Michael Grandage, boss of the Donmar, is a most unusual director. He has no ideas. His rivals go in for party-theme, concept-album, pop-video Shakespeare (provincial folksiness in metropolitan disguise), but Grandage just goes in for Shakespeare. He arrives with no prejudices or pieties, only solutions. He’s the bard’s delivery boy.
His current production of King Lear sweeps the stage clean of the usual Ozzy Osbourne clutter and reduces the inventory to just three items, a map, a chair and a pillory for Kent. Nothing else. This daring austerity opens things up and allows the mysterious, grotesque, lurching and inscrutable play to do its best and worst, to charm, horrify, move and appal us. There is nothing Grandage won’t consider omitting. He does the storm scene without the storm. So obvious. So effective. At last, we hear the words. And we can relish the suggestion that the real tempest is the one in Lear’s mind.
Derek Jacobi is a surprise. With his slight frame and intimate, velvety voice he was an unlikely choice to play a deranged monster but he covers the terrain with astringency and conviction. Rather than aiming for a big showy tour de force, he goes the other way. He goes small. The three facets he offers us are enough. The obtuse self-destructive tyrant, the embittered loner bickering with his family, and the dandelion-wreathed outpatient whose mental overthrow guides him to a gold mine of accidental truth. A fine supporting cast is led by Gina McKee, who brings an unsettling quietness, a watchful malice to Goneril, flavoured with an explicit and manipulative eroticism.
I wasn’t entirely taken with Christopher Oram’s whitewashed set — the bleached-out look suggests art studios or yuppie penthouses — but his costumes are perfectly judged. Simple but regal clothes, with colours chosen from a narrow palette, and based deliberately in an uncertain historical era which lets the modern footwear harmonise unobtrusively. Wonderful. And the best thing of all? Jacobi at the curtain call. Rather than a merry old goat springing on from the wings with a smile and a curtsey, like Captain Birdseye opening a supermarket, he returned to the stage heavily, red-faced, covered in sweat and completely drained, as if he’d just lugged a tree trunk up Box Hill.
Aside from being the best Lear I’ve ever seen (and I’ve fidgeted through half a dozen), this is a Lear that a Shakespeare beginner could grasp, and thrill to, and adore. Grandage’s light-touch pragmatism makes him the classiest act in the country.
Georges Feydeau is known as the lord of misrule, the greatest of French farceurs, the master of mistaken identity. Yet it’s Feydeau himself that we all get confused. He’s credited with a comic talent far more extensive than he possessed. Farce has a topsy-turvy effect on otherwise sober commentators. They start to flourish intoxicating clichés like ‘timeless’ and ‘classic’ and they tell us ‘it has to be true to be funny’ and ‘physical comedy is as demanding as tragedy’ and all that. The same observers like to espouse the impressive vacuity that the secret of comic performance is ‘timing’.
Some aspects of Feydeau’s 1907 comedy A Flea in Her Ear are ingeniously clever. Others are silly and false. A drunken porter working at the town brothel is physically identical to Chandebise, a respectable businessman (played with gusto Tom Hollander), and this ambiguity exposes him to the vengeance of an irate soldier who chases him around kicking his bottom about 48 times. Which is funny enough, if foot-up-the-fundament target practice is your idea of hilarity. Much amusement in the second half depends on a quirk of the brothel’s design which allows a revolving bed connected to an adjoining room to be switched at the touch of a button. It’s quite entertaining, sort of, in a way, as long as you can stop yourself wondering why a brothel-owner would design a room that fatally compromised his customers’ privacy.
Far from being ‘classic’, the play is stuck in its Edwardian time zone and relies on stereotypes we barely recognise now: cuckolded butlers, crazed Prussian colonels, lisping Spanish hot-heads bristling with jealousy and revolvers. Even Chandebise, the ‘respectable businessman’, belongs to the wing-collar and tailcoat age that expired with the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
The production by Richard Eyre is faultlessly elegant and entirely faithful to the script and the cast give it everything. Occasionally they give it more than that. Some players raise their vowels to Brief Encounter levels of clipped absurdity — a hint of desperation in an otherwise poised production — and although the show is sumptuous to look at it does require imaginative effort, an act of sympathetic forbearance towards its lapses. You have to patronise it, in other words. And in the season of goodwill nothing could be more appropriate.
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