Theatre

Seduction and King Lear

Alan Hindle | Tuesday 1 February, 2011 22:01

Seduction Above The Stag Theatre, 15 Bressenden Place, SW1E 5DD 020 8932 4747 Until 6 February
King Lear Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, NW1 8EH 0844 482 8008?? Until 4 February

At the turn of the 20th century in Austria, Arthur Schnitzler wrote Le Ronde, to be circulated only amongst friends but which was eventually produced. Schnitzler escaped prosecution for obscenity when the judge threw the case out.

He disowned the play, but it has since been staged many times since, reworked to best unsettle the current society. Jack Heifner has translated the play seamlessly for the gay scene and renamed it Seduction. The scenes are arranged in a circular fashion, handing off from rent boy to sailor to handyman to student, and finally to the Hollywood movie producer, who brings it back to the lowest rung on the social ladder, the rent boy.

As a series of brief sketches so there isn’t much the actors can do to flesh out their characters, besides get their kit off. Instead, the acting depends on quickly establishing power structures and the moments when these flip to reveal one or the other’s true desire: money, influence, security. Sometimes love. Stewart Dunseith as The Actor manages to infuse fun and depth into what is supposedly the shallowest character, and he gets all the best lines, but the script doesn’t grant much. The play is much more concerned with nudging the envelope of sexual politics. This hinges on The Teenager, a minor who’s queer but vulnerable to the predatory men around him. The kid knows what he wants, but is it acceptable he should have it when it subjects him to the will of the adults who use him? Seduction also pinpoints the emptiness of anonymous sex, and the choice for the gay community between freedom from consequences and responsibilities, and the stability of commitment and love. The stigmas of the 80s and 90s have moved on, or at least evolved to allow a continuing search for happiness, and the focus now is on acknowledging the value of real relationships with actual human beings.

On the other hand, the show is also quite silly, full of witty lines, and hot dudes with nothing on. I might have been the only one concerned with all these issues. Everybody else might have just been having a good time. That, I think, was all part of the Seduction.

Doddering old king Lear retires and divides his realm between his three daughters based on how effusively they can profess their love. Goneril and Regan happily spout sweet nothings but Cordelia offers only a salty statement of duty because love cannot be reduced to mere words. The king, always rash but now descending into senility, banishes her without dowry. However, when dad tries to go live with his kids, along with his personal retinue of a hundred unwashed, hard-drinking, heavy-eating, belching, farting knights, the cold-hearted daughters turn him away citing tight budgets. Possibly they also didn’t have enough towels and air fresheners. Thus stripped of his overblown dignity and rapidly losing the royal marbles, the king is reduced to wandering the wilderness with his fool and the mad Tom of Bedlam.
History, legend and fairy tale blend, along with the boundaries between madness and despair in Shakespeare’s tragedy, and the Royal Shakespeare Company reflect this by blurring the visual themes of the play. Costumes range in periodicity from mediaeval furred robes to WWI army uniforms to Victorian evening wear. For lighting we have burning braziers and torches, bronze chandeliers and industrial age pendants, modern flourescent tubes. Shakespeare by way of Time Bandits.

Everything crackles, fizzes, threatens to collapse. The set is fairly bare save for the backdrop, a wall of rusted, jagged sheet metal, corrupt and disintegrating. Scenes bleed into one another with actors remaining after their speeches are done while the next act populates the stage around them.

This is a relatively fun and funny Lear. Director David Farr, Greg Hicks as the king, and Darrell D’Silva as an oafish, boorish and yet charming Earl of Kent manage to wring some wonderful and surprising humour out of the least expected corners. And Sophie Russell as the Fool (apparently a last minute change from Kathyrn Hunter) is comical but somehow also the only one with any real gravitas. As Lear descends into madness her fool effectively becomes the king’s serving intelligence, his last vestige of dignity.

This lightness of touch—welcome in a three hour play— also weakens the sense of drama. There are few moments of real power. Only the blinding of the Earl of Gloucester conveys any sense of horror and unfairness of the world, and only the the amazing scene of Lear and the fool in the crashing storm creates an image which lingers in the mind after the play is done.

A Lear for the 21st century, then—frazzled, fractured, and everybody’s broke—but also unfocused, a bit overwhelmed by a multitude of influences.

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