The Globe and Mail - January 22, 1996

"In Seven Lears, audacious, glittering prose mixes with dark Pythonesque humour"
Kate Taylor

IN one of the first scenes of Seven Lears, a dark speculation about the early life of Shakespeare's King Lear, half-dead prisoners writhe on stage, shaking their chains and uttering cries that will ring a bell with any fan of Monty Python: "We're not dead yet. We're not dead." What blasted heath is this where Shakespeare and Python can consort?

It is the theatrical landscape of Howard Barker, the British playwright whose large tragedies, gallows humour, spiralling rhetoric and epic disillusionism recall not only Shakespeare and Python, but Beckett and Brecht. In Canada, Barker has one prominent proponent, director Richard Rose, whose North American premiere of Seven Lears at Harbourfront's du Maurier Theatre Centre is the fourth Barker play he has mounted in Toronto.

The premise behind Seven Lears is a simple question: Whatever happened to King Lear's wife, mother of Goneril, Regan and the faithful Cordelia? Barker assumes there must be a reason for her absence, and that the reason must explain Lear's folly and his elder daughters' thanklessness.

In eight parts, charting a rough, absurdist biography of the Lear family until the death of Queen Clarissa, Barker turns the themes of the original tragedy on their heads. Shakespeare followed an old Lear from foolish sanity to wise madness; Barker follows a younger Lear from precocious intelligence to addled tyranny. King Lear knew too little; this Lear knows too much and uses his great, cluttered mind to snuff out his flickering conscience.

It is Clarissa, his mistress's daughter and the sensible saint he takes for his wife, who embodies that conscience. Lear marries her, but soon abandons her so he can return to her more biddable mother, while in a parallel move he forces his wise first minister to take on the job of Fool. If Barker's question about the forgotten Queen is a postmodern one, these characters remain Shakespearean: literally separated from them by a transparent scrim that hangs across the stage, we understand them through their struggles, not their psychology.

There is never a shortage of directors and actors who want to play Shakespeare because they have fallen in love with the surface of his language, but bring little illumination to its depths. Barker, however, is a much harder playwright to love, and no director would stage this work if he were not only smitten by its audacious and glittering prose but also married to its hard and bitter themes. Rose is that director and this production is hugely sympathetic to its difficult script. With a spectacular vertical design by Graeme S. Thomson that takes great advantage of the du Maurier's high ceiling, Rose matches the hallucinatory intensity of Barker's language with the vividness of his staging.

But how to play these half-heroic parts? The expressive articulations of Maggie Huculak in the role of Lear's mistress Prudentia, the full classical tones of John Gilbert as the reluctant Fool, the Pythonesque posturings of Julian Richings as the evil Bishop, these are clear choices. Rose's decisions about Clarissa and Lear, personifications of good and evil, must be much darker and labyrinthine. Stuart Hughes deftly manoeuvres around the troubling part of Lear, with a bravura performance of his precocious prattling in the early scenes - the mere talking of this part must be a challenge to the tongue. There he finds both the charm and the hateful narcissism of the young man before moving the character powerfully into old age, unearthing the few moments of humanity Barker permits the lone figure who will become Shakespeare's King Lear.

As Clarissa, Rose has cast Megan Follows, who 10 years ago charmed television audiences in the title role in Anne of Green Gables. Is it just so much postmodern posturing about referentiality to suggest that this is something bigger than type-casting; that she is the right choice for the role, partly because (for a Canadian audience) she is already a personification of spirited goodness? At any rate, she and Rose have opted for intelligent humanity rather than prissy puritanism in playing Clarissa: Her insistence on truth-telling is refreshing; her pragmatism charming. In a production that faithfully produces Barker's distancing techniques, from grotesque humour to mighty speechifying, Clarissa offers the audience its one entry point and its few moments of empathy.

There are many lines in the script to suggest that Clarissa could be played differently, darker. "I can't help feeling her honesty is an attempt against my sanity," says Lear.

Her mother asks: "This acting, this intervening, what obliges it Clarissa?" "My conscience," Clarissa replies. "Put it to sleep," says her mother. Indeed, Barker's own introduction to the play suggests he sees Clarissa as the kind of Cassandra-like figure who gets on everyone's nerves: "She was therefore the subject of unjust hatred. This hatred was shared by Lear and his daughters. This hatred, while unjust, may have been necessary."

