New adopted to our hate – Bard on the Beach does King Lear

This summer was my first experience with Bard on the Beach in Vancouver.

For my first ever performance, I watched Meg Roe make her directing debut with The Tempest. It was marvelous. The set, the costumes, the music, the actors - especially Jennifer Lines who played the best Ariel I’ve seen yet – were fantastic. The play flowed beautifully from beginning to end.

King Lear did not.

King Lear is my favourite Shakespeare play. I like most of his plays, but I’ve always really liked this one particularly. What can I say – I like tragedies. This production was indeed a tragedy that made Friday night a waste of time.

It starts off with a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday by a bunch of people in fussy office attire singing to a wheelchair ridden Lear. A chocolate cake is placed in Lear’s lap which he then uses as a sort of map to divest himself of “Rule, Interest of Territory, Cares of State” and frees himself of his duties by “conferring them on yonger strengths” – namely, his three daughters Gonerill, Regan and Cordelia.

At first, I liked the costumes. They looked like they just came from an office in the 1980′s and that seemed like a pretty interesting way to do it. I’m not a snob, I think it’s OK to make Shakespeare look a little modern – after all, his words ring true no matter how you dress the characters.

The only costume that seemed out of place was the Nurse’s. She was wearing some ancient looking VON getup and stuck out like a sore thumb.  And the scene with Lear wearing Wellington’s and a tweed coat with elbow patches looked a little strange too. To be honest, most of the time Lear looked like Indiana Jones’s dad from The Last Crusade – in a wheelchair.

I figured the singing would stop with Happy Birthday – I was wrong. They sang A LOT in this play. It seemed very out of place. This may be just a personal preference, but that much singing in a tragedy seems to be in poor taste somehow.

I also wasn’t impressed with the casting of Cordelia: Melissa Poll simply did not ring true as Lear’s youngest and most beloved daughter. The costume she wore - tight little black skirt and fussy white satin blouse – made her look much, much taller than everyone else, gaunt to the point of sickness, slightly jaundiced and unfriendly.

According to the booklet I got from the volunteers at the festival grounds, Cordelia’s “simplicity and directness is indicated in warmer tones and less contrained in silhouette.” Black and white are “warmer tones”? I’ll give you the silhouette, she was puffy while Gonerill and Regan were dressed in more figure-hugging clothes – but there were no “warmer tones” where Cordelia was concerned.

I suppose Melissa Poll was chosen for her blondness – perhaps the director, James Fagan Tait, was going for good v.s. evil by having a light haired Cordelia and making Gonerill and Regan dark haired. If that’s the case, there is no need for that: their words and actions will tell us all about them without such gimmicky nonsense. In terms of looks, I would have cast Melissa Poll as Regan and Tiffany Lyndall-Knight (who played Regan) as Cordelia.

Cordelia –  in my head and in most productions – is young looking, innocent, kind and thoughtful. Not a blonde and gaunt Amazon woman in a shiny blouse.  That blouse was really visually distracting too – it made Cordelia’s head and hands look disembodied, washed the colour from her face and made her look a little bit zombified.

The first half of the play dragged along pretty painfully – too much singing, seemingly inconsistent costuming, a ridiculous scene involving guns that sounded like toy cap guns, poor voice projection from two of the actors – Gerry Mackay (Kent) and Andrew Wheeler (Cornwall) - the bizarre and confusing presence of the entire cast on the balcony swaying and making “storm” noises, Lear was so whiny and insufferable I felt sympathetic to Gonerill and Regan and that stupid rain stick was distracting and annoying.

Then there were the audience members:

The guy across from Joe ate popcorn with his mouth open for nearly all of the first half, a guy a few seats down and the next row back put his dirty bare feet on the chair in front of him (most of the people around him were pretty disgusted by this) two people wore large hats – and left them on during the performance – and far too many people talked during the performance.

I know Bard on the Beach is pretty informal compared to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, but it’s still a theatre setting! Good manners and basic courtesy still apply! Eat with your mouth closed, keep your dirty feet off the seats, take your bloody hat off and turn off your cell phones you cretins.

In short, it was an awful experience and we left at the half way point. It’s the first time I have ever walked out on a performance – I hope it will be the last.