Growing Old or Growing Up?

Staged readings can feel like a more pure form of theatre. The words have room to breathe. They lift off the page and soar around us in the room. The acting style is necessarily sparse which lends a pure, earnest quality to the performances.

In the talk-back that followed, Simon Webb said something to the tune of “you just get out of the way and say the words”. He was talking about performing Shakespeare in general I think, but the statement applies even more strongly to staged readings.

You don’t have to be familiar with King Lear to enjoy Eugene Stickland’s Queen Lear, the story stands on its own. Stickland weaves Shakespeare’s themes of youth vs age, family relations and the personal battle for sanity into a delightfully contemporary situation and peppers it with his own questions around gender and the way we use language. Being the Lear-o-phile that I am, I couldn’t help drawing a million connections between Jane (Marilyn Norrie) and Lear as well between Heather (Rachel Harrison) and Cordelia. I found the fresh angle of Queen Lear gave me a whole new insight into King Lear (which is one of my favourite plays of all time) as well as into my own life. Once you start making connections your mind doesn't want to stop. That's the great thing about adaptations and reinterpretations of famliar stories. For days after I was pondering about gender, family, age and maturity and what it all means when you get down to it. Good stuff!

I particularly enjoyed the discussion between Jane and Heather regarding ignorance and use of language. This is a topic that has been a keen interest of mine since reading Oleanna. I felt the question was beautifully handled. The “relationships between our intellect and the words we say, between our soul and our expression” how mindful are we about the way we speak these days? Sure, not many people are going to research the history of every word they use in everyday life. And meanings are always mutating dependant on usage. But what are the ramifications of that on our collective subconscious? And is there anything to be done about it?

While we’re on language. I thought the mix of contemporary and classical speech allowed  for the actors to really luxuriate in the classical text. Usually I steer clear of that stuff, preferring a more naturalistic approach to Shakespeare, but this felt more like heightened speech than pretentious pomp. I liked it. I could hear the swelling strings (haha sometimes literally) but it didn’t feel fake, it was just big and emotive, gorgeous. Often, in full-length productions of Shakespeare’s plays the ebb and flow of the language gets lost and it ends up either all pompous or all hyper-realistic.

A particular event in this script that really struck me was the way Heather reacted to Jane’s episode of confused panic. OK, she’s a preteen modern girl with her own angst dealing with an aging lady she doesn’t know very well, but it did give me pause. I grew up in a house that we shared with my grandmother who had dementia, my father is an eccentric artist and I’m a pretty emotionally volatile person myself. The step from “sane” into “madness” has always seemed more semantic than anything else to me. So Heather’s reaction felt a little extreme. It made me wonder if our first world tendencies towards retirement homes are creating a youth-centric society. Nevermind the ramifications of that for our community, but how will that affect future performances of King Lear?!? Later in the talk-back there was a lot of discussion about how to approach Lear’s “madness”, how actors have approached it historically, and how the Elizabethans didn’t have someone like Freud so the character development doesn’t make sense necessarily to a modern audience. It all makes perfect sense to me. And I have a theory that the Elizabethans had a similarly blurred line between sane and insane.

Queen Lear might be one of those “actor plays” that I find absolutely hilarious and moving because it is all SO true and there is just so much in it about actors and life in the theatre that I can relate to. Lines like “Sooner or later everybody does yoga” had me in stitches. I have no idea how many non-theatre people would even choose to go and see a play called “Queen Lear”. I’d love to know how a non-thespian experienced this play. Are there any non-theatre people reading this review?  Please comment below, I’d love to hear your opinion.

There were some minor annoyances, few performances are perfect and this one only had 2 rehearsals! It took me a while to get used to the idea that Norry was playing a woman almost double her age. And I felt guilty about my lackof imagination. Norry certainly does transform into her character and I loved her Jane. I just didn’t buy the age. And that made certain lines feel incongruous. I was LONGING for something small to help my limping imagination (usually so strong) like a heavily beaded glasses chain or a frumpier costume. Just... something!

And the way props were used annoyed me. They were mercifully few and essential to the script, but it’s a staged reading, so the rules are a bit wonky. Heather holding her cell phone where she couldn’t see it behind her script (although it would have been correct if the script wasn’t there) made it look more like the actress had forgotten to put her phone down than like the character was texting. If you’re going to use it, hold it in your other hand so my brain isn’t constantly snagging on the illogical eyeline. Or just memorize that portion of the script, it wasn’t long.

On a whole though, the play was captivating. With only 2 days of rehearsal, the cast made this piece seem effortless. Scripts in hand or not, that's a tough thing to do. Norry's Jane was alternately charming and infuriating. Harrison’s Heather conveyed all the wisdom, confusion  and arrogance of youth. Peggy Lee playing the cello was fantastic, not only with the music itself, but her engagement with the characters the entire time. They got a break from being on stage, she didn’t. Without the musical accompaniment, and without Lee to participate as a representational character, I'm not sure if the audience would have stepped into the world enough for this reading to work. As it was, the music provided a strong undercurrent to the action  and an eloquent indication of Jane’s state of mind.

While we’re on soundscape, there was another element that added to my personal experience of the piece: I was sitting just under or just in front of a very loud clock. The ticking enforced an ambient knowledge of time passing that lent weight to the subject matter. A not so subtle reminder that with every breath I move further on that journey of child to crone. A juicy coincidence.

I felt the final moment lacked punch when compared to some of the more stirring scenes in the middle of the piece, but overall I loved this performance. It made me laugh, it made me sad and it made me think.

A nugget of the script to leave you with that I think we should habitually ask ourselves at every point in our lives is Heather’s line to Jane... “Growing old is one thing, but what about growing up?”