Gordon Jones, The Telegram
June 16, 2014
Returning to the Stratford Festival to review for The Telegram was a no-brainer, since six Newfoundland artists are involved in productions this year. So, last week I took in five plays in three days.
First up was “King Lear,” the most savagely brutal of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, featuring an aging king who yields his power and responsibilities to two ungrateful daughters, a nobleman who gouges out the eyeballs of another peer and a psychopath who casually orders the hanging of Lear’s youngest and favorite daughter.
“Hamlet,” “Othello,” “Macbeth” are simply stations on the way. “King Lear” is Shakespeare’s tragic terminus.
Directed by festival director, Antoni Cimolino, the Elizabethan-costumed production is spare and bleak, full of darkness pierced by light. Rejected by his elder daughters, Goneril and Regan, and fleeing to the barren moor and into an epic storm, Lear runs mad. Colm Feore’s Lear is compellingly believable, both as a headstrong monarch and as a witless outcast, finally and sadly coming to recognize his own faults and guilt, and dying of a broken heart, with the dead Cordelia in his arms. […continued]
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