showbiz

Lear’s 3 deadly dull daughters

BY THOR KAH HOONG
January 24, 2016

Goneril (Christina Orow, right) and Cordelia (Marina Tan, left) confronting a disposal problem. – Pic courtesy of KLPAC, January 24, 2016.Women do not come off well as complex or strong beings in Shakespeare’s oeuvre... with a couple of exceptions.

In the comedies they are just pretty Barbie dolls, plot devices to propel fluffy romances from initial thwarted or denied love, through disguises and mistaken identities, to happily ever after.

In the darker scripts, they are wispy, clueless victims – Desdemona choking on Othello’s jealousy; Ophelia becoming a water-logged bloat.

Okay, Kate puts up a fight in “The Taming of the Shrew” but the match is fixed – the title is the spoiler: she’s a shrew and she will be tamed, she will submit to the “merits” of matrimony and male superiority.

When marital bliss does not accommodate ambition, when a woman wants to be more than a trophy wife, then she must be like Lady Macbeth, calling on the spirits to “unsex” her, filling her “from the crown to the toe top full of direst cruelty”, so that she can, while a baby is “smiling in my face/Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums/And dash’d the brains out.” Charming!

Then there's the dysfunctional family of King Lear.

Of his three daughters, the two elder, Goneril and Regan, flattered their father to deceive, to inherit, exasperated over their father hanging on to the pomp and circumstance of relinquished power, driving him out into the wilds, out of his mind.

Truth be told! The youngest, Cordelia, contributed to his cracked mind with her priggish, unbending moral rectitude, a virtue that was as unyielding as a jihadist’s theology.

The idea of celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death can only have been spawned in the mind of a British Council marketer.

Fundamentally, the idea is vacuous – there is no significant difference between the 399th year of his death and the 400th.

I do not expect, on April 23, there will be a host of descendants at the Holy Trinity Church in Avon, holding a memorial mass and laying flowers on his grave.

More likely a few tour buses delivering Asian tourists, wondering why they are visiting a cemetery instead of shopping for t-shirts and souvenirs.  

But if one must be inspired by Willy, then it was a good idea of writer Uen Ng to script the marbled hearts of Lear’s daughters, veined with avarice, deceit, wary jealousy, to suggest that Cordelia is no paragon of love.

It may sound like a crazy idea for Uen to rope in Shakespeare as a co-writer, but if any writer has the testicular audacity and ability to do this it would be Uen.

Heck, the crazy man’s idea of an education was to go to Australia and study medieval languages, and I don’t mean their sub-literate baby talk appending of “ie” to almost everything from “footie” to “barbie” to “brekkie.”

Forget the plots. Shakespeare was not too hot on them. The comedies and romances generally followed a formula of switched/mistaken identities, disguises. The tragedies have gaps in logic, and in their sprawl, characters with barely explained motivation.

No matter. It’s the words, their flow, their aptness, that has lasted the ages.

Kids of my generation (probably not just in Malaysia, but in all the countries that constituted the British Commonwealth at its fullest extent) had elocution contests where high-pitched unbroken voices pleaded with the audience to regard the quality of mercy drenching people, or trying to plead with their fellow Romans for an organ donation of an ear.

As a kid, I used phrases that, if asked, I would have said came from Enid Blyton, Dumas, etc. Phrases like “vanish into thin air,” “will not budge an inch,” “to thine own self be true,” “flesh and blood,” “foul play,” “be cruel to be kind,” “foregone conclusion” and one that was a favourite of all kids, “blinking idiot” – all these phrases that have passed into common usage or become clichés, all were first coined by Willy.

(Trivia for literature students:  the phrase “remembrance of things past”, too. Shame on you Proust, but if you must steal a title, I guess you might as well pick from one of the best.)

If Uen has an ear for the rhythms, the ebb and flow of Shakespeare’s words, I wouldn’t know. What I know is that he has no ear for casting.

The tonal quality of the voice of one of the actresses was… a chipmunk stoned on nitrous oxide? I struggled much of last night, after attending the show, trying to find a more prosaic description, but that’s the best description I can come up with.

On the occasions she wanted to express strong emotions, the volume was upped till it was a screech scratching at the blackboard of my mind.

Another’s voice was so weak, it was lost every time she addressed the wings, and when she had to say two impassioned sentences, she was pushing for breath by the second sentence, usually delivering a fading dash of a mumble.

Compound this with the one-note presentation. Bad enough we have three talking heads on stage who must convey the emotions and weight of words of two writers, but whatever the subject, it didn’t seem to be sourced from any deep emotion. 

Dad is mad. Cool.

“I love him.” “He doesn’t love you.” Okay. 

“I didn’t mean to upset you.” (One, she did me, and two, the other actress didn’t look upset at all.)

An avowal of blood ties “You are my sister” is said with the same lack of inflection, stress as a more explosive (or should have been) “This is madness”.

It was three actresses chatting with each other, seemingly unaware of an audience that needed to be drawn into the intrigue and abrasive relations, and not helped by awful blocking that often had them speaking to each other across the width of the stage.

Maybe I was wrong to expect a catfight from three strong female characters, to expect an in-your-face-bitch scratch-fest. I’m not fond of melodrama, but there was no drama, just mellow.

Exemplified in Christina Orow’s body language.

She has the height and physical presence to dominate the stage, to be bitch eldest sister Goneril. Looking regal no problem.

But there was no tension in her body. General posture standing – relaxed, one leg slightly forward; arms folded or at the back. Seated – legs crossed, one arm draped over the back of the chair, languid. Comes in to find one sis dead. No tension visible. She dead? Cool. Maybe that’s how Uen saw the character – an ice queen.

Oh yes, there was a peak – a chair was thrown – but the moment was spoiled for me because the actress’ body signalled the move, and, sorry, a plastic chair has no gravitas, the thwack of plastic on wooden stage evoking my only smile of the night.

(Confession. For the first time I committed the cardinal sin of a reviewer and slipped away during the intermission. So please dismiss this piece if you’re an Arts fundamentalist. Blame it on a weak mind and body unable to take any more stretching on the rack of Garble and Gibberish.) – January 24, 2016.