THEATRE

Things that hurt

HILARY SPURLING

Jonathan Miller's production of King Lear, mightily praised when it opened at Not- tingham in- October, trod the boards of the Old Vic last week—and a tread so firm of purpose is not often heard, in this or any other theatre. It is a bold director who would take on a play so hackneyed, one which melts so easily into a tale of sound and fury signifying (as it did two years ago at Strat- ford) little beyond a conscientious acknowledgement that some passages are played loud and others, by long tradition, soft. Mr Miller's production is seldom loud and never soft: indeed, tartness, a dry com- icality which runs right through the play on the fine line between conscious pathos and the king's self-pity, is characteristic of the production and its central performance.

Not that Mr Miller is unmindful of the past. For, if Michael Hordern's Lear is perfectly free from the formidable shadow cast by Paul Schofield in the part, then the grandeur of Peter Brook's production for the asc—which opened on battle-scarred, leathery, unkempt thegns milling round a hero of Old English myth or saga—may perhaps be said to have cleared the way for this- one, which opens on homelier ground, altogether more familiar from traditional English comedy. Courtiers (sumptuously dressed by Rosemary Vercoe in Jacobean costume) trickle silently across the stage, holding desultory, inaudible conversations and eyeing one another with a mixture of nervousness and boredom. Lear's entrance suggests familiar tensions, the kind of slack, habitual vindictiveness which goes with a long-standing family quarrel. The court's obsequious watchfulness—They flattered me like a dog' and 'the observation we have had of him hath not been little'—seems largely a matter of routine; and the sense of submerged resentment is as apparent infpor-

delia (Penelope Wilton) as in Thelma Ruby's Goneril or Cherith Mellor's Regan.

So that the scene Lear makes his daughters—Tell me . . . which of you shalt we say doth love us most?' delivered with a gloating, lip-sucking relish, in anticipation of protestations still more fulsome, a sub- mission still more unctuous, than any he has

yet. exacted—seems not so much a sudden 'hideous rashness' as the culmination of a

whole series of such wretched scenes forced on his luckless family. His elder daughters play it out for him with a 'glib and oily' parody of indulgence. Cordelia in this scene is lowering, almost baleful: something not entirely pleasant in her cold, self-righteous 'Nothing,' suggests that she, too, is her father's daughter.

For Lear's tantrum is far from senile in this production; it is the more dangerous childishness of middle age, the effect of power—and nothing could more plainly demonstrate Lear's absolute hold on his family than the sense of repetition, of frightful, dull, routine humiliations inflicted in this scene—on a grown man whose vic- tims' public helplessness breeds private loathing, and a contempt as callous as his own insensitivity to their tender parts. Hence the chill impact of the fool's premonition—a marvellously tiresome, grey-faced, ageing clown in woollen mittens, pestering his master like a needling child—'Thou should'st not have been old till thou had'st been wise.' Hence, too, the urgency and venom of the exchange between Goneril and Regan when, breezily admitting the justice of Cordelia's parting accusation, they snatch at the revenge Lear has placed within their grasp: 'He hath ever but slenderly known himself'.

It is the classic cry of English domestic comedy : the punishment regularly visited by those who know themselves well on the insufferable vanity of tyrants. Only here the terms on which this pair have returned sycophancy for past snubs and insults are literally murderous. The tone, even in the atrocious bargaining which follows over Lear's retainers ('What need you five-and- twenty, ten or five . . .?'), is shrewd, prac- tical, matter-of-fact; one will not soon forget Goneril's gluttonous enjoyment of this scene, nor the sweet, pert smile on Regan's face as she turns aside on an almost co- quettish intonation—'What need one?'—to savour future pleasures. One such is Gloucester's blinding, and already Bruce Purchase as the future torturer, Cornwall—a somnolent thug, watching the sisters' smooth operation on their father silently and with open approbation—hangs ominously on this scene.

It has been argued that this homeliness, the sense of ingrained, domestic rancour diminishes what is to come; but in fact the intimacy of this family group standing in the door, their grotesque nanny-talk ('Oh, sir,

to wilful men/The injuries that they them- selves procure/Must be their schoolmasters'), the way in which they vent their spite on Lear as casually as one might treat a cat that won't come in when called: all these lead logically to their seeing him as an animal, a thing, a disposable object—to a malevolence from which the storm is in some

sense a respite. The stony cruelty of this scene implants a further bitterness in the tempest which 'would not give me leave to ponder/ On things that hurt me more.'

And Mr Hordern's storm speeches are -most beautifully judged: the ferocious images delivered with a musical delicacy, and a calmness more appalling than the wildest passion., For this is., the onset,44

terror, a terror which can only turn inwards to stifle itself—even Lear's inquisitiveness, his mad fretful questions, are above all furtive, again like a child frantically squirm- ing to avoid the implications of its own astuteness—for this is the fear, not of a lunatic, but of a sane man. It is this which makes Mr Hordern's Lear so terrifying. If madness offers some meagre protection, then so does the thin thread of humour which meanders between the king and fool (a brilliant performance by Frank Middlemass) and back again as Lear cracks Irish jokes on . Dover beach : 'They told me I was everything: 'tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.' It gives his brief sanity, and his last despair, a poignancy almost intolerable to watch.

I have no room here to explore the reaches of this astonishing performance, nor to in- dicate the many subtleties of this production, its clarity, its formal shaping and placing of images which come and go like themes in music; nor even to pay tribute to the many excellent performances—notably, David Dodimead's Gloucester, Peter Whitbread's uncommonly fine Kent, Donald Gee's shifty and lascivious Oswald—in a whole where no part is less than well played. Mr Miller directs The Merchant of Venice later this season at the National Theatre and, on the evidence of his Lear, I hope it may prove only the beginning of what promises to be a spectacular combination.

The Nottingham Playhouse also brought a neat, witty and singularly well orchestrated production of The Alchemist by the com- pany's director, Stuart Burge, to whom our thanks are due for this dual triumph. Meanwhile Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth opened last week at the St Martin's—a piece on which, as per instructions from the manage- ment in the programme, my lips are sealed, save to say that it is a remarkably soigne and ingenious thriller, containing one smooth performance by Keith Baxter and one small comic masterpiece by Anthony Quayle.