presented by Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia, 11 – 13 June 2008
review by Amos Toh
Based on critical essays by Marvin Rosenberg, Jonathan Goldberg and Wilson Knight, Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia’s The King Lear Project: A Trilogy attempted to eviscerate the difficulties of performing one of Shakespeare’s most contentious tragedies. Conceived on the scale of a precisely controlled spectacle, The Project spanned three nights at the Drama Centre, demanding a high level of commitment and investment to witness its full deconstruction. Paradoxically, this placed pressure on the artists to not only sustain a coherent theatrical dialogue throughout, but also ensure each show remained separately individual such that any theatregoer watching only one of the three plays would understand the events unfolding during that performance.
However, this responsibility was largely unfulfilled, especially during the third night, which raced into its deconstructionist agenda with minimal regard for new audiences. A tediously staged Question-And-Answer component–repeated five times to illuminate different perspectives on the staging of the concluding scene–compounded their bafflement and frustration.
While the trilogy’s intentions were noble–Ho and Borgia demonstrated a keen critical eye; and certainly, with a production length of over six hours, it was painstakingly detailed–the execution was often belaboured, as it sought novel ways of transposing literary and performance criticism to the stage with little consideration of whether they were suited to the live and shared experience of theatre.
On its first night, Lear Enters, this long-gestating epic began promisingly enough, fashioning theatre out of the theatrically unseen. The artists conveyed wry, sparkling observations on the art of performing, putting both crew and audience through several agonising, but ultimately illuminating auditions for the lead role. Providing comprehensive coverage of Rosenberg’s archetypal Lears were Remesh Panicker, K. Rajagopal and Gerald Chew, who played variations of the role as God, Madman and Everyman respectively.
Ho and Borgia’s realistic portrayal of the auditioning process plumbed the actors’ offstage interactions for fresh insight on how characterisation could shape cast dynamics. In some of the most electrifying productions, theatre or otherwise, actors inhabit their roles so deeply they often find it difficult to shake them off. Inevitably, reality and the stage overlap, often with profound personal and emotional impact on the actors. Felicity Huffman as a pre-operative transsexual in indie hit Transamerica, for example, was so engaged in her character’s gender transformation that she began to act and talk differently, until her husband William H. Macy finally “told me not to call in that voice. It was weird for him.”1
Similarly, we witnessed, through the actors’ subtle tics, gestures and mannerisms, the unfolding of their characters in real life. Panicker manoeuvred the other actors with teasing authority, interspersing his directions with wisecracks like, while donning a ghastly black fur coat, “I’m more King Kong than King Lear.” One sensed with Rajagopal, however, a certain detachment from his surroundings. Eyes half-hidden under a beanie, he spoke in a sparse monotone, and radiated nervous energy during the performance talkback. The atmosphere of the audition room also changed considerably when a gum-chewing, laidback Chew came on stage. Although cautious to include everyone in pre-audition discussion, he, like his character, ultimately favoured Shu An Oon, who played Cordelia, in making several wardrobe and prop decisions.
The auditions themselves mined several outrageous and strangely effective ways of expressing what Rosenberg called Lear’s “inner dialectic,” where “the most powerful Lear needs help as he enters…the mad…will have a flash of lucidity…the sanest…a tremor of doubt of his soundness.”2
Particularly memorable was Rajagopal’s rendition of madman Lear, whose wildly entertaining entrance was more tribal dance than regal procession. Later on, Tan Kheng Hua, as Goneril, smothered her face in Lear’s chest, enlivening her sycophantic tribute with hilarious sexual frisson. This madcap setting, juxtaposed against the sobering climax of the scene, was an incisive reminder of how fury is so often a shade away from madness.
However, there were creeping annoyances in Lear Enters that became major obstacles in latter parts of the Project. The audition setting, for example, was a perplexing evocation of a film set, with cameras panning the theatre and director Kaylene Tan yelling “Cut!” after every scene. And why did Tan adopt an unyielding, Miranda Priestly-like persona, which not only succumbed to stale directorial stereotypes, but also lent unnecessary frigidity and tension to the show? Another character hard to follow was producer Paul Rae, planted in the audience as the production’s Deus Ex Machina. Issuing criticism between auditions, his lines adhered closely to the dense academic syntax of Rosenberg’s essay, and consequently leave no lasting impression on the audience’s experience of Lear’s entrance.
