| KING LEAR with Patrick Page in DC |
| Last Edit: singleticket 11:24 pm EDT 04/07/23 |
| Posted by: singleticket 11:21 pm EDT 04/07/23 |
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| Simon Godwin's production of KING LEAR at DC's Shakespeare Theatre Company is certainly the most engrossing production of the play I have ever seen but also surprisingly the most gentle. As in Godwin's other considerations of Shakespeare that I've seen there is a deep reading of the play that bears surprising results. Tonight Shakespeare's play of humanity at its bloody worse revealed itself to be a kind of kaleidoscopic garden of all of Shakespeare's plays rolled into one. The evening was surprisingly funny throughout with moments flashing by that could have been from Shakespeare's comedies and then romances where love has a chance to express itself in the Green World and then back again to the horror of the royal court and its power battles to the death and then suddenly back again to tenderness. It was dizzying but beautifully sustained and most of all moving. No one actor better expressed Godwin's take on the play than Patrick Page whose skills as an actor moved seamlessly from full throttled poetic declaration to a plain and unaffected naturalism as Lear journeyed from tyrant to a slow stripping away of his power with a simultaneous slow emergence of his humanity. The production has its flaws, the cast has more than a few weak links, the costumes and sets are un-chic but nothing that gets in the way of the remarkably sustained beauty and power of this production. |
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