The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 51

OBSERVER SUNDAY 29 JULY 1990 51 srnmDt II iji i a vi Shakespeare's kings take to the road Kate Kellaway asks Brian Cox and Ian McKellen about their roles as Lear and Richard III in the Royal National Theatre's new touring company, launched at the South Bank last week. IAN MCKELLEN looks fit and sportily dressed; his spectacles swing on a chain a fierce but elegant prop with which to submit his new role, Richard III, to rigorous scrutiny. Brian Cox looks rather unfit weighed down by a long grey beard that has taken him six months to grow. His hair spills down his shoulders. He looks ready to take on King Lear.

Richard III is directed by Richard Eyre, King Lear by Deborah Warner. The Royal National Theatre's newly-formed touring company perform in both productions. McKellen plays Kent in Lear, Cox plays Buckingham in Richard III. 'We've had 15 weeks of says Cox. 'We began with Lear and moved extremely slowly.

Then we did four weeks on Richard and moved extremely fast. It was schizophrenic. Our lighting man, Jean Kalman he's French described it as like having two mistresses on the same day. Ian would say to me: "Isn't Lear going well?" I'd say: "We've done good work on If good work is to yield any single result, McKellen hopes it will be to make the audience take Richard III seriously. He does not agree with those who see him as 'a stage villain who should be played for laughs'.

Nor does he see Richard as conspicuously disabled as he was in Antony Sher's electrifying performance. He does 1 not believe that Richard's deformity is a manifestation of evil. But he is at pains to anatomise Shakespearean villainy and to respect its various parts. This king is a 'bottled spider' who must have his legs labelled. Richard III is a villain because McKellen checks the points off from a list of notes he is an expert liar; and, like Iago, he does not lie to the audience.

He is fuelled by hatred, elated by deceit. His good qualities are intelligence, wit and bravery, but they are perverted when 'put to the service of his villainy'. Shakespeare wrote Richard III as a young man for the Burbages in their theatre in Islington. McKellen believes it 'stands alone', quite distinct from the Henry VI plays which Shakespeare wrote for the Rose Theatre. While McKellen tempers the jokes in Richard III, Brian Cox uncovers the comedy in King Lear: 'There is as much of Spike Milligan and Tony Hancock in Lear as of Laurence Olivier and Michael Cox discusses Lear in an engagingly homely fashion and a grumbling Dundee accent.

He talks about him as if he were a difficult but lovable neighbour. Lear has 'certain unpaid bank accounts'. He has family problems too. 'He doesn't know how to handle his three girls. He has at once indulged them, and at the same time deprived them.

If you can't get your children right, you certainly can't get your kingdom The last Shakespearean hero Cox played was Titus. 'I like Lear more than Titus, although I had a sneaking 'Shakespeare's soldiers all have the soldier home from the warsPhotographs by NeilLibbert. voice, combining languor and liking for Titus. The thing I didn like about Titus is that he is a McKellen is obsessed with Shakespeare's soldiers: Othello, Coriolanus, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Richard. He asks: 'What is it that goes so terribly wrong when soldiers are idle? What happens when a great soldier like Richard returns from the war and suddenly finds himself out of a job? What happens when he finds people are talking to women? Shakespeare's soldiers all have terrible relationships with three girls': Brian Cox as Lear.

Different faces of the National character McKellen says: 'I helped to design the costume but I am not wearing it For McKellen the hardest thing about playing Richard III is combining the different strands of his personality. 'All the strands needed a play of their own and eventuallv thev got one. These roles are taking their toll on both men. McKellen says he has not been able to sleep until six in the morning and then wakes up 'speaking, speaking, speaking'. He addresses the remark to the floor in his inimitable deep temperamental proclivities, indicates clearly how a political machiavel, shuttling expertly among the Three Estates, turns political despot.

It is a chilling progress, clearly marked at all stages and fully expressed in the overall staging. Army uniforms are exchanged for tyrannical black shirts and boots for the Lord Mayor's reception, another brilliant sequence in which rhetoric is suborned at a microphone on a cantilevered lift and McKellen descends to his destiny while his good right arm a rapidly efficient instrument for buckling on and lighting up creeps of its own volition to a sinister salute. The lingering fetish of medieval pageantry Li the ceremonials of monarchy is as potent today as in the 1930s. Hence the surprise appearance of the new king in glittering crown and decorum. Cox, meanwhile, has been stormed by Lear.

