STAGE REVIEW : STRATFORD ‘LEAR’ HAS A HURRICANE-FORCE LEAR

In “Twelfth Night,” the Stratford Festival Canada company ran obligingly through the routines of Shakespeare’s comedy. In “King Lear,” the company’s other offering at the Doolittle Theatre this week, there is some digging going on. I’ll take “King Lear.”

John Hirsch’s production is not immune from the general problem when “Lear” gets put on stage: the fact that it’s both such a long play and such an intense one. As usual, there’s a droop in attention between the storm scene and Lear’s reconciliation with Cordelia.

We also catch several members of the Stratford company speaking lines rather than thinking thoughts, either because they’ve been playing their roles too long (the production was part of last summer’s festival) or because they didn’t understand them to begin with. Benedict Campbell seems particularly buffaloed by the devious and ironic Edmund.

A “Lear” without an Edmund has problems. But not as many as a “Lear” without a Lear. That’s not the case here. Douglas Campbell plays him, with hurricane force.

This isn’t a realistic Lear. It’s a highly theatricalized one, to the point of being operatic. Campbell takes Lear’s great tirades like arias, building them until the theater is ringing with the richness of his beautifully tuned voice and then taking them back down to the range of mere impassioned speech.

Badly done, this would be ham acting, the kind of thing we laugh at in “The Dresser.” Well done, it takes those speeches into another range of expression, exactly suited to the dreadful yet exalted journey that Lear takes through the play. It’s never been so clear in the storm scene that Lear welcomes the thunder and lightning--that they embody precisely what’s going on in his head.

Campbell and Hirsch also have time for details. Even with the state of things between them clear, Lear wants to touch his evil daughters, Goneril (Patricia Collins) and Regan (Maria Ricossa). But either he can’t bring himself to do it, or they shiver in disgust and move away. The reconciliation with Cordelia (Seana McKenna) isn’t half as touching as these aborted ones.

In the big things and the small things, this is a major Lear. It is matched by Nicholas Pennell as Lear’s Fool. Pennell’s Malvolio is a one-note prig, but his Fool is a complete conception. One can’t absolutely define his relationship with his bullet-headed master, but it’s very nearly a blood tie and allows him to be astonishingly free in his criticism of Lear, like a shrewish wife with nothing more to lose.

Moreover, his jester’s weeds suggest the trappings of a mummy. (Chris Dyer designed the show, with Judy Peyton Ward as co-costumer). We can almost see him as an apparition, an embodiment of Lear’s soul. Yet he’s as real as anybody in Lear’s court. Playing away from pathos and tenderness, Pennell makes an indelible contribution to the role.

Elsewhere, the company is generally solid, living up to the verbal responsibilities of the play (one of the things that American actors have to learn from this company) if not always creating a vivid character.

Of Lear’s three daughters, it’s Collins’ Goneril who makes the clearest journey. (Evil improves her temper; it gives her scope.) Of the men, James Blendick has a nice irony as the gruff Kent; Richard McMillan has the right general spookiness as “Poor Tom” out on the heath, and Roger Forbes as the Duke of Albany clearly regrets having married into such a family of hellcats as Goneril and Regan.

Lewis Gordon makes a prosey Gloucester, but the pity is there in the scene where he gets his eyes put out, a scene that Hirsch stages without the usual torture apparatus--which makes it twice as disturbing. By now in the story, this sort of thing is happening every day.

As with “Twelfth Night,” the unit set (designed by Christina Poddubiuk) emulates Stratford’s thrust stage, while being contradicted by the Doolittle’s proscenium. That’s in the cards while touring. This “King Lear” was worth the trip.

‘KING LEAR’ Shakespeare’s tragedy, performed by Stratford Festival Canada at the Doolittle Theatre. Presented by UCLA Center for the Arts. Director John Hirsch. Designer Chris Dyer. Costumes co-designed Judy Peyton Ward. Tour scenic design Frank Holte, Chris Dyer. Unit set Christina Poddubiuk. Music and sound Stanley Silverman. Lighting Michael J. Whitfield. Assistant director Brian Rintoul. Fights supervised by John Broome. Stage manager Michael Shamata. Assistant stage managers Victoria Klein, Peter McGuire. Assistant lighting designer Elizabeth Asselstine. Sound realized by John Hazen. With Douglas Campbell, Patricia Collins, Maria Ricossa, Seana McKenna, Nicholas Pennell, James Blendick, Michael Shepherd, John Bourgeois, David Renton, Lewis Gordon, Richard McMillan, Benedict Campbell, Mervyn Blake, Roger Forbes, Colm Feore, Nolan Jennings, Ernest Harrop, Stephen Russell, Jefferson Mappin, Simon Bradbury, Brian Paul, William Dunlop, Brent Strait, Charles Kerr, Howard Rosenstein, Kelly Bricker, Julie Khaner, Jefferson Mappin, Eric McCormack, Elizabeth McDonald, Susan Morgan, Eric Zivot. Plays today, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. Closes Saturday. Tickets $5-$22. 1615 Vine St., (213) 410-1062 or (714) 634-1300.