By PETER CALDER
Rethinking the plays would doubtless have pleased the Bard if it lent them new life or found new sense in familiar texts. But it is hard to conclude that this re-gendered King Lear does either.
Leah as a smothering, manipulative mother of three daughters has a certain appeal, particularly
in a post-colonial, Pacific culture where matriarchy and patriarchy have always jostled for control.
But it soon becomes obvious that such tinkering touches only on part of Lear, and not the part that makes it the awful masterpiece it is. This is a work which drags us to the brink of what it is to be human and dares us to stare into the abyss.
But Leah in Geraldine Brophy's otherwise courageous and competent reading is never "every inch a Queen".
On the heath, she is too nimble and lucid; her madness has no majesty in it. Elsewhere, her character seems at times like a fretful, petulant mother in a classy soap opera, and her tormentors shrink to fit.
Thus the fiendish Goneril (Cameron Rhodes) and Regan (Tim Balme) roll their eyes in an exasperation which is faintly comic. It's intentional, perhaps, but jarring; the metaphysical menace is absent.
Retooling the text makes for its own problems, and not just because "lord" and "lady" or "son" and "daughter" scan differently.
Some of the best poetry goes (the early "into her womb convey sterility" curse was the saddest loss for me) and the gender switches become distracting (as when Regan intervenes in his wife's fight over the bloodied Gloucester) rather than illuminating.
Meanwhile, the mind boggles at the thinking that made Tom o' Bedlam into a leather-strapped hooker.
All that said, the cast - with the exception of Ian Hughes' prosaic Cordelius - makes a good fist of things.
Peter Hayden's Fool (his fevered riot of fabric is the best of Tracey Collins' excellent costumes) is a standout, and Robyn Malcolm's Kent is a performance as honest as the character.
In sum, Leah casts new light on Lear, but only fitfully, sputteringly and at the play's peripheries. In centre stage, it takes a titanic work close to the ordinary.
