The Low Countries. Jaargang 11

Film, Dance and Theatre

What's on an Old Man's Mind?
Luc Perceval's King Lear

In 1997-1998 the Flemish director Luk Perceval staged To War (Ten Oorlog), the stunning and fascinating version of Shakespeare's two tetralogies of history plays written by Tom Lanoye (see p. 176) in collaboration with the director himself. It was a major event in the recent theatre history of the Low Countries. Soon after its run in Flanders and The Netherlands, the production also achieved international renown: a German version entitled Schlachten! was produced at the Salzburg Festival and subsequently played in Hamburg. To War was the culmination and at the same time the end of an adventure on which Luk Perceval had set out in 1984 when, together with Guy Joosten, he founded the Blauwe Maandag Company. For a decade and a half this company, by combining a thorough exploration of dramatic texts with a strongly visual style, represented the best of what was to be seen in Flemish theatre. In 1998 it amalgamated with the Royal Dutch Theatre (kns) in Antwerp to form Het Toneelhuis with Perceval as artistic director, a post he will be holding until 2005. In many productions with both Blauwe Maandag and Het Toneelhuis Perceval has shown himself a highly idiosyncratic director, tirelessly searching for hidden levels of meaning in the dramatic material and with a particular preoccupation with the forces of family relationships.

It should therefore come as no surprise that he recently turned to Shakespeare's King Lear. It seems that the success of Schlachten! stimulated cooperation between Flemish and German theatre artists. For indeed, L. King of Pain, a radical rewriting of Shakespeare's tragedy, was jointly produced by the Antwerp-based Het Toneelhuis, Brugge 2002 (Bruges, European Cultural Capital 2002), Schauspielhannover and the Schauspielhaus Zürich, with a mixed cast of Flemish and German actors. The multilingual text was written by Peter Perceval, Klaus Reichert and Luk Perceval, the music by Bart Maris.

The set (designed by Katrin Brack) was dominated by a huge, gnarled, and significantly also uprooted tree placed centre stage. This impressive image obviously had symbolic overtones: the spectator associated it with Lear himself, but it also represented the force of Nature and evoked the tree of life. In the opening scene the family members gather around the tree. Gradually it becomes clear that the action is situated in an institution - a mental hospital or a home for the elderly - where L.'s family come to visit on him.

The adaptation focuses entirely on the main character, and its plot meticulously follows Shakespeare's to the extent that it traces Lear's madness. In L. King of Pain, however, L. is already demented from the beginning. Whereas in Shakespeare madness is part of a process of regeneration, Perceval shows a poignant picture of a man imprisoned in his own hallucinations, with no hope of redemption whatsoever.

The whole of Shakespeare's drama seems to take place in the mind of L., an old man who imagines himself to be King Lear. Around him two groups of characters can be distinguished. On the one hand there are L.'s daughters and their husbands, and on the other a group of inmates who go along completely with Lear's acting out of his imaginings. His family do this only to a certain extent. The daughters are Caroline, Stefanie and Yvon who respectively play the roles of Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. Except for Kent, who in Perceval's version is married to Cordelia, their husbands are given only a minor role. As in Shakespeare, here too Kent supports L. and struggles with him in an attempt to free him of his delusion. The other characters from King Lear reappear as the inmates in the home. One of them is Gloster, a friend of L. whose dark glasses remind the spectator of his blindness in the original play. His two sons, Mong the Bastard and Edgar, are presented as rather grotesque figures.

In Shakespeare's King Lear the theme of madness is penetratingly explored, not only through the poignant depiction of the different phases of Lear's collapse but also because Lear is accompanied by characters who themselves represent different forms of madness. Thus the Fool playfully confronts his master with the reality of his own foolishness and Edgar who pretends to be Poor Tom holds up a mirror of man as a ‘poor, bare, forked animal’.

In L. King of Pain, in which everything centres around L. and the other characters could even merely be voices in his head, the Fool and Edgar are an all but symbolic presence. The Fool is called ‘der Stumme’ and does not speak a single word. Perhaps silent acquiescence is the lesson he is teaching Lear. Also Edgar as Poor Tom fulfils the function he has in King Lear in a largely visual manner. While L. is raging in his madness Edgar, naked but for a loincloth, shins up the tree clinging to it like a ‘forked animal’. As in Shakespeare's play, this ‘king’ also undresses to regain his awareness of being but a humble human creature.

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Luc Perceval, L. King of Pain. Photo by Phile Deprez / courtesy of Het Toneelhuis.

Particularly moving is the scene in which the Fool helps L. to put on a patient's long shirt. To the characters accompanying L. Perceval also added a ‘Singer’, who almost seems to represent a split-off aspect of the Fool. In contrast to the latter's total silence, the Singer represents the sublimation of suffering in art.

