Postprandial nightmare
Patrick Carnegy
Athough no one would pretend that youthful players could ever be a 'cast of choice' for Lear, the actors of the RSC's fledgling Academy have one advantage over riper colleagues. Relatively unphased by this awesome text, they're able to speak what they feel, 'not what we ought to say'. This is the debut production by the Academy whose 16 actors graduated from their drama schools earlier this year. Their RSC syllabus has been ten weeks' rehearsal under DecIan Donellan.
This new Lear is certainly a far more worthwhile enterprise than the RSC's previous effort, born of an ill-advised flirtation with the Japanese director Ninogawa in which the valiant Nigel Hawthorn was distinctly ill-at-ease in the title role — not that any actor could exactly be comfortable in the part. At home, maybe, and this well describes the Academy's Lear, Nonso Anozie, who is the solid rock on which the production is built.
Abdication speeches are perhaps not generally sprung after everyone's had a good time at dinner, but this is how DoneIlan launches the play. He sets it up as a postprandial nightmare, a party that goes wrong and just keeps getting worse and worse. Lear and his courtiers are in white and black tie respectively, which is pretty well how things remain right through the storm and until Lear, now in bedraggled white shirt, bursts in after Gloucester's thwarted leap from Dover cliff. The milieu is that of a black cabaret, with the Fool making his entry as a television compere in glitzy jacket and frilly-fronted shirt.
Lear's auctioning off of his kingdom in the 'how much d'y love me?' competition is virtually treated as a game-show, inspiring mirth and applause from the contestants' spouses, Albany and Cornwall. Goneril and Regan wrestle with contestants' nerves. No wonder that their younger sister is speechless with embarrassment, Cordelia (Kirsty Besterman) barely containing her anger at her father's insistence on this public show of private family matters. A couple of scenes later, there's a brilliant ploy when Lear enthrones himself on Goneril's diningroom table and addresses his hostile hosts through Edward Hog,g's excellent Fool, now seated on his knee like a ventriloquist's dummy with a ghastly grin and mechanical laugh: 'Why, this is not Lear. Does Lear walk thus, speak thus? . . . Who is it that can tell me who lam?'
A further twist is that Kent disguises himself not as the usual servant or rough soldier but as a supernumerary tap-dancing Fool, replete with rats-tails' wig and scarlet bow-tie. Holding these perilous cabaret turns together is Nonso Anozie's Lear, in every sense a huge presence, in physique, in personality and in accomplishment as an actor. He has the power and, more remarkably, the subtlety to hold your attention through speech after speech. In the quality of his anger, breakdown is just beneath the surface. He draws you irresistibly into the terrifying processes of his dissolution into madness. He can do this because of a rare understanding of the contraries at war with one another in Lear — the anger and the humour, the pride and vulnerability, the laughter and terrible tears. Anozie shows a man buffeted about so helplessly between sanity and madness as to make you forget that you'd ever known what he was going to do next. He delivers the words as though they're new-minted, not pausing for effect or making an onomatopoeic meal out of 'Howl, howl, howl!', which he puts across quite tersely as a defiant statement of how things lie with him. But then, as he suddenly begins to laugh, it seems that he's never been saner. And as he dies he's again laughing quietly as though he's broken through to the place where Falstaff babbled of green fields.
The only trouble is that this terrific black actor is so good and of such Orson-Welleslike stature as to win sympathy for his colleagues, who look as though they could do with feeding up and an intensive course at the gym. The stronger talents among them included Steven Robertson who brought off the risque interpretation of Kent with great spirit, Bruce Godfree's larky first appearance as Edgar made it seem far more plausible than usual for Gloucester to be taken in by Edmund's plot against him, as well as nicely anticipating his transformation into 'Poor Tom'. Adam Webb's insouciant charm and suave cunning as Edmund was disconcertingly reminiscent of Kenneth Tynan (who'd doubtless have enjoyed the debagging and spanking of Kent).
There are things in the production that have yet to come right, but this is an auspicious launch for the Academy and a remarkable debut for the 23-year-old Anozie. You can only hope that the RSC will be able to maintain the Academy and that it'll fulfill its aim of providing a springboard for promising young actors of classi cal potential before they're irretrievably lost to television. After Stratford the production travels to Newcastle (from 23 October), to The Young Vic (from 13 November) and then to Madrid, Girona, Mallorca, Rome and Nancy.
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