PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Tobacco Factory, Bristol (Thur 9 Feb-Sat 24 Mar)

THEATRE To be honest, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory’s opening gambit back in 2000 seemed pretty much unbeatable at the time. As you might expect, though, circumstances and experience have had their way, and this new production of the tragedy that set the SATTF ball rolling twelve years ago is possibly even more nuanced and compelling than the one that Venue saw in the company of three old men and a dog back in the early days of the new millennium. Comparisons, though, are invidious: one of the few resemblances between the two productions is that they both share the remarkable intensity and integrity for which SATTF has become rightly known – while the differences between them are testimony to both the tireless exploratory instinct of Andrew Hilton’s company and the imaginative reach of old Shakespeare himself.

Where this production is concerned, one of the difficulties of reviewing it is that listing its strengths risks making it sound slightly dull. ‘Scrupulous attention to detail’, ‘judicious characterisation’, ‘sensible rejection of both melodrama and rhetoric’ – all such phrases, while true, suggest an overly scholarly approach, as if what’s put before us in the narrow confines of an in-the-round staging isn’t a passionate, intense – often brutally intense – drama, but an academic paper. Nothing could be further from the truth.

John Shrapnel’s Lear is terrifyingly human, caught in the cleft between power and responsibility, kingship and paternity, and catapulted into madness, not by a malign external agency, but by his own incapacity to understand that he’s not the only person on the planet. That Shrapnel manages to inject new life into lines dunned into a million Eng Lit students is the mere icing on the cake: his is a Lear who manages to be both hideously solipsistic and ‘a man more sinned against than sinning’.

Not that Shrapnel is alone in giving a first-rate, constantly questioning performance. This – as SATTF productions characteristically are – is a take on ‘Lear’ which features a gloriously well-realised dramatis personae. You can, as it were, imagine Kent (Simon Armstrong), Gloucester (Trevor Cooper), Edmund (Jack Whittam) and even the grotesquely obsequious Oswald (Paul Brendan) being the central character of a different play, and there are eye-opening performances, too, from Julia Hills as Goneril, Dorothea Myer-Bennett as Regan, Byron Mondahl as Cornwall and Alan Coveney as the ever-dithering Albany. Christophers Staines and Bianchi, meanwhile, give good humane, down-to-earth counterpoint as Edgar and the Fool respectively.

Stripped down and fast-paced, but above all on the button, this is a version of ‘Lear’ which ranks amongst the best – and amongst the best productions that SATTF has brought to the Tob Fac stage. So far. (Tom Phillips)

Copyright Tom Phillips 2012