Critics have sometimes objected to the improbability of the opening scene in Shakespeare's play, in which Lear divides his kingdom and sets up the love test for his daughters. By situating the action in L.'s imagination this difficulty is removed. But the adaptors have also provided a strong motivation by having L. refer to the recent death of his wife. In the course of the play he desperately calls on her several times. Perhaps Perceval was inspired by The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1605), the play which Shakespeare also used as a source for his tragedy. The loss of the mother/wife also accounts for L.'s ambiguous and even sexually coloured relationship with his daughters. At times L. seems to identify Yvon with her dead mother. This is particularly clear in the profoundly moving final scene where L., lying stretched out on the floor, presses Yvon's body to himself. Whereas in Shakespeare's play Cordelia is dead and Lear draws hope from the delusion that she still breathes, Perceval's L. imagines Yvon, who is alive, to be dead because of his identification of her with his wife.

This emphasis on L.'s longing for the mother/wife to some extent also explains the role of Gloster. In King Lear Gloster is the character who most explicitly voices a belief in the natural order of the universe. ‘Unnatural’ phenomena such as eclipses of the sun and moon are related to the unnatural behaviour of human beings. Taking his cue from this aspect of the figure of Gloster, Perceval tries to make him into a representative of the forces of Nature. Under his dressing-gown this Gloster is wearing women's clothes. In To War too Perceval introduced a drag queen, La Falstaff, who united the roles of mother, Madonna and lover in one character. Like La Falstaff, Gloster, who in Shakespeare's play takes a role mirroring Lear's, is clearly meant to represent the female values, which L. may have repressed in the past.

The inmates of the institution where he lives reflect the role of the knights in King Lear. In the second act of the play he and his friends put a long plank on their knees so that they are sitting close together at a table. They are given an orange and try to cheer up the melancholy L. This is the beginning of a lengthy bout of horseplay which eventually gets out of hand and leads to the inmates' revolt against L's daughters. Turned out of the house, L. is now entirely at the mercy of the elements. In this desperate situation he calls on his ‘moederke’ (‘mummy’). As in Shakespeare's play, the core of the drama unfolds on the heath, in Nature, where L. becomes aware of his human nature and his mortality. Towards the end he asks to be visited by an angel, ‘der mir sagt, dat ik träume / Denn wir sind doch nur träume / In den Köpfen der Götter’. The insight

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which L. has gained here reminds us of Prospero's wisdom: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on / And our little life is rounded by a sleep.’

As the short quotation from the play demonstrates, its language is a curious mix of Dutch and German. L's daughters at times also speak French, which indicates their alienation from their environment. Again, the mix of languages in some parts of To War may have provided the model for this. But practical circumstances - the international context and the mixed cast of Flemish and German actors - are likely to have led to this choice. Yet both writers and actors seem to have achieved a natural fluency, while the alienating effect which necessarily results from the use of different languages is in keeping with the strange introverted world of the main character.

A considerable part of the credit for the production's impact must go to the German actor Thomas Thieme's stunning performance as L. He is a helpless, depressed man, pathetically angling for some affection from his daughters. But in his stubbornness and aggression he achieves an impressive grandeur. His fits of anger are overwhelming outbursts of madness which are in strong contrast with the long silences and the often all but muttered passages. Thieme's performance is fascinating throughout the show, but his depiction of the storm must be singled out here. While imitating the sound of the wind by whistling, he keeps banging the long wooden board on the floor until it splits into pieces. Nature unleashed coincides completely with the desperate L. himself.

Clearly L. King of Pain is a radical adaptation of Shakespeare's play, which starts from a specific view of the character of Lear. Shakespeare's most comprehensive tragedy seems to be reduced to the case of an old man who is becoming demented. For all that, it is remarkable that the play's psychological development is largely followed and that most characters also find their place in the adaptation. The cosmic scale and the effect of the double plot in King Lear may have disappeared in the adaptation, but the depiction of the demented old man surrounded by children who have grown alienated from him speaks to the contemporary spectator. Moreover, L. King of Pain derives its impact from the persistent echoes of Shakespeare's play. King Lear is always present in the background and to a certain extent shapes the play. The role of Edgar for instance is a very limited one, but the sight of the naked figure in the tree immediately brings to mind ‘poor Tom’ from King Lear. The bunches of flowers which the daughters give their father but which get scattered in the ensuing chaos reflect the image of the mad king ‘fantastically dressed with wild flowers’. I have already mentioned the dark glasses of Gloster. By means of these details the original play constantly resonates in the action and gives depth to it. With the additional strength of the symbolic setting, the case of L. thus develops into a poignant rendering of the ‘condition humaine’. And so the performance which takes place entirely around or in front of the uprooted tree of life gradually unfolds with the force of a compelling ritual.

jozef de vos

Het Toneelhuis: Komedieplaats 18 / 2000 Antwerp / Belgium www.toneelhuis.be