King Lear by Sydney Theatre Company at the Roslyn Packer Theatre (review)

Ever since Peter Brook's path-breaking 1962 production and 1971 film, there have been, broadly speaking, two obvious routes to the summit of this mountainous drama. The first is to craft a psychological study of a great man failing due to age, madness, and undutiful daughters; the second is to play the tragedy as a study into how seemingly individual plans can have wide-reaching social ramifications. As a Shakespeare scholar, feminist, and ecocritical theorist with Marxist tendencies, I prefer the latter, enjoying dark and pointed social critiques more than productions that plumb the depths of a monarch's individual despair. So when I heard that the forthcoming Sydney Theatre Company (STC) blockbuster production starring Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush was going to be set on a completely bare stage and be "totally psychological," I actually rolled my eyes. The study of Lear's innards is hackneyed; it is in the tradition of Charles Lamb and Harley Granville Barker and, more recently, of Derek Jacobi channeling Orson Welles in the painful 2012 Donmar Warehouse production. I envisaged the Lecoq-trained Rush playing Lear as a fool (given he had already enlivened the King's Fool twice, in 1978 and 1988), using clowning to symbolize madness. I feared having to endure all five acts.