What is it about King Lear that continues to inspire so much reverence? Shakespeare’s late-career tragedy of feeble monarchs, thunderous landscapes and vengeful children seems to create fear and awe in actors and directors alike. George Bernard Shaw lauded it, Leo Tolstoy famously despised it and Harold Bloom compared it to ‘a kind of secular scripture or a mythology’. It casts a long shadow. Upon being offered the role of Lear in My Perfect Mind, actor Edward Petherbridge referred to the character as ‘an Oak’; a telling phrase that encapsulates the majestic significance that this role seems to hold.
Returning to the Young Vic, Told by an Idiot’s My Perfect Mind is the latest in a number of productions which uses Lear as a springboard. Recently German ensemble She She Pop’s Testament – in which the performer’s fathers joined the company on-stage for a powerfully honest examination of age versus ‘generational debt’ – was performed as part of this year’s LIFT. There are interesting similarities between that production and A Perfect Mind, not least of which is the way both engage with the subject of age while slipping between different modes of performance to explore it. While Testament offered a probing analysis of it’ subject, My Perfect Mind is lighter in its approach, paddling about the subjects it raises without ever really fully committing to them.
My Perfect Mind sees Petherbridge hastily re-create a number of real-life scenarios showing the lead-up to, and aftermath of, the stroke he suffered in 2007, just two days into the rehearsals for Lear. These take the form of a series of lightly humorous vignettes and the whole thing plays out as a meta-theatrical romp, with director Kathryn Hunter revelling in the slippage between biography and performance.
Those who saw Never Try This At Home know that Paul Hunter and his company enjoy making a mess. Yet My Perfect Mind is a restrained – dare I say it, understated – departure from the company’s usual screwball performance style. The tone of the piece is altogether more meditative and confessional and Michael Vale’s stark design – with its white-walls and sloping stage – is decidedly lacking in clutter, choosing instead to emphasize light and space, a move suited to the confessional nature of the performance.
It’s not a total departure, of course. And good thing too, since one of the continual joys of Told by an Idiot’s work is there willingness to revel in a sense of buffoonery. As a company, they take seriously their own silliness and My Perfect Mind doesn’t dispense entirely with this winning combination of daft humour and clownish comedy. Hunter plays a clownish professor-cum-fool, sketching out a colourful cast of characters from an intrepid cab driver to the ebullient Artistic Director of a New Zealand community theatre. But it is Petherbridge’s utterly charming performance as this ‘stage-version’ of himself – full of brilliantly timed asides, waspish humour and stinging anecdotes – who steals the limelight as he sweeps about the stage reciting Lear and effortlessly dropping into polite chit-chat.
Despite the somber nature of the subject matter, neither Petherbridge nor Hunter allows the performance to become outwardly gloomy or sentimental and the production contains a willful lightness, an almost subversive jocularity, that is entirely antithetical to the existential sorrow of Shakespeare’s play.