During the half hour offstage before the-Dover scene, he takes a P5 hke a "uu ay" a u. On stage he asks himself: 'What am I doing this The answer, he thinks, is 'something to do with energy; giving my energy to the audience for an evening, saying to them: How does that, seem? Does that go anywhere for you, for an black hose beneath a strange, idealised portrait of a naked McKellen on his pale white horse, his Surrey with the king on top, for which the kingdom is finally on offer. At the heart of this play is a struggle for the heart of England, a feet triumphantly realised and expressed by actor and production. The two lead actors save all their fire-power for the main roles. An important postscript to the enterprise is that Cox's Buckingham is.

a strangely muted, low-key performance buried in a beard and monocle, while McKellen's Kent, a part for which he is entirely unsuited, comes across merely as a nodding simpleton. But there is plenty of time for improvement. The productions play in the Lyttelton until 1 September, then visit Tokyo, Hamburg, Milan, Madrid, Paris and Cairo, with local stop-offs at Nottingham, Cardiff, Leeds, Belfast and Cork, before returning to the South Bank in the New Year. Michael Coveney reviews the new King Lear and Richard HI at the Lyttelton Theatre. Jeffrey picking his way lightly through doomed Clarence one night and the blinded Gloucester the next; or to see.

comparative newcomers such as' Derek Hutchinson (Warner's Kent in her Kick Theatre Lear) and Hakeem Kae-Kazim tested in the first play by Catesby and Tyrrell, and in the second, on a higher plane, by the rival sons of Gloucester. The women are strong, particularly in Richard where Joyce Redman queens it royally as the Duchess of York and Clare Hig-gins's Elizabeth gives as good as she gets from McKellen in the magnificently pitched wooing by proxy interlude. Higgins is equally fine as Regan, savagely differentiating herself from Susan Engel's superior Goneril. One notes with pleasure the contribution to both plays of such stalwarts as Bruce He doesn 7 hiow how to handle his THE TWO productions could not be more different. For Richard III, director Richard Eyre and designer Bob Crowley have set the ship of state in a vast steel container and have brilliantly reactivated the Shakespearean tensions between British royalty and politicians by invoking the rise of fascism in the 1930s.

For King Lear, director Deborah Warner and designer Hildegard Bechtler, less controversially, and in marked contrast to the current RSC abstract inventions, create a brutally simple environment for tragedy, with timeless costume, two great tarpaulins, one white, one brown, and a 'rough theatre' storm drummed up on live percussion at Lear's command. Both productions will bring credit to the RNT. For the second time, Ian McKellen has formed a company within the National, and not the least pleasure of this double-headed project is to encounter an established actor like Peter Quest Jann Parry meets Yoshi Oida, an actor of few words. YOSHI OIDA sees his life as a voyage of perpetual discovery, navigating a wider ocean since he moved from Japan to Europe 22 years ago. Much of the journey since then has been in the company of Peter Brook, whose Paris-based Centre Internationale de Recherche Theatrale he joined in 1970.

He travelled with Brook's troupe through West Africa in 1972 in search of a universal form of theatre. He has performed in The Mqhabharata around the world; and he has made his own show, Voyages a Guide to the Other World, which he performs at the Almeida from Tuesday to 18 is Purchase, David Collings and Richard O'Callaghan. The sense of company pays off particularly in the set-pieces: Richard's nightmare on the eve of battle is the play's final social ritual, with healing renewal signalled in Lady Anne's dance with the saviour Richmond. Eyre's production throughout is strictly regimented, with such telling elisions as the young prince's 'some little train', punningly represented as an electric toy, heralding the young duke's full-dress, red carpet arrival at a London station. Warner's control is over figures in space; although the storm and hovel scenes tend towards the pedestrian, the overriding impression is of a hospital ward littered with aghast visitors.

For while Cox's Lear is undoubtedly moving and Oida first performed a version of Bardo Thodol in ancient Japanese. He has since tried it in French and in a wordless version with the African dancer, Elsa Wolliaston. At the Almeida, he and Elsa will speak a minimal text in English: he plays a recently dead man and she is both his wife and the visions he sees in the after-life. The Tale of the Chameleon is his adaptation of a West African (Peulh) legend about the beginning of the world. Oida's companions on a journey through the desert are Koffi Koko, a dancer from Benin, and a musician, Pape Thiam.

Oida likes working with African artists because they draw instinctively on the kind of energy he wants, instead of being bound by words and technique, as European actors tend to be. for an invisible theatre Ian McKellen is, bv his own account, a cerebral and organised actor. He confesses that he still feels on the outside of Richard. But, he says generously, Cox 'inhabits' his roles. Cox owns that he finds it essential to let parts play him: 'Abandon hope all ye who enter he says.

The hardest thing in Lear is 'dealing with the pain' of the part and marrying it with absurdity. Cox argues that you have to depend partly on your fellow actors, allow them to play the part for you. Cox used to be ambitious epitaph, with a shrug and a grimace; the RSC, in contrast, finds lyricism and example in the Fool's patter. The CoxWarner RSC Titus Andron-icus was a searing essay on the transforming emotional properties of grief, and an outline for a Lear they have now avoided. Cox is both wonderful and curiously dull.

