King Lear at the Globe

Apart from a few passenger jets circling overhead while waiting to land at Heathrow, it was a perfect warm  still evening to stand in the yard at Shakespeare's Globe for Dominic Dromgoole's production of King Lear.  The music, played on a range of early instruments and composed by the Globe's former musical director Claire van Kampen, features Pamela Hay singing solo ballads in what I assumed was Gaelic but turned out to be early English.  It's very spooky and it sets a suitably pagan tone that matches the costumes, which are in a primitive style that echoes Shakespeare's time but also suggests something much older.  David Calder is an excellent Lear, making the difficult transition from sanity to the far reaches of insanity and halfway back again while still remaining recognisably himself.  In the opening scene he's a blustering, tyrannical politician, always casting an eye on the audience to see the effect his bullying performance is having.  But the fool (excellently played by Danny Lee Wynter, who featured in Stephen Poliakoff's last TV film) starts to puncture his arrogant facade, which disintegrates when he gradually realises that surrendering his crown means he is no longer instantly obeyed.  Calder makes the shift to the mad scene utterly convincing, though he doesn't bother with the usual stripping off, and for the first time Lear starts to behave like a human being, showing genuine tenderness both to Edgar in his disguise as poor Tom, and to the blinded Gloucester.  At the end of the play Lear seems to have aged a decade or more, an old man struggling against confusion and amnesia, but he seems to have inwardly absorbed everything he has experienced.  The key to acting successfully at the Globe is one that many experienced actors can't find, but Calder has it at his fingertips.  It's not just a matter of projecting, but of setting up a real communication channel with the audience.  This is a Lear who, especially in the opening scenes, is always making eye contact to see how he is perceived by those who are watching him.  Like Mark Rylance, Calder has the knack of setting up a three-way relationship between his character, the other characters on stage, and the audience, who are drawn into his performance.  There's a strong cast backing him up, notably Paul Copley as Kent and Joseph Mydell, who played the dictator in the RSC's Breakfast With Mugabe.  There are some nice inventive moments on stage, including the sudden appearance of some blood-streaked zombie-like Bedlamites. 

Since the days of Rylance, who positively welcomed a noisy and participative audience at the Globe, there's been a shift towards a more traditional focus on keeping the spectators quiet and discouraging them from moving about. I'm told that David Calder tends to complain when the audience shifts around.  I'm in two minds about this;  in theory I like Rylance's original concept of a rowdy, rough, Jacobean theatre with the atmosphere of an inn yard, but in practice I like to hear the play with as little disturbance and distraction as possible.