A Nordic Howl

‘I’ve directed around seventy-five shows, and Anna’s designed about forty of them. It’s like a big old marriage!’ says Matthew. What’s made it work? I wanted to know. ‘It’s the communication,’ says Anna. ‘The different perspectives and the different crafts have equal value, so the conversations are very open, very free, very inviting — they invite you to have quite bold ideas.’ Every new show she says, starts several steps further down the road than the last. ‘There’s a lot you no longer have to talk about, which makes you braver and braver. You know the other person is with you and wants to go on that journey with you.’ Matthew puts it more candidly: not long ago, Anna presented him an idea that he initially rejected as too extreme. ‘Why are you allowed to take risks if I’m not?’ she asked him. Matthew agreed and has been trying to live up to that challenge ever since — this Lear, he says, has ‘a set that is quite extraordinary.’

He and Fleischle wanted to go beyond the traditional visuals associated with King Lear and instead followed the play’s own references to fur, hide, animal skin: a world in which those materials feel less like costume and more like they are ‘built into the fabric of society’ Fleischle comes at the same territory from a different angle: a design built around ‘the struggle between man and the elements’ — the storm, the wind, the way Lear himself becomes, in her words, ‘a leaf in the wind, tossed about.’

“Her set uses towering columns of chain that can frame, contain or exclude characters, suggesting juxtapositions of security and violence, connection and separation.”

And these are above a floor with a visible history of cracking and corrosion in it — a world that looks stable and controlled until it isn’t. Fleischle has borrowed the Japanese craft of kintsugi, the art of repairing broken ceramics with gold rather than hiding the break. ‘The scar of what happened is celebrated,’ she says, ‘and serves as a reminder of what you’ve learned from it’, very much a design motif for a play in which family, kinship, and nation smash apart over the course of the play.

Family is where Matthew starts when asked what the play is about. ‘I think the core is the disintegration of two families,’ he says — one destroyed by ‘a hubristic mistake,’ Lear demanding his daughters declare their love; the other by Edmund’s calculated deceit. This fits neatly with the immersive dynamics of a theatre in the round. ‘In one we watch a man, in real time, make a terrible decision, and in the other a younger man tells us directly that he’s going to destroy his family. So I thought: fine, I’m taking the audience through two different familial destructions — one we observe in the space, and the other says, come with me, watch what I’m capable of.’

What’s it like working with Shakespeare himself? Matthew traces his own answer back to his twenties, at the Edinburgh Festival, chatting to a fellow theatre- maker about collaboration. Asked who his favourite collaborators were, Matthew offered a friend who played guitar, and a girlfriend who did some choreography. ‘My favourite collaborators,’ the other man told him, ‘are Chekhov, Ibsen and Shakespeare’. ‘Honestly, it was massive,’ Matthew says now — the start of a habit of treating the playwright as a living creative partner rather than a monument to be venerated: ‘he’s the best dead writer to work with, because you get so much freedom.’ Part of that freedom is licence to rewrite: he’s cut the play hard and modernised its language, wanting, as he puts it, to make sure ‘there’s no barrier to his audience being with him.’ Fleischle finds the same excitement from the audience’s side of the equation. However far away the story seems, she says, ‘the effect always is that it makes you think a lot about yourself, and about where you are, or about the state of the world now.’

That sense of a play still finding new things to say, 420 years on, is vivid in rehearsal — in what Dunster calls the most extraordinary moment of the process so far. Working on Lear’s mad scene in the fields near Dover, with a newly-blinded Gloucester in attendance, Dunster found himself talking through what Lear’s madness is actually saying: not nonsense, but something close to social justice — that the people put into positions of authority were hypocrites, and that poverty makes it impossible to hide your sins the way privilege allows. Jonathan Slinger, playing Gloucester, began to cry. ‘What he was hearing was exactly what Gloucester is beginning to discover himself,’ Dunster says — ‘that Lear is ahead of him, and that this isn’t madness, it’s reason.’ Threlfall went over and put an arm around him, and the two actors simply played the scene together from there. It’s the kind of moment Fleischle’s design exists to hold: a world that looks ordered and stable until suddenly it isn’t — and where what’s broken doesn’t get thrown away, but marked, and carried forward.

Talking to them both, it’s striking how often they land on the same image from different directions. The visual feel of the show began, for both of them, in the same place: the far north. ‘We talked a lot about Scandinavia, about the Nordic feel of it,’ Matthew remembers. When he was planning the adaptation, he was drawn to Gloucester’s reference to a portentous eclipse and immediately thought of the circle of the Royal Exchange floor; but as he started describing the moment, he found himself writing ‘we hear a kind of Nordic howl’. Where did that come from? ‘I think there’s something in our collective imagination that still exists, in the present, something north of us — colder, harsher pre-Christian,’ he says, ‘and the creative team picked up on that and ran with it.’ Fleischle wanted the audience to feel that howl too:

“the power of nature in this play is overwhelming. I am really interested in the struggle between humans and the environments we inhabit, because we always seem to see ourselves as apart from it.”

We seem to have a struggle accepting that we’re actually part of it.’ And so it’s important, particularly for a theatre like this, when the audience comes in, that you’re not looking at a set but ‘you’re in an environment’. King Lear is a play that propels us into the same world as the characters, experiencing that deep, primal Nordic howl.