These problems manifested more acutely in the second performance, a misguided attempt at elucidating Goldberg’s Dover Cliff and the Conditions of Representation. Mostly, Ho and Borgia entertained indulgent readings of the three most difficult scenes of the play–namely Lear’s railing against the storm, Gloucester’s blinding, and Edgar’s theatrical deception–with often cringe-worthy repercussions.
Dover Cliff seemed to have no unifying purpose except to push the limits of artistic interpretation to ludicrous extremes. With heightened (and over-rehearsed) involvement of the production crew, the storm scene was staged to pulsing disco lights and a “funeral march of man-made music,” devolving into predictable farce. In the middle of the play, a bewildering discussion between the actors on which instrument to use for the blinding ensued, trivialising the potency of Goneril and Cornwall’s cruelty, and Gloucester’s suffering. To complete our wretched experience, an overly enthusiastic James Page decided to embellish his set with a large black penis spouting water, apparently to illustrate the sexual undertones of Shakespeare’s imagery. These elaborate stage experiments amounted to nothing more than a tedious compendium of antics and miscues that was long on banalities, and short on insight.
Fortunately, Ho and Borgia managed to salvage the play by the end with a sparse rendition of dialogue between Edgar and Gloucester on voiceover in a pitch dark theatre. This provided a much needed counterpoint to the bizarre theatrics on display a few minutes ago. It was sustained outside the theatre later on as a taut and intensely silent portrait of bodies caught midway in action, capturing tragedy as it was about to strike.
The final performance, The Lear Universe, was a fitting mix of the production’s best moments and most dismal flaws. A sterling rendition of King Lear’s tragic conclusion opened the show, followed by an elaborately staged curtain call. After introducing an extended cast, Ben Slater, our “moderator of the evening” sat them down for a post-show dialogue. But they would not take real questions from the audience, and kept enigmatically silent until a planted audience member piped up to “break the silence,” prompting the cast to launch into an adaptation of the play’s conclusion, interspersed with commentary from a variety of critical sources. These false endings were repeated for the next two hours, allegedly to invoke Wilson Knight’s comment that “(the play’s) philosophy is continuously purgatorial.”
Thankfully, this repetitious performance allowed a few moments of dynamic commentary to break through, including a flawlessly-timed introductory sequence illuminating the conflicted morality of Lear’s universe, and a charming enactment of Nahum Tate’s happy ending, cavalierly appended to the tragedy.
Unfortunately, these achievements were eclipsed by the play’s frustrating sense of contrivance, borne out of the artists’ glib expectation that their audience would find the criticism more urgent than its presentation. Planting “actors” into the audience may have had some conceptual value, but having them engage in stilted debate on the semantics of the Quattro and Folio versions to jumpstart the production’s own assessment of its merits was simply dull and uninspired. Such gimmickry reached its peak when a teenager emerged from the stalls to contend that perhaps King Lear aimed for a “representative ideal of its own representation.” There was very little point in grounding the play in a Question-and-Answer format if it was devoid of the very elements that crystallised dialogue: spontaneity, interaction, and real questions. Very often, these scripted “questions”contained their own thinly-veiled answers that provoked Rae, Tan and some of the cast into more elaborate pontification on stage, prescribing instead of facilitating discussion. It was this hellish cycle of didacticism that seriously marred the performance.
Early on in The Lear Universe, I remember that Rae had ominously proclaimed, “There is only one voice to be heard, and that is one’s own.” This gave me the worrisome hint that Ho and Borgia did not entirely know how to boil this wealth of material down into a play as they were too caught up in their own voices to let alternative voices in.
Amos Toh has contributed poetry and theatre reviews to The Straits Times and online arts magazines The Flying Inkpot and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. He was also a judge for the 2008 Life! Theatre Awards.
notes
By Amos Toh
in Reviews