2023: King Lear - Echo Theatre at The Q

 

 King Lear by William Shakespeare.  Echo Theatre at Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, The Q.  

Reviewed by Frank McKone
Opening Night November 30, 2023


Creative Team:
Playwright: William Shakespeare    Director: Joel Horwood
Producer/Props Assistant: Jordan Best    
Stage Manager: Maggie Hawkins; Assistant Stage Manager: Ann-Maree Hatch
Set and Costume Design: Kathleen Kershaw; Set Builder: John Nicholls
Costumier: Helen Wojtas; Sound Design/Operator: Neville Pye, Sophia Carlton
Lighting Design/Operator: Zac Harvey; Voice Coach: Sarah Chalmers
Promotional Photography: Jenny Wu, Shelly Higgs
Promotional Videography: Craig Alexander
Production Photography: Photox - Canberra PhotographyServices

Cast (in order of appearance)
Karen Vickery - Lear
Lewis McDonald - Edmund/Others
Christina Falsone - Kent
Michael Sparks - Gloucester/Others
Lainie Hart - Goneril
Jim Adamik - Albany/Others
Natasha Vickery - Regan
Tom Cullen - Cornwall/Others
Petronella van Tienen - Cordelia/Fool
Glenn Brighenti - Oswald/Burgundy/Others
Holly Ross - France/Doctor/Others
Josh Wiseman - Edgar
Ensemble - Sienna Curnow, George Hatch, Liam Prichard, Nathan Wilson

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You might wonder if a small-town theatre company, Echo Theatre in Queanbeyan, could have the resources to mount a great Shakespeare play, but, as Hamlet said, “The play's the thing/ Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.”  

Joel Horwood shows us, as Peter Brook famously explained last century, all a play needs is The Empty Space and some people to watch some other people acting.  Around the same period, Jerzy Grotowsky called this Poor Theatre.  But there was nothing poor about Karen Vickery’s performance last night.

Petronella van Tienen and Karen Vickery
as The Fool and Lear
Echo Theatre 2023

Her Queen Lear, for the first time in my experience watching a number of productions of this play, made me feel deeply sorry for this royal parent whose political opponent, the horribly manipulative sexually and socially-controlling Edmund, had ordered the hanging of her youngest daughter – whom she now realised was the only one who genuinely loved her.  As she remembered Cordelia’s “voice was ever soft, / Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman”, we remembered how harsh her mother’s voice had been in Scene 1 when Cordelia had spoken truthfully about her love for her mother as Queen, and the hypocrisy of her elder sisters – which we saw play out in their treatment of their mother throughout the play.  

Reaching this impossibly low point after the madness engendered by Goneril and Regan, and their ‘noble’ husbands, and by Edmund’s perfidy against his brother Edgar, the sons of her only honest noble supporter, Earl of Gloucestor, it is no wonder Lear dies exhausted by the utter collapse of her world.  The bravura performances of Karen Vickery and Michael Sparks were exhausting to watch, against the cruelty of Lainie Hart’s and Natasha Vickery’s Goneril and Regan.

Horwood has captured the human disaster of government by monarchy, or any other form of dictatorship, and made it real at a personal level.  I could not help recognising what we saw on ABC TV recently: Queen Victoria’s Royal Mob.  This UK Sky History TV production showed how the family relationships of Queen Victoria’s grandaughters led to the disastrous World War I.  What on earth could we expect to happen next in Lear’s Britain?  

Anthony Burgess in his Shakespeare points out that King Lear was written after the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605: the “[Robert] Catesby plot [when] the people nearly came face to face with the ultimate apocalyptic vision of horror – their king [James VI of Scotland, now James I of Britain], whom only holy oil had laved, blown skyhigh.  His father [Henry Stuart] had been blown skyhigh too, at Kirk-o’-Fields when his mother had gone to a ball….   At Christmas, 1606, The Court was regaled with King Lear….   The theme of deference to a ruler by divine right is sounded loudly enough in the very first scene, but Lear is all too James-like in wanting fulsome flattery more than plain truth; his tragedy springs from a rejection of honesty.”

In fact, it was Tuesday, 30 January 1649 when “the anonymous executioner beheaded [James’ son] Charles with a single blow and held Charles' head up to the crowd silently, dropping it into the swarm of soldiers soon after.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Charles_I
Shakespeare was some 33 years dead by then, but did he wonder about the possibility of Parliament forming a “Commonwealth” without a king or queen?  And later reinstating monarchy, but limited, as we see today in King Charles III?

I think he might have – and it is Echo Theatre’s showing the visciousness of the social destruction caused by divine right that makes William Shakespeare live again.

Christina Falsone, Petronella van Tienen, Karen Vickery
as Kent, Cordelia and Lear
Echo Theatre, 2023

©Frank McKone, Canberra