INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL
King Lear
at the Josephine Louis Theater, Northwestern University
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Shakespeare understood folktales. Either that or he just absorbed them more completely than anybody this side of Ovid. Shakespeare’s plays not only indulge the folk taste for blood, they turn on the folk theme of disguise. In fact, they make disguise a starting point for some of the most disquieting explorations of identity in all our literature.
And also for some of the lightest, sweetest, tenderest goofs on same in all our literature. You can see exactly what I mean at the International Theatre Festival this week, where British whiz kid Kenneth Branagh and his Renaissance Theatre Company are performing in repertory one of the Bard’s most disquieting explorations with one of his tenderest goofs: King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
With the substance of his identity gone, Lear quickly lapses into a delirium of shifting personas. Very much as in Calvino’s folktales, Evil assumes the beautiful disguise of loving children while Virtue’s made to take on progressively meaner and more horrific masks. Lear himself becomes a kind of poet of disguise, as his pain is transformed into a madness in which every role melts into the next and the only indisputable identity is attained through death.
No: with her Louise Brooks bob and her powdered face, Shira is a ghost of European decadence. What Herbst longs for is the moribund, reactionary culture he left behind. More, he longs for death itself. This is made horribly clear when leprosy eats away Shira’s face and hair, leaving her without her Weimar mask. Revealing the skull beneath the skin. And Herbst decides to stay with her. Herbst kisses her and confirms his devotion. Literally makes love to Death.
