Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
YYou know when you enter a room, you forget why you entered? Maureen Beattie does this at the beginning of Shakespeare’s gender reversal problem. He walks, catches himself, half steps back, turns on his heels and goes out the other way completely. After a while, he needs a moment to remember the name of Goneril, his daughter. In the middle of the second half, he is rocking in a wheelchair, talking with painful emotions and we know where it all started.
Yet this Queen Lear can be sharp, too. Dividing her kingdom between Goneril (Jenny Hulse), Regan (Lindsey Campbell) and Cordelia (Ailsa Davidson), she is a famous woman who expects respect.
But what kind of honor is it? Her tone when Cordelia knocks her down is as hard as she is stubborn, a frustrated mother with a disobedient daughter. Played as a man, Lear ends up falling in love with Cordelia; she is played here as a woman, she is too direct to do so. For all that he calls his beloved Cordelia, you can guess that they’ve had a falling out before, as Goneril and Regan clearly light each other up.
If the power of the family comes out of the modern dress code – which is in a pile of country, designed by Emma Bailey, with paintings on the wall and wires coming out – it is a waste of a great human tragedy. This Lear speaks straight, not big, not the kind with 100, or bothered by downloads. His madness, which comes quickly, is more a reflection of the decline of his house than a sign of a mighty king who has fallen. Even though he’s very weak, it’s more sad and personal than a shock.
In part, this is due to the lack of meaning in the relationships around him. Forbes Masson enjoys the role of the blinded Gloucester, acting intelligently and enthusiastically, but his devotion to Lear seems to be out of place, as is the connection of Edmund (Reuben Joseph) with the plots of the two older sisters. It’s not the tone of the story, but the subtle plot twists that make this drama more simple than tragic.