Barker is a great one for asking questions - is evil somehow existentially necessary? - but not a great one for answering them. This likable Clarissa is Rose's attempt at an answer: If we can see Hughes's aging Lear as almost heroic in his solitary struggle, and can understand something of this bloody man, it is because Follows' Clarissa has reminded us of our humanity, the humanity Lear lacks. Barker subtitles his play The Pursuit of the Good; in Rose's Seven Lears, the failure of that quest is by no means a foregone conclusion.

If part of the critic's role is as consumer adviser, I'm duty-bound to tell you this is not a distracting evening's entertainment. Seven Lears makes huge demands on its audience, asking that it grasp the bold formality of its language, face its dark questions and recall the complex thematic universe of the Shakespearean original so as to seize upon its clever foreshadowings and counterpoints. The rewards for that act of profound attention are all intellectual rather than visceral - but they are huge.

Source: The Globe and Mail

Variety - February 16, 1996

"Seven Lears"
Mira Friedlande

Howard Barker's 1989 "Seven Lears" finally makes its North American debut, at the hands of director Richard Rose and Necessary Angel, the company responsible for the runaway interactive hit "Tamara," in the days before computer jargon had usurped the word.

This is Necessary Angel's fourth Barker play, and it makes sense that Rose, now also director of the Stratford Festival's Young Company, should tackle the one connected to Shakespeare -- if only peripherally. Perhaps no other Canadian director could wrestle this particular text into submission, much less shed light on Barker's perennial themes of the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy, on the one hand, and between criminality and politics on the other.

"Seven Lears" positions the monarch as an ugly scar on a devastated sociopolitical landscape filled with starving masses, greedy aristocracy and brutal warfare. A prison chorus consistently confronts Lear in the best Brechtian style, commenting on injustice and begging for relief, while Lear shifts from a child who responds to their plaintive pleas to the man who willfully and gleefully ignores them. But beyond this, what is one to make of this quirky play, in which Shakespeare's famous monarch is given a full history to explain the absence of his mother as a character in the original play?

Even with dense subtext, theme-riddled scenes and a choppy dramatic structure, there is enough potboiler plot here to kickstart any production. A weak, selfish Lear marries the daughter of the woman he is bedding, has two children (Goneril and Regan) by her and later tries to drown Cordelia when he discovers she is the offspring of another man. At the end of the play Lear returns to the mother, shattering his wife and handing the older woman a hollow victory stripped of pride and dignity.

And just to keep things really interesting, Gloucester the beggar is elevated to a dukedom, Kent lusts after Lear's wife, and the Fool, formerly a dignified minister of the realm, is pathetically made to fulfill a role for which he has no talent.

As Lear, Rose has cast Stuart Hughes, a Shaw Festival actor whose boyish good looks and innocent, wide-eyed wonder work perfectly, especially in the first half of the play, where humor and youth collide in such lines as, "My sense is that I shall not do this job well. Is that your sense?" Later on, Hughes trades on an eerie contrast that develops between his physical beauty and the growing ugliness of his soul. Thus he layers Lear's unpredictable and self-centered shallowness with an ironic delivery. On the downside, he relies on vocal gymnastics at moments when more restraint would serve him better.

As the mother who was axed from history, Megan Follows is an inspired bit of casting. Well known in Canada as a child actor for playing the title role in "Anne of Green Gables," Follows has matured into a serious talent whose work here is exemplary. She emerges as the strongest force onstage, a child bride deprived of innocence and grown into the inflexible bearer of unbearable truths that must be excised from history. Perhaps it's no coincidence that costume designer Charlotte Dean has dressed Follows in a medieval get-up reminiscent of Joan of Arc.

Set and lighting designer Graeme Thomson has encased the actors in a black box with high walls, dangling iron chains, smothering curtains and a gauzy black scrim through which the audience views the stage. It makes for a wonderful atmosphere and some terrific lighting effects, but ultimately distances a difficult and heady play from its viewers. Not only that, but low lighting levels make it difficult to see the actors' faces.

"Seven Lears," like all Barker's work, is a jungle of contrasting ideas, and in order to work fully, the production needs to marry a humanity with the playwright's intellect. That relationship is only partly successful here. With all its layers, including the way Barker turns Shakespeare's characters on their heads, there should be room for more emotional fireworks between the lines (or at least the half-lines, as Barker often leaves his characters floundering midsentence) than we get here. When the sparks occur, "Seven Lears" is riveting.

Some performances need anchoring, and there are a few gratingly phony British accents. Luckily, Rose's simple but inventive staging distracts, and some of the secondary performers -- in particular, Julian Richings as the corrupt Bishop and Victor Ertmanis as the blustery Kent -- provide scenes of clarity and stunning theatricality.

Source: Variety