa has arranged to have killed. Parsons and Sinead Leahy achieved an intensity in their brief exchange which was sadly absent elsewhere.

I remarked earlier on the limitations in the staging, but it is worth noting some aspects which worked very well. The portrayal of the dungeon in Lear’s mind where he keeps his prisoners was particularly well accomplished. It was one of the few scenes to make proper use of the two levels (Lear above, the prisoners below), and it was marvellously lit: front and low, with a disfiguring green filter. The last scene, where Lear plays chess with his bitter rival Kent (Toby Leston, confident throughout though not always nuanced enough), is also worth mentioning for its striking use of wind effects and random corpses. To these impressive design elements, one can add the excellent publicity. However, overall I felt the design of the show didn’t quite come off. There were a lot of ideas – face paint, use of actors as aeroplane parts, front lighting – but a lack of cohesion, of an overall point which these ideas were helping to make.

I’m still not entirely sure what I made of Seven Lears. This isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but it reflects the fact that while aspects of it were quite successful, others were frankly not. In general, I would say that this production didn’t work, but was a brave (perhaps overly so) choice, which gave a tantalising suggestion of what a college company could achieve with more precisely calibrated material.