It is something to do with a lack of spiritual and intellectual energy at the core of this production. Quite the opposite is the case with Richard. Following Antony Sher's exorcism of Olivier in the role, McKellen freely proceeds to both undercut and re-define the monster as a ramrod-backed, glacial officer with Sandhurst vowels and a suppressed Journeyman: Yoshi Oida. inexplicable. He draws comparisons with Noh theatre, which requires great performers, otherwise the audience goes to sleep; or with abstract painters, some of whom can only show pigment while others go beyond the canvas.

He likens his spare use of text in performance to words LAUGHTERHOUSE, HARVEY KASS BRUCE HYMAN MOISTEN Scarry 4. and vain until a friend told him to stop worrying about being a star and concentrate on trying to be a good actor. he says, 'as I wander around in my gear, I think: this is definitely not a pulling part. You're covered in shit or flowers and you've got torn underwear and long straggling hair. But one of the great lessons about these roles is that when vanity is stripped away you get at the In Richard III there is much to satisfy vanity: smart military uniform, glorious coronation garb, silver armour.

deformity: no hint of the warped spine until he marches off in profile, and the withered arm is only brandished at the turncoat Hastings as a sign, at last, of mental degeneration. Like his RSC Iago, McKellen 's Richard is a brilliant soldier in a new setting. Trevor Nunn's detailed and animated Cyprus scenes in Othello, which extolled the power of positive anachronism in the American Civil War, are clearly Eyre's model as he stunningly locates the long, meandering scenes of political in-fighting first in the dining room of Queen Elizabeth (evening dress, cigarettes, candles, curses over the soup) and later in the cabinet office at Westminster. Sher's sensational Richard operated in a nebulous medieval void; McKellen, whose performance is perfectly tailored to his written on a conceptual painting. They provide an extra layer of interpretation as well as a guide, a story.

He has learnt from Peter Brook how important storytelling can be in the theatre. He is still learning from Brook: otherwise, he says, he would long ago have set up on his own. He has written a book, Floating Actor, about his experiences since he first played Ariel in 1968. A cycle is nearing completion because Brook is once again directing The Tempest. This time, Oida, now 56, will be playing the wise old counsellor, Gonzalo.

(The production will come to Glasgow in October). We watched different coloured soils being mixed like poster-paints for The Tempest floor in Brook's theatre, the Bouffes du Nord. Oida wished that the Almeida was able to provide him with real desert sand for The Tale of the Chameleon; but he is happy to leave it to the imagination. present 1 II August. This will be the first time he has brought two hour-long pieces together in one programme: The Tibetan Book of the Dead and The Tale of the Chameleon.

The first is solemn and mysterious, the second light and funny, a combination typical of the classical Japanese theatre in which he trained. He has been working on different ways of staging Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead) since 1975. The book a guide to the various stages of enlightenment through which a person must pass before being freed from reincarnation. Oida says that it is also a account of the 'after death' experience: the vision of a tunnel with a white light at the end, the sense of floating above one's body, the reluctance to return to it. vocally extraordinary the variations on a strangulated Celtic whine are endless the performance is primarily one of busy playfulness subsiding quietly into static, granite stoicism and simple fear.

After John Wood's exhilarating explorations in his ascent to madness at Stratford-upon-Avon, the effect is earth-bound. Wood dreaded the wheelchair; Cox is in it from the off, careering on with party hats and favours before switching comically to 'our darker purpose'. Hunched and nimble, bearded like a prehistoric caveman, Cox is a figure of pathos before he starts. Thus David Bradley's poignantly acidic Fool delivers his lines as an extended Elsa Wolliaston says that he challenges her to explore, to question the reason for a gesture, to find simpler ways of doing things. A degree of improvisation remains in performance: Elsa has to make a baby out of a piece of cloth and each night the baby is different.

The gesture needs to be spontaneous so that the audience sees the baby, not the movement. Oida calls this 'invisible theatre'. The performer's technique becomes transparent, giving the spectators' imagination free rein. Visual theatre, packed with action and spectacle, can be exciting; but invisible theatre has no limits. The onus is on the performer; and Oida readily acknowledges that no amount of technique can compensate for genius, which is Credit Cords 071-734 1 166 wn UDC ATI MfliiilJI Mv 741 9999071 2407200 BOOKING (sMm NOW CO-STARRING TONY' AWARD WINNER JANE ALEXANDER MUST CLOSE SEPT 8 PRIOR TO BROADWAY TRANSFER 1 maxim gorky 3flf ritafilB nflpii sf iRoiyal InSurancel SUNDAY 5 AUGUST- SATURDAY 1 1 AUGUST The Barbican Centre is the place to with much of the entertainment ABSOLUTELY FREE! For full details and free leaflet, ring: 071-638 4141 ext.218 piytemngy street i- rautid rfiucft much more.

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