Director Michal Hába has returned to the Klicper Theater in Králové Hradec for several times. Similar to when he staged Moliere’s classic The Miser here years ago, now he is also breaking production tradition and an established genre in William Shakespeare’s King Lear. It proves that in this apocalyptic tragedy there is a lot of humor, albeit black, and especially parallels with today.
Due to old age, King Lear abdicates the throne, which he wants to divide between his three daughters. The elder Goneril and Regan flatter him insincerely, but the youngest Cordelia upsets him with a well-thought-out comparison of love to precious salt. The monarch banishes her from the country and bequeaths his property and privileges to the first two. However, they soon turn their backs on him and gradually drive him mad.
Rejected by the children, Lear travels through the wilderness accompanied by a jester. Along the way, he meets a man disguised as a fool, Edgar, who is hiding from the supposed malice of his father, the Earl of Gloucester, who was blinded by the deception of his illegitimate son Edmund. Here William Shakespeare develops the characteristic second line of narration for his works. It doubles the motif of the folly of old age, which pays for the arrogant profiteering of one’s own children.
King Lear depicts a world that is shaking to its foundations. The order of man and nature is seriously disturbed, facing a directly deadly crisis, yet it does not disappear completely. It is a visionary play, wrote the translator and Shakespearean scholar Martin Hilský about the text from the beginning of the 17th century, originally set in pre-Christian England.
The current Králové Hradec production works with Jiří Josko’s translation and transfers the story to the present, but it is very well aware of these contours of meaning. On the one hand, it takes into account the tradition of the so-called medieval laughter culture and the feast of fools, as defined by the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. At the same time, we feel the awareness of a globalized world in which established terms such as nationalism and ethnicity are being emptied, but nothing has yet replaced them.
The authors of the production also rely on the Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s article The Interregnum, or Interregnum, when the old is dying, but the new cannot yet be born. In this scattered, non-concrete time, several candidates strive for power and society is ruled by pleasure, that is, entertainment, which leads back to the starting point of the upside-down carnival world.
Rejected by children, King Lear, played by Filip Richtermoc, travels through the wilderness accompanied by a jester. | Photo: CTK
The novel directly quotes Bakhtin and Bauman, and serves as an argument for the shift from tragedy to tragicomedy. Shakespeare was not the author of a pure genre, his serious plays always hid humor, and comedies, on the contrary, contained a tragic undertone. Nevertheless, in Michal Hába’s direction, one can sense to what extent it was possible to step up the opposite genre and where, on the contrary, to break it. It worked – at least the last few images got significantly darker compared to the rest.
The play with the genre in this case is based on the belief of the German playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht that serious matters need to be talked about and played with insight and humor.
Michal Hába subscribes to his ideas for a long time, while often applying the principles of commentary or so-called alienation on stage. This is also true of King Lear, where several actors occupy multiple roles. The director therefore uses signs with various inscriptions clarifying who is currently speaking or commenting on the plot. Signs are most likely not Brecht’s invention, they were already in use in Shakespeare’s time.
For example, when Cordelia is about to express her love for her father, she holds the slogan “Shut up honey” in her hand. The Count of Gloucester, played by Jiří Zapletal, is later staked on a log as part of the tort law. At that moment, he is lying on the ground with his legs tied and a table marked with the inscription “log”. Some texts may be deliberately provocative, for example signs stating “This is not done on stage”.
Instead of a real actor, the jester in the production is represented by a life-sized puppet, which is hung on a noose and has a sign hanging around its neck with the phrase Now you know. Cordelia will bring the dummy to the stage. But he also has a small child’s toy of a stuffed rabbit in his hand as a foreshadowing of Lear’s fate, when the respected and powerful king turns into a rabbit fleeing from himself.
The jester in the production is represented by a life-sized puppet suspended from a noose. In the foreground are Filip Richtermoc as Lear and Štěpánka Todorová as Regan. | Photo: CTK
The rabbit is an ancient symbol of inner spiritual transformation, rebirth, as well as purity and female innocence. In Háb’s production, he replaces the Jester and is played by Martina Czyžová, who also represents Cordelia. Doubling of roles was already common in the Elizabethan and Jacobean times. The actor who was entrusted with the role of Cordelia also took on the role of the Jester.
In Klicper’s theater, the king later approaches this rabbit by choosing a costume. There are quite a few disguises based on Shakespeare. The Earl of Kent, embodied by Jan Vápeník, chooses the disguise of Robin Williams from the movie Mrs. Doubtfire – Dad in a Skirt. The sons of the Earl of Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund, have their half-naked bodies painted, perhaps imitating military camouflage or symbolically narrowing the world into contrasting colors.
These also dominate the costumes of Lear’s daughters at the very beginning, as designed by designer Adriana Černá. In Edgar and Edmund, the blue and red colors may represent the bloodline being played for. Vojtěch Říha in the role of Edgar is Glostra’s legitimate son, therefore he has blue blood, while Edmund, as a left-sided man, has red blood in his veins.
King Lear was portrayed by Filip Richtermoc. He lives the role passionately, he declaims almost heroically, which is in rather funny contradiction with all the surrounding travesty. One character even glosses his performance with the nickname “dramatic artist”. It is hard to say whether Lear’s position was supposed to sound contrasting already in the assignment, or whether it is more the charm of the unwanted.
It is the performances of the actors that represent the biggest weakness of an otherwise very good directorial and dramaturgical concept. Not everyone is comfortable in the Brecht-Hábo theater. And not everyone likes the fast-paced acting style that the director’s colleagues from the Lachende Bestien association are used to – several of them participated in the project, but not from the ranks of the actors. The actions of the characters on the stage, on the other hand, are excellently commented by Edmund’s representative, Petr Kult, who is engaged in the second season in Králové Hradec.
Shakespeare and Brecht are close to each other, the ensemble of the Klicper Theater lags a little behind them. Nevertheless, the local King Lear is a representative title indicating the direction in which urban scenes should be presented in contemporary drama.
Theater
William Shakespeare: King Lear
Adaptation and direction: Michal Hába
Klicper’s Theatre, Hradec Králové, premiere on October 5, next reruns on October 23 and November 5.