Lear in the Berkshires - Page 2

And then we have the three madmen: Lear, the Fool, and Edgar in the guise of Tom O'Bedlam. Kevin Coleman's Fool enters with a broken heart and exits as Lear's truest child. His love of Lear, and Lear's love of him was clear and pure. (Tina Packer tips her hand early by having The Fool laugh in delight from the rafters when Cordelia refuses to flatter her father in the opening scene.) Jonathan Epstein's Lear was, to me, disappointing. In trying to play an 80 year old man, he talked in a distracting halting vocal rhythm, including the trick of picking up the beginning of the next sentence without a pause after the current one. It was also a remarkably lachrymose performance. He certainly had his moments — reuniting with Cordelia, but not raging in the elements — but the performance over all felt like a performance. Even a bit — sorry to say it — hammy.

And then we come to Edgar. Harold Bloom says that he's never seen a successful performance of this role, which he rightly considers to be the second focus of the play. Jason Asprey would not have changed Bloom's mind, but, then, what would? Yet Asprey's performance was terrific. His love for his evil brother seemed admirable and touching, not naive. His scenes with Gloucester were tender. His cradling of the brother he has just mortally wounded did more to explain Edmund's conversion than anything previous in Edmund's performance. His assuming the mantle of the king at the end seemed to be a moment of growth based in abiding character. And yet ... the time he spends in the king's train as Tom seemed under-motivated and his ramblings seemed too random to be of interest. And his failure to come clean to his blinded father seemed like a theatrical trick. I don't know how Edgar should be played to avoid those difficulties. Edgar's disguises are harder to understand than Edgar himself, and Asprey overall did him proud.

So, a night of tough-minded Lear. As always with Shakespeare & Co., the copious amounts of speech unmeaning to our modern ears is nevertheless presented with such heart and intent that we fathom it. Whatever the difficulties of the performances, we left stripped of some of our propriety, more aware of the tempest hidden behind the summer's midnight balm.

Put more plainly: Shakespeare & Co. is a treasure.

Article Author: David Weinberger

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