The Gothic scale of Bruno Schwengl's set establishes the essentials of the Second Age Theatre Company production of King Lear: as flies to wanton boys, these characters are the sport of the gods - diminished by the physical world around them.
Lear insists he can control this world, and his madness increases as his control is challenged. Here dimension is everything - in what might otherwise seem like a fairly cursory reading of the play.
Lear is played by Alan Stanford with a full-voiced passion that affords little room for either pathos or wisdom. Mastery is Lear's creed, and Stanford commands the stage with unfaltering confidence. Stanford's direction has a strong shape, emphasised by Schwengl's medieval exaggeration of the modern costumes, and there is a glamour to his approach which, with Paul Keogan's lighting, brings immediacy to this ostensibly mysterious tragedy.
Dementia is not the only answer to the great "Why?" of this drama; it is in the coherent rendering of the other dysfunctional family, that of Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund, that the psychology of Shakespeare's symmetrical plotting makes sense. Robert O'Mahony is not only convincing as Gloucester but, with Simon O'Gorman and Robert Price as his rival sons, substantiates the written importance of this element of the play.
Sex and drugs animate Lear's daughters Regan and Goneril (to the hearty approval of what seemed to be every Leaving Cert candidate in Munster) - played well by Liz Schwarz and Jeananne Crowley, respectively. Emma Moohan's Cordelia, however, was petulant and seemed to deserve her banishment. This could be a result of the brisk pace set by Stanford and by the set, which swings into action with as much alacrity as the impressive cast, although it is a mistake to let Regan move an entire battlement with a touch of her hand.
King Lear is at The Market Place, Armagh today at 1 p.m. and 8 p.m. (028 37 521 820); at An Grianan, Letterkenny, on Friday and Saturday at 7.30 p.m., (tel: 074-23288) and at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, from February 26th to March 3rd at 1 p.m. and 7.30 p.m., tel: 01-6771717).
Cora Venus Lunny (violin), Irish Philharmonia/Rod Dunk
