Home / Arts & Life / Minds in Meltdown, and a Risk-Taking Director Back on Form

Minds in Meltdown, and a Risk-Taking Director Back on Form

When “Prism” is playing fast and loose with its Hollywood notables, it has a decided kick that falls away once we return to the workaday portrait of an affliction that has been dramatized to far more rending effect elsewhere.

Photo

Robert Lindsay as the storied cinematographer Jack Cardiff in “Prism” by Terry Johnson at Hampstead Theater in London.

Credit
Manuel Harlan

On the other hand, I entirely understand the programming of “Prism” within a season of work at a playhouse run by Edward Hall, the director whose own father, the former director of London’s National Theater, Sir Peter Hall, died on Sept. 11 after a long battle with dementia. It’s entirely possible that the elder Mr. Hall himself might one day make a remarkable subject for a play. Until then, “Prism” keeps potentially searing material on a decidedly low flame.

The decline, both physical and mental, chronicled in “King Lear” exists a league apart, and few productions of this play knock at the door of the psychic abyss that the play itself inhabits.

Where then does Nancy Meckler’s production, running in repertory at Shakespeare’s Globe through Oct. 14, fall on the spectrum in a country where the classical canon exists in near-constant rotation? (Ian McKellen is next up as Lear, a role he has played before, in a version opening Sept. 30 at the Chichester Festival Theater, south of London.)

In fact, the American-born Ms. Meckler offers one of the shorter, more briskly efficient accounts of “King Lear” in recent times — light on emotional catharsis and patchily acted, perhaps, but cleareyed in its chronicle of Lear’s dying fall on the way to a self-awareness that is arrived at far too late.

The opening evokes the here and now of homelessness and sleeping rough, whereby the cast emerge as so many vagrants who have to claw their way on to a tarpaulin-filled stage in order for the performance to start. (That means among other things paying no heed to a highly visible “Keep Out” sign.)

The idea, presumably, is to reclaim the space in order to perform a play that is itself about dispossession, but the conceit soon runs out of steam and is supplanted in any case by a fairly no-nonsense canter through this grievous narrative of parents and children mutually misunderstood and often at fatal odds with one another.

Lear, unusually, is taken by a Shakespearean newbie, at least to me: The film actor Kevin R. McNally (Gibbs in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” film franchise), who lends a sinewy, grizzled authority to a part that can devolve into rhetorical grandstanding. Such posturing rests mainly with the baddies — Emily Bruni’s Goneril and Ralph Davis’s Edmund, to name but two — and is correspondingly absent from both Anjana Vasan’s open-faced Cordelia and the stalwart Saskia Reeves as a female Kent: Lear’s companion on a downward trajectory from which few in this eternally mournful play return.

Photo

Judith Roddy plays a nameless young woman who leads a hardscrabble life in David Harrower’s “Knives in Hens” at the Donmar Warehouse.

Credit
Marc Brenner

The director Yael Farber could have been forgiven a primal howl of her own given the collective brickbats aimed her direction following the “Salome” that she brought to the National Theater in the spring. Rarely have I sat through a duller, more self-important evening.

Instead, she has moved on undaunted to the current revival of the Scottish writer David Harrower’s “Knives in Hens,” at the Donmar Warehouse through Oct. 7, and looks happily to be back on form. To be sure, the rigor of the production is of a piece with Ms. Farber’s style, which favors deliberately paced, brooding atmospherics. (The idea of Ms. Farber directing a comedy seems borderline surreal.)

But her approach, as it happens, aligns well with Mr. Harrower’s 1995 play, which has acquired the status in some circles of a modern classic and will be seen Off Broadway in a separate production in New York later this fall at 59E59 Theaters. Set in a preindustrial, agrarian world, the play charts a relationship that suggests a biblical parable rewritten by Thomas Hardy.

An unnamed woman (Judith Roddy) exists to do the bidding, sexual and otherwise, of her ploughman-husband, Pony William (Christian Cooke), whose authority is challenged by the incursion into his wife’s hardscrabble routine by a loathed if comparably hirsute local miller (Matt Ryan); the physical similarities between the two actors allow for a cunning irony in view of the characters’ deep-rooted differences. (All three performances are superb.)

The miller brings with him a flair for language and encourages our heroine to acquire the power of the pen. That, too, turns out to be an ambivalent strength: The miller’s teachings include instruction in how to curse — words, one realizes, can cut both ways.

Ms. Farber’s visual flair remains second to none, and she is elegantly served by a collaborative design — Tim Lutkin’s baleful lighting, especially — that makes something spectral and haunting out of what could merely seem opaque. “Knives in Hens” is never going to be a crowd-pleaser, and I noted more empty seats than is the norm at this address, but Ms. Farber’s work here cuts to the quick; the directorial knife is razor-sharp.

Continue reading the main story

About admin

Check Also

Hear the Best Albums and Songs of 2023

Dear listeners, In the spirit of holiday excess and end-of-the-year summation, we’re about to make …