King Lear is the Everest of world theatre. But the critical consensus is that neither Nigel Hawthorne nor his Japanese director, Yukio Ninagawa, have got beyond the foothills in the RSC production at the Barbican. "More like Wurzel Gummidge than a mighty monarch," says the Daily Mail of Hawthorne's performance. "Little more than pique in his rages," claims the Times. "Shallow and lacklustre," says the Independent of Ninagawa's production.
So have we got a famous disaster, worthy to be ranked alongside Peter O'Toole's Macbeth? Absolutely not.
Hawthorne is miscast rather than actively bad: anyone who has followed his work over the years, including his memorable George III in Alan Bennett's play, would know that his forte is not the big bow-wow effect but moral decency flecked with irony. He is a miniaturist rather than a megawatt actor.
Oriental beauty
Where I dissent from my colleagues is in their verdict on Ninagawa's production: it has an elegiac oriental beauty that I warmed to. As in his famous Samurai Macbeth, Ninagawa shows tragedy is not incompatible with aesthetic grace.
If Hawthorne fails to scale the heights of King Lear, he can console himself that he is in good company. In the 19th century Hazlitt said of Edmund Kean that "he chipped a bit off the character here and there." James Agate wrote of a 1920s actor, Hubert Carter, that his performance "reminded me of the neat piling up of points by a boxer who lacks a punch".
Even the great Gielgud, in his final stage Lear in 1955, was attacked for saddling himself with a Japanese designer, Isamu Noguchi: Lear's costumes were compared to a hole-riddled Gruyere cheese and his throne to a golden lavatory-seat. As a boy, I loved that production; but maybe British critics do not like the Japanese messing with their beloved Shakespeare.
Hawthorne's failure to measure up to Lear seems to me entirely predictable. The part requires a huge tonal range, a Blakeian ability to move in a moment from the domestic to the cosmic, and a quality of ecstasy in which, to quote Agate again, "the soul stands beside the body".
Pathos, irony, and moral goodness are Hawthorne's gifts - which is precisely why he was perfect as CS Lewis in Shadowlands. Even when cast beyond his natural range, Hawthorne has his moments. He is good in the opening scene where he enters at a gallop, pre-emptively places Cordelia on his throne, and peremptorily exits unable to believe France would marry his discarded daughter. He picks up laughs through bathetic irony: viewing the bedraggled Poor Tom, he wanly enquires, "have his daughters brought him to this pass?"
But his well-modulated, dry-sherry voice is unable to encompass Lear's titanic rages, and there is no sense of Lear progressing through madness to a tormented self-knowledge. Hawthorne substitutes the minutiae of pathos for the grandeur of tragedy.
In a more domestic production, he might have been more effective, but Ninagawa's concept cries out for large-scale gestural acting. The stage is dominated by wooden doors, encrusted with pine-leaves, that open on to a vast cosmic emptiness. And the actors who come off best are the experienced classical hands who know how to fill the space. Sian Thomas's Goneril, seductively curling up on a rug with her dad's discarded crown, is a superb mixture of demonism and sensuality. John Carlisle's strong-voiced Gloucester suggests a future Lear waiting in the wings. And Michael Maloney's outstanding Edgar is fire, fury, and wrenching filial torment. With these performances, you sense a genuine marriage of oriental style and British textual detail: sadly, what does not work is the Fool of Hiroyuki Sanada, whose erratic inflections obscure his verbal barbs.
Mutual antipathy
But, to those who accuse the production of shallowness, I would say that Ninagawa points up the mutual antipathy of Lear's daughters with absolute clarity.
Visually the production is also stunning. Ninagawa's use of descending rocks and boulders in the storm-scene has been much mocked, but it conjures a world in which Nature's moulds are cracked. The image of the enchained Lear and Cordelia dragged across the vast length of the Barbican stage is also memorable. And Lily Komine's costumes harmoniously blend dazzlingkimonos with rough hessian.
Ninagawa, in short, has created an impressive framework. What his production fatally lacks is a Lear whose heart and mind crack under his own folly. But the cruelty of theatre is that the actor has to carry the can. The Telegraph says that Hawthorne was "destined" to play King Lear. Nonsense. The real mistake was to assume an actor of wry irony had the vocal iron for an assault on this play's treacherous summit.
Great Lears
John Gielgud : Stratford 1955. The music of a soul in torment and racked upon a 'wheel of fire.' Nobly moving.
Paul Scofield : Stratford 1962. A testy authoritarian patriarch in a Peter Brook production.
Donald Sinden : Stratford 1976. An early 20th century Junker Lear combining harshness and humour.
John Wood : Stratford 1990. A Lear full of insane contradictions, hugging Goneril even after cursing her.
Ian Holm (left) : Cottesloe 1997. Courageously unafraid, quite literally, in the mad scenes of naked self-revelation.
