PRODUCTION King Lear [Lier zai ci]
Data Type：review
Author：Kidd, Briony
Title：King Lear, Contemporary Legend Theatre
Source：Australian Stage
Date：2009/4/6
URL：http://www.australianstage.com.au/reviews/tendays/king-lear--contemporary-legend-theatre-2418.html
Language：English
Abstract：The review adopts a somehow patronizing tone, acknowledging the performance's theatricality but also criticizing its simplicity.
The first impact of Contemporary Legend Theatre's production of King Lear comes from copious amounts of smoke. Pouring onto the stage, making great dramatic shafts of light down to the floor, where three ominous, craggy rocks stand like shadowy figures, the smoke tells us straight away that this isn’t going to be a very subtle version of Shakespeare’s most dense and fascinating work.
(It also served to greatly irritate a woman in front of me, who proceeded to fan herself furiously with her program for the rest of the evening, thereby irritating everyone else in turn).
Yep, this is theatre with a capital T, that heady stuff they used to do back in Victorian era London, the stuff that’s perfect for a large, old-fashioned space like the Theatre Royal in Hobart. This is a real show, and the performers -- Wu Hsing-kuo and eight accompanying musicians – are taking it very seriously indeed. As well they should!
But if this implies a stuffy reverence to tradition – well, that’s not quite right either. Solo performer and director Wu Hsing-kuo trained at the Fu-Hsing Chinese Opera School for eight years and is a former lead dancer of Taiwan’s renowned Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. But this is his version of Lear, not a strictly Chinese opera version.
For a start, there’s the fact that he plays all the roles. He does this with remarkable ease, largely because he plays them one at a time. There are a few moments where two characters interact – most notably the suspenseful scene where Edgar (as Poor Tom) leads the blinded Gloucester to an imaginary cliff – but most of the time the character is on his own, telling his own story, singing his own song.
The three sisters – the false and simpering Goneril and Regan and the quiet, sensible Cordelia – each tell their father, as requested, how much they love him. Wu performs this with elegant simplicity, changing only a couple of details of costume to transform from one sister to the next, yet each woman is clearly delineated and powerful in her own way. This scene is helped along by a simple device. At the end of her speech Goneril says “Your turn now, second sister”. At the end of her speech, Regan says, “Your turn now, third sister”. It’s a simple way to make the action clear that works well.
Another thing that serves to make the action clear in this production is the use of surtitles, translating the Mandarin into English, and even indicating which character is saying the words in case you’ve lost the thread of what’s going on. (Unfortunately some members of the audience were denied this comforting convenience at the Theatre Royal, the surtitle screen being positioned high at the top of the proscenium arch, a spot that not all seats in the house are able to see. Well, let’s hope they muddled through somehow.)
The surtitles allow an appreciation of how impressively Wu Hsing-kuo has distilled a complex and rich play into a series of brief vignettes. He has retained a sense of grandeur to the language used (at least as far as I could tell from the English translations; always poetic, if occasionally a bit questionable). Some scenes are direct retellings of incidents from the play, while others are more like a character musing on his fate, having broken free of the play and become a new entity with a life of his own.
So Lear sings and tugs at his great white beard and plays games with the audience, even to the point of taking off his costume and wondering, “Who am I?”. The Fool, of course, does play the fool, and is the lynchpin of this version of Lear (or perhaps of every version?). The Fool is the one asking the questions: everyone else is too stuck in the reality of their situation to really lift their head up and wonder why.
It’s easy to get the feeling that Wu is playing the Fool most of all, that even when he’s playing the sisters or Edgar or Edmund, he’s really the Fool playing those characters, mocking them even as he portrays them. With Lear and Gloucester there’s more empathy: there’s no fool like an old fool. With Cordelia – well, this production is notable for how briefly she appears. She tells Lear that she loves him “according to my bond, no more and no less” and then is not seen again. Except that, just before the end of the story, in that moment of horrible uncertainty that Wu evokes so powerfully with just the use of lighting and music, Lear carries the Cordelia costume, cradling it in his arms. Nothing more needs to be said. She is gone.
So how much of this production do we understand only because we already know Shakespeare’s King Lear? Perhaps, in the end, it doesn’t matter. Wu Hsing-kuo uses the story to create something that feels universal: a folktale, a morality play, a complete piece of entertainment. He sings, he shouts, he goes mad, he hangs from wires, he kicks and falls on the ground, he even speaks English at one point. He’s a Taiwanese opera singer who’s made one of the most revered texts of Western culture into something personal and unique to himself. He’s playing his own Lear, as everybody eventually does.
