- The Observer, Sunday 17 February 2002
King Lear Almeida at King's Cross, London N1
The Winter's Tale The Tobacco Factory, Bristol
Push Up Royal Court, London SW1
The Syringa Tree Cottesloe, National Theatre, London SE1
Shoot 2 Win Stratford East, London E15
You go to the Almeida for excitement. You get it at a price. Jonathan Kent's production of King Lear is Almeida excitement stretched to breaking point. It's stirring to look at but hard on the ear. The detail is lost in a whirl of effects. It can't be a good sign when the climactic moment in a Shakespeare play is a magnificent, synchronised collapse of the set.
The boldness of the design isn't at fault. Paul Brown has created a cogent image of the play's arc into desolation. In the opening scenes, dark wood panels line both stage and auditorium; Edmund delivers his bastard speech as a fireside lecture, sprawled in a chintzy armchair. In the great centrepiece of the evening, prosperity and security implode: the walls cave in; rain pelts on to the stage. The audience shivers.
But performances and direction, though sturdy, aren't equally bold. Lear is the most intricate but the most apparently fragmented of all Shakespeare's plays, and supplies the most purely Beckettian scenes, with its maimed characters talking fluently in a dark place. Everything here is insufficiently weird. Oliver Ford Davies - a king fuelled by anger who disintegrates when he has no one to boss - is authoritative in the opening scenes, barking his edicts with the square-jawed swagger of a boardroom bully, grunting sceptically as his elder daughters suck up. But he resorts to quavering to suggest grief, and his address over the body of Cordelia is a series of musing, plangent, rhetorical questions. He's not helped by the indeterminate twentieth-century setting: it's hard for anyone to look other than quaintly dotty tiptoeing through puddles in pants and socks. Tom Hollander's jerky, nasal delivery makes Edgar seem both dopey and sneering: when he speaks of his father's eyes as 'bleeding rings', it's as if he's swearing.
There's a good trio of sisters, with Suzanne Burden outstanding as a snakily vain Goneril. But there's no sense of family. Lear 's other pillar is also missing. It should show intimacy running into wildness. For all its bravura and thrills, Kent's production doesn't do that. It's full of movement, but doesn't move.
A different approach to staging Shakespeare is bringing rapt audiences to Bristol's Tobacco Factory, where Andrew Hilton directs two plays a season with crystalline precision. The space is small but the casts are big: productions are intimate and expansive. There are no star names: the cast, often untried, is largely drawn from the Old Vic Theatre School. Design is unobtrusive, scene changes marked by a dip of the lights.
Hilton's The Winter's Tale isn't perfect. As Leontes, John Mackay is so scratchy - like a nit-picking civil servant - that his jealous spite and his thawing heart are scarcely credible. Nevertheless, this is an evening which, like the play, constantly renews itself.
You could chart the unexamined misogyny of the English stage by the portrayal of Paulina, the play's most perceptive character who, knowing and speaking her mind, is often presented as a comic shrew. Zoë Aldrich beautifully remakes her as honest, kind and purposeful. You'd think it would be impossible in a space where the audience can register everything in close-up to make the idea of a statue coming to life plausible, let alone moving. They pull it off. The risks are higher and the pay-off is greater: when Lisa Kay (playing both Hermione and her daughter, so you witness a resurrection by looking from one face to another) raises her hand, a gasp runs through the auditorium.
And Hilton brings to life moments that you barely knew existed: a slowly dying light on a shepherd's face as he talks about the dying and the newborn goes straight to the heart of the play. And to the audience.
The Royal Court has started its International Playwrights' Season with a sleekly acted, immaculately directed (by Ramin Gray) German play by Roland Schimmelpfennig. Push Up - an attack on corporate life enacted in a sequence of cunning dialogues - suggests it's a rehearsal for a larger work. It's formally elegant and crisply expressed, but it breaks no news.
Still, its astringency is infinitely preferable to the mawkish autobiographical monologue written and performed by Pamela Gien at the Cottesloe. The Syringa Tree has accumulated awards off-Broadway: its story of a liberal white South African family and their black housekeeper who struggle together under apartheid could hardly fail to strike sombre chords. But Gien's saccharine prose and arch delivery drain gravity and dignity from the account. Though she breaks off from time to time to demonstrate her versatility - impersonating an aged black woman; a white-shite, Bible-bashing neighbour - most of the story is seen through the oh-so-wide eyes of a cutie-pie little white girl. Gien skips, she squeaks, she moues. She lisps about fairies getting dressed. She gurgles about her princess underpants. No wonder her nanny ran off.
It's hard to imagine the sisters in Shoot 2 Win being mimicked in Gien mode. Tracey Daley, Jo Martin and Josephine Melville's study of a troubled netball team (six black and one wannabe black woman) won't win any prizes for exquisiteness of structure. It's a series of portraits disguised as a play, with an unconvincing climax and an exasperating inability to run with the ball of its central metaphor. That's not important; it does the thing that any vital theatre does - it forcefully projects a language and experience that hasn't been put on the stage before. You won't hear the roll or the vocabulary of these lines in the West End, and you might never hear stories like this.
There's the dealer and the born-again Christian, the abused wife and the dumped bride. All are comically, touchingly got up in pink frilly satin kit. The night I attended, the stalls were full of very quick, sceptical black teenagers. As soon as the team lined up behind their born-again leader and began to translate her game manoeuvres into breakdance routines, they were half out of their seats echoing the moves; the instant the cheated wife told her husband to sod off, they unleashed a cheer. Stratford East has got adrenaline flowing again. The theatre needs it.
