Theatre
Rutherford and Son (National, Cottesloe) King Lear (Barbican)
Family tales
Sheridan Morley
AI have lately, and in a minority voice, been questioning both the adequacy of the National Theatre's revivalist policy and its passion for director-led extravagan- zas often reconstructed at considerable cost to the original text and present casting, I should be the one to shout loudest when the management sticks to its guns but gets them in the right place. On the Cottesloe stage Rutherford and Son is a major redis- covery from 1911, and one moreover given a 'concept' production of considerable triumph by Katie Mitchell.
We are in the home of a North Country glassworks' proprietor, in a room cav- ernous enough to be the factory itself; once upon a time Robert Newton or Wilfrid Lawson would have played him, for we are in the world of Hobson's Choice and Hatter's Castle and all those domestic dramas set around the dark, satanic mills.
Realistic Pony Tail Our Ibsens, they were, the plays that set tyrannical father-figures against pale, hope- less sons, and against daughters just beginning to unfurl the flags of feminism. Here Rutherford either fires or destroys all his own male heirs, and is left at the last to strike a terrible bargain with the only relative who can, or will, stay under his roof and influence: a daughter-in-law who promises him access to the baby grandson who is now his only hope of a dynasty, but only if he will promise not to approach the child for a decade. There is a terrible dramatic and industrial power to Githa Sowerby's writing, though this was the only play with which she made her mark before turning to now-forgotten children's tales. Bob Peck's masterly performance as the brutal, and yet curiously noble, tyrant grinding out lives as his workers grind glass, is wonderfully contrasted with those of Brid Brennan and Phoebe Nicholls as the daughters eking out their lives by inches to the lugubriously deafening sounds of a grandfather clock where there are no grandfathers.
The Robert Shephens King Lear has come, trailing clouds of his reborn theatri- cal glory, from Stratford to the Barbican in Adrian Noble's RSC production. Noble, here as in his Kenneth Branagh Hamlet and his less successful Derek Jacobi Mac- beth, is intent on telling the tale. His Shakespeare is not so much the Eliza- bethan poet as the Victorian novelist, and Noble sets out the story much after the fashion in which 1930's Hollywood direc- tors like George Cukor would tackle the classics, going heavy on the narrative and light on the individual interpretation of character.
Thus Stephens's Lear is an endearing old buffer, somewhere between Edward VII and George V perhaps: he strips himself easily of his kingdom and majesty, falls out with his daughters and heads off into the storm, only then to discover he has come somewhat lightly dressed and supported for the inclement weather. This is not, per- haps, a great Lear: but it is one of the most humane and touching and accessible I have ever seen. Stephens wonderfully suggests a foolish, fond old man: he must be the only actor in the world to have played Falstaff more angrily than he plays Lear.
But around him Noble has assembled a cast all of whom wondrously make you reconsider their characters too: Jenny Quayle is the Regan who can cry even as she punishes her father's vanity; Simon Russell Beale the strange, sinister Edgar; Owen Teale the mad, matinee-idol; Edmund apparently in training on the heath for Heathcliff himself; David Bradley a heartbreaking Gloucester. Only when the great globe above the stage weeps sand does Noble get threateningly close to a concept gone wrong. When he leaves it to his superlative character actors to rip up the map of England that forms the stagecloth, • this becomes a genuinely gripping yarn.
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