It seems apt that Belarus Free Theatre has taken on King Lear as part of the Globe to Globe season. Their current production, Minsk 2011, is a visually arresting ensemble piece which addresses the political tyranny of the company’s country, while Lear is a bleak interrogation of tyranny and power which documents the painful unravelling of a political dynasty. Furthermore, it is full of striking tableaux – Lear raging against the storm, Gloucester’s eye-gouging – which play to the company’s strengths. These parallels, between Belarus Free Theatre’s artistic concerns and Shakespeare’s play, have sparked into life a bold, irreverent and provocative interpretation of Lear.
Aleh Sidorchik‘s Lear is an aggressive, domineering ruler who emerges from the central doors onto the stage shouting and gesticulating at his subjects. He’s wearing a long black leather coat and an oversized armoured glove; the former evoking a sinister secret police goon, the latter a nod to history’s ‘iron fist’ rulers. Initially a symbol of brute strength, Lear’s glove became the marker of his political and personal decline. In the storm scenes, when Lear’s mental state is at its most fragile, he places the glove on Tom of Bedlam’s head: the swaggering accessory of power now just a rather silly-looking coxcomb. At the end of the play, Lear and Cordelia’s captors paw the king’s goods; one closely inspects the glove only to laugh and casually toss it aside. As the ‘iron fist’ becomes worthless junk, so a mighty king is transformed into a ‘foolish, fond, old man’.
The company’s ability to make beautiful and witty theatre through ensemble and individual physicality, so evident in Minsk 2011, is also on display here. Once Goneril and Regan have passed their father’s love test they are rewarded with their share of the kingdom: from a large wheelbarrow of sodden earth, Lear shovels healthy portions into the sisters’ skirts. Clasping their gift of soil close to their bodies, they waddle around the stage like heavily pregnant women. Lear’s childless daughters bear the only family legacy, his kingdom, a large mound of dirt. The storm scenes are a DIY tour-de-force involving a large majority of the company making noise and frantic movements with the help of a large blue tarpaulin, a bowl of water and a piano. In this way they convey both a sense of the stormy weather and Lear’s fractured, confused mind.
As the production draws to its close, Goneril and Regan’s rule proves chilling and sinister when contrasted with Lear’s blustering presence. Before Gloucester’s eye-gouging, the sisters walk slowly around the stage, stopping a few times to whisper conspiratorially to one another. The violent course of action which was to follow is set upon with calm, cold indifference. Lear and Cordelia’s guards cover their faces with black mesh, transforming into a gang of violent thugs. They strangle Cordelia with her pearl necklace, her dress slipping off in the struggle, and nonchalantly throw her half-naked body aside when they have finished. The political violence is never excessive; instead, and more frighteningly, it is subtle, sudden and vicious. A theatre troupe born from political struggle, the company inflect Shakespeare’s play with a sense of modern terror and oppression.
Some aspects of their production come off less successfully. The oddly sexualised behaviour of many of the characters – Lear intensely French kissing his daughters, Goneril and Regan doing the same with one another – feels gratuitous. The company also don’t always engage with the audience in the way that a space like the Globe seems to demand, and some scenes fall flat as a result, despite the strength with which they are played. Despite this, and as with so many productions in the Globe to Globe season, the company prove that the loss of Shakespeare’s language need not be a hindrance to conveying the full emotional and, indeed, political force of his plays.