Ten Days on the Island presents
KING LEAR
Director / Performer Wu Hsing-Kuo
LAUNCESTON
Princess Theatre, Brisbane Street
2 April at 8pm
HOBART
Theatre Royal, 29 Campbell Street
4 & 5 April at 4pm
Duration: 2hrs (Interval)
Patrons Advice: In Mandarin with English surtitles
Tickets: Premium $65, A Reserve $55, B Reserve $44, Concession $38, Gallery/C Reserve $28, Concession $23
(It also served to greatly irritate a woman in front of me, who proceeded to fan herself furiously with her program for the rest of the evening, thereby irritating everyone else in turn).
Yep, this is theatre with a capital T, that heady stuff they used to do back in Victorian era London, the stuff that’s perfect for a large, old-fashioned space like the Theatre Royal in Hobart. This is a real show, and the performers -- Wu Hsing-kuo and eight accompanying musicians – are taking it very seriously indeed. As well they should!
But if this implies a stuffy reverence to tradition – well, that’s not quite right either. Solo performer and director Wu Hsing-kuo trained at the Fu-Hsing Chinese Opera School for eight years and is a former lead dancer of Taiwan’s renowned Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. But this is his version of Lear, not a strictly Chinese opera version.
For a start, there’s the fact that he plays all the roles. He does this with remarkable ease, largely because he plays them one at a time. There are a few moments where two characters interact – most notably the suspenseful scene where Edgar (as Poor Tom) leads the blinded Gloucester to an imaginary cliff – but most of the time the character is on his own, telling his own story, singing his own song.
The three sisters – the false and simpering Goneril and Regan and the quiet, sensible Cordelia – each tell their father, as requested, how much they love him. Wu performs this with elegant simplicity, changing only a couple of details of costume to transform from one sister to the next, yet each woman is clearly delineated and powerful in her own way. This scene is helped along by a simple device. At the end of her speech Goneril says “Your turn now, second sister”. At the end of her speech, Regan says, “Your turn now, third sister”. It’s a simple way to make the action clear that works well.
Another thing that serves to make the action clear in this production is the use of surtitles, translating the Mandarin into English, and even indicating which character is saying the words in case you’ve lost the thread of what’s going on. (Unfortunately some members of the audience were denied this comforting convenience at the Theatre Royal, the surtitle screen being positioned high at the top of the proscenium arch, a spot that not all seats in the house are able to see. Well, let’s hope they muddled through somehow.)
The surtitles allow an appreciation of how impressively Wu Hsing-kuo has distilled a complex and rich play into a series of brief vignettes. He has retained a sense of grandeur to the language used (at least as far as I could tell from the English translations; always poetic, if occasionally a bit questionable). Some scenes are direct retellings of incidents from the play, while others are more like a character musing on his fate, having broken free of the play and become a new entity with a life of his own.
So Lear sings and tugs at his great white beard and plays games with the audience, even to the point of taking off his costume and wondering, “Who am I?”. The Fool, of course, does play the fool, and is the lynchpin of this version of Lear (or perhaps of every version?). The Fool is the one asking the questions: everyone else is too stuck in the reality of their situation to really lift their head up and wonder why.
It’s easy to get the feeling that Wu is playing the Fool most of all, that even when he’s playing the sisters or Edgar or Edmund, he’s really the Fool playing those characters, mocking them even as he portrays them. With Lear and Gloucester there’s more empathy: there’s no fool like an old fool. With Cordelia – well, this production is notable for how briefly she appears. She tells Lear that she loves him “according to my bond, no more and no less” and then is not seen again. Except that, just before the end of the story, in that moment of horrible uncertainty that Wu evokes so powerfully with just the use of lighting and music, Lear carries the Cordelia costume, cradling it in his arms. Nothing more needs to be said. She is gone.
So how much of this production do we understand only because we already know Shakespeare’s King Lear? Perhaps, in the end, it doesn’t matter. Wu Hsing-kuo uses the story to create something that feels universal: a folktale, a morality play, a complete piece of entertainment. He sings, he shouts, he goes mad, he hangs from wires, he kicks and falls on the ground, he even speaks English at one point. He’s a Taiwanese opera singer who’s made one of the most revered texts of Western culture into something personal and unique to himself. He’s playing his own Lear, as everybody eventually does.
Ten Days on the Island presents
KING LEAR
Director / Performer Wu Hsing-Kuo
LAUNCESTON
Princess Theatre, Brisbane Street
2 April at 8pm
HOBART
Theatre Royal, 29 Campbell Street
4 & 5 April at 4pm
Duration: 2hrs (Interval)
Patrons Advice: In Mandarin with English surtitles
Tickets: Premium $65, A Reserve $55, B Reserve $44, Concession $38, Gallery/C Reserve $28, Concession $23
