First Encounters: King Lear – Percy Shurmer Academy, Birmingham

Writer: William Shakespeare

Director: Justine Themen

The RSC’s First Encounters is as vaulting in ambition like no others in their previous ken, reaching out to some anticipated young and not so young audiences of 24000 or more. A first, even for them, is to take this eighty-minute adaptation as far flung as the Isle of Wight and the Scilly Isles. Funding from Arts Council England, a make-or-break windfall given the onerous demands of travel, accommodation and not least salaries for this exceptional, and heavy weighting towards youth, ensemble cast. The Message, there always has to be The Message.  Director Justine Themen’s mission statement is worth quoting –

‘There is so much wisdom in the observations of young people, but, as with Lear’s Fool, they are so often dismissed by the adults around them. We chose to put on King Lear to reflect what we were hearing from young people as we went round the country speaking to them – their preoccupation with the inequity of the current system …. In preparing for the production, we are back speaking to them to ask them how we need to do things differently to Lear in order to create the more equitable world that they want to live in. Their ideas will be reflected in a new epilogue to be delivered by the Fool. The idea is that the epilogue will bring hope, and also encourage young people to act on their own ideas.’

The original text has had some judicious abridgements, but the raw, core power of the verse and its delivery pulls no punches – though poisons and daggers are manifestly less discreet. Notwithstanding some serious ants in the pants and numbing derrières after being sat on the hall floor for the long afternoon, the kids are keen to join in with the rhyming couplet commissioned Epilogue by former Birmingham Poet Laureate, Jasmine Gardosi, with input from children at host school Percy Shurmer Academy.

Fool, an outstanding take on this most demanding, not least, trickiest of roles, comes from Nkhanise Phiri; she likewise ties the heart-strings up playing Cordelia tighter than steel hawsers in a strangling tempest: a distilled quart of volatile nitro-glycerine-like talent decanted into a hair-triggered petite pint pot. Look out for her. She skips and skirts about the crocodile lines of entering youngsters, eliciting an understandable,’ Oh, thanks a lot for winding the kids up even more!’ from the shepherding, busy staff who excelled themselves this afternoon. For added ambience, there is the timeless and ubiquitous aroma of school dinners. Not to worry, a bit of eye-gouging will soon bring them order. (Memories of jam and tapioca might jolt the more mature reader?) King Lear as a first and exceptional close encounter of the best kind for Years 4,5,6. Experiencing The Bard goes up to eleven: tapping into such young minds has great expectations.

Fool’s antics literally take on the meme of a basket case on account of her wicker-work head-piece – and of course, her teddy bear. One wonders what take on pantos Shakespeare would have conjured. The ensemble cast enters with a cacophony of percussion and the vulgar familiarity of a raucous slide-trombone. The grizzly bear giant of Oliver Senton’s Lear, his rough woven, woolly cape serendipitously coloured to match the impeccably uniform dressed gawping young audience, sees a massive canvas map literally unfold of his soon-to-be-dissected kingdom and the ensuing sycophancy, hypocrisy and carnage that it entails. Leona Allen and Vigs Otite as Goneril and Regan respectively, are a pair enough to have the Scylla and Charybdis regarded as lightweights. Their later cuckolding embrace of Edmund (Lee Drage’s debut RSC gig) had the kids utterly bemused, slightly uncomfortable and sharing sick-bag mimed moments with their neighbours. Job done there.

The kids didn’t particularly get thrown by the role changes the actors took on and as for Michelle Moran’s studied Gloucester being a woman being a bloke – well, who’s to say anyway these days. Seen through the kids’ perspective, the crucial device of contrived letters of falsehood and incrimination, might have been somewhat confusing though possibly for teenage audiences the capacity of malevolent messages through social media would make for post-performance Q&As rich pickings. Each Act is billboarded with legends such as ‘The Daughters Take Control’, ‘Lear Goes Mad’, ‘Cordelia Leads An Army’ and such.

There’s a cheeky side-stepping the fourth wall with Devon Modha’s Edgar slipping into a faux Brummie street-stray beggar role explaining to the kids the concept of penury. ‘I will preserve myself, and am bethought/To take the basest and most poorest shape/That ever penury in contempt of man/Brought near to beast.’ Act 2, Scene 3.

The ‘Lear Goes Mad’ banner segues into a surreal maelstrom of percussive instruments augmented by synthesised, discordant underscored pre-recorded sound effects. And damnibly effective they are with Lear’s climactic, apocalyptic, ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks.’ As we see the awful juxtaposition of ‘Poor Tom’ Edgar’s alter-persona affecting madness as we witness Lear’s actual mental downfall. 

And how are they going to show  9, 10 & and 11-year-old kids the grotesque apotheosis of evil with Gloucester’s eye gouging? Judicious editing, and rightly so, glides over the Play’s opening scenes where he boasts about the illicit conception of his bastard son, Edmund. Hubris rarely takes any prisoners. Though its consequences can often be eye-openers, as it were. Full on for RSC not sanitising the dreadful scene, though subtle, if such a word can be match to this horrific episode, use of non-bloody make-up serves sufficiently well to mark its outcome.

Lear, gently now asleep, is taken away on a handbarrow. Soon to return wearing a rustic-fashioned straw-crown, a mockery of his once majestic prowess but equally a consequence totem of his catastrophic decisions exploited with callous advantage by his supposed favoured daughters – now too late to appreciate the humbling humanity of Cordelia’s honesty and devotion. The interpreted battle tableau is shrewdly and economically realised. Slow motion formation marching compounds the impending gravitas of the despicable villains bringing about their inevitable self-destruction, set against subtle, and not quite so, machine-gun rattle. Incongruous, anachronistic certainly, but grimly effective and apposite. It is shrewd director’s licence that has Lear present the death of Cordelia by carrying her pastel-hued yellow costume and laying on the hand cart. To be in the mind of these kids watching this would be worth a sane King’s ransom more than either Midas or Croesus could ever imagine.

And so to The Epilogue – the moral thrust being that each and every individual can steer their destiny and that of sympathetic others in the direction of what is good. ‘Speak what you feel, not what you are expected to say. We do, we do have the power to steer our own futures.’ Given the contemporary pernicious bias towards herd mentality and self-righteous assumptions of being on the right side of history, what’s not to like about that maxim? Barnstorming stuff indeed.

On tour until 12 December 2025.