Ong Yi Ling
An Unbridgeable Gap?“There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless,” renowned writer Jorge Luis Borges muses in Ficciones, his collection of short stories.
The Substation Magazine quotes director Ho Tzu Nyen’s endeavour with the trilogy as an attempt, nevertheless, “to try and disseminate certain scholarly and critical intelligences to a wider public sphere – to rescue them from academic specialisation.”
Yet to what extent can this valiant-sounding effort to bring academic critiques to the general populace genuinely bridge the gap between them?
The King Lear Project is a trilogy that comprises the following stories:
Lear Enters puts three King Lear wannabes through a ‘live’ audition where they are given some autonomy to interpret their Lear as ‘God’, ‘Madman’ or ‘Everyman’, and direct their actors and props to their respective ends.
Dover Cliff – The Conditions of Representation, examines the art of staging and the possibilities (and limits) of putting up three particular scenes – the storm, Gloucester’s blinding and Gloucester’s ‘suicide’ at the titular Dover Cliff – that have been contentious in different periods of history.
The Lear Universe ends up the trilogy by directing one’s attention from the conditions and contexts of production to an exploration of the multivalent problematics of audience reception.
Described as “ambitious” by a cast member in The Lear Universe, the trilogy is achieved through thrusting what’s traditionally marginal – or what we are normally ‘blind’ to – to theatrical centre stage.
With the processes of audition, staging and a post-show dialogue enacted over three days, there is relentless self-reflexivity in the epistemological forays into the ‘behind-the-scenes’ mechanics of theatre realised through the multimedia marriage of theatre and film.
A member of the audience who watched Lear Enters found the idea “new”, “funny” and entertaining. However, she was quick to self-consciously qualify her response with a statement about not knowing much about “the arts”. It was ironic and discomforting to hear her downplay the validity of her personal thoughts, particularly in light of Ho’s vision for the trilogy as quoted above.
While it can be said that the trilogy has achieved success in its basic pedagogical function of letting the audience know that there can be more than 1 interpretation of a role or scene, it arguably still seems to alienate the ‘plebeians’ – despite its well-intentions – from the kingly halls of (academic) erudition, also euphemistically known as “the arts” in the lingo of most Singaporeans.
Maybe it is not difficult to comprehend this insurmountable gap: while his strategic location amongst the audience in Lear Enters and Dover Cliff visually seeks to blur boundaries between audience and actor/academic, the imperious intellectuality and God-like control of Paul Rae’s stoical producer exclude potential touches of connective affectivity with the “helpless audience”.
The Passion of Cordelia d’Audience
A verse from Albany’s/Edgar’s ending speech repeated ad nausea inThe Lear Universe goes, “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say”.
Preferring to be martyred for truth than burn at the stake of academic pedantries preached by producer (Paul Rae) and director (Kaylene Tan) in the show throughout the trilogy, a confession must be made: by the end of the third play, this UrbanWire reviewer’s emotions have been roused to an extreme form of debilitating madness rivaling Lear’s.
Director Ho Tzu Nyen’s main aim of creating a meta-theatrical atmosphere of “rigorous purgatory” might have been achieved in the excruciating repetitions of the same scene with strategic variations in The Lear Universe. Yet it ironically falls where it starts: the trilogy is too “rigorously” and stiflingly scripted.
This tight control is corroborated by actress Janice Koh, who acted as Regan. In the post-show discussion, she reveals that the trilogy is “very scripted beforehand”. Rae phrases it most memorably in a statement philosophically pronounced during the same discussion: “The greatest anti-theatre is by actors done in a very particular way”.
The unbearably repetitive face-offs between cast and audience in The Lear Universe silent showdowns exacerbated by Rae’s producer overbearingly spouting audience-negating one-liners like, “There is only one voice to be heard, and that is one’s own”, is a good example of this.
A second example involves the audience being cued to clap for an illusory “three-and-a-half-hour-show” over and over again through a piped in ‘encore’ soundtrack, an act that is uncannily akin to Goneril and Regan absurdly performing what they don’t mean.
To borrow a phrase from a member of the real audience who first broke the silence, “what is the significance” of ignoring the actual audience only to go through painfully well-rehearsed ‘post-show academic chats’ with the planted audience, some of whom sound glaringly and narrowly scripted?
Obviously power lies with the planted audience who are given microphones to speak, a recurring object suggesting power differentials from the very first play: only the director and producer use microphones, which symbolically ‘lord’ their amplified voices over the rest and suggest their intrinsic power over their oft’-silenced lieges.
Nonetheless, by being silenced, is the real audience most treasured and true, like Cordelia’s place in her father’s heart?
After all, Ho has been quoted in The Substation Magazine as saying, “It is more important that the theatre likes you”, a statement of his friend’s which can be analogously equated to King Lear’s love for Cordelia.
Yet it’s a blindingly solipsistic, self-obsessed and silencing love that prefers the scripted performances of his two lesser daughters to engaging with Cordelia’s (the “helpless audience’s”) raw and veracious spontaneity, pushing her to the very extreme and sadistically staging her death scene again and again in the final play.
It’s too late to continually cry over her dead body, however.
To be fair, the ideas in the last few repetitions are good, but due to poor pacing – an element crucial in making or breaking a show – and the aforementioned pedantries, accumulated fatigue and frustration prevented UrbanWire from deeply ruminating about the issues.
If not for this review, this UrbanWire writer, having felt wretched enough at the end of the show, honestly would not have been prodded to any meaningful retrospection.
Perhaps this is what a member of the real audience means when she mentioned that Ho did “all the thinking” for her.
The Nihilistic Performance
Thankfully enough, this agonising affliction of The Lear Universe is not mind-numbingly present in Dover Cliff: there is relatively more nuanced and imaginative space to work in as the audience is more intelligently prodded to self-reflexivity.
For instance, it’s comparatively clearer in Dover Cliff that power hierarchies are problematic and not subversion-free in Ho’s self-reflexive meta-theatre, coming closer to his view on how the trilogy (in particular the third play) is not out to imperiously “punish” the audience.
There’s a thought-provoking scene where the Fool discovers an abandoned microphone and, in a stroke of playful power-problematisation, rehearses his famous “prophecy” speech through this instrument of symbolic power.
This is doubly subversive in both the universes of the Shakespearean text and Ho’s trilogy, as an ambivalent duality is immediately bestowed on the characters of the director and producer – and, perhaps obliquely, even on Ho and Borgia themselves – as wise fools or foolish kings when “nobles are their tailors’ tutors”.
Yet as earnest as Ho might be in hoping to merely present “a multiplicity of possibilities”, Dover Cliff doesn’t feel as open-ended as it seems: the storm, blinding and Dover Cliff scenes all gravitate toward an unspoken (but palpable) ‘best interpretation’ that involves experientially estranging the hapless audience.
Particularly for the later two scenes, the audience parallels Gloucester’s helpless character by being literally “blinded so that [we] can see”. This is achieved by turning on a row of piercingly bright lights that face the audience at the exact moment of the ‘blinding’ onstage – a stroke of brilliance, in our opinion.
In utter darkness, Gloucester’s and Edgar’s disembodied voices tonelessly boom over the speakers in the final rendering of the Dover Cliff scene that, like the blinding scene, omnipresently penetrate the audience’s umwelt , refusing to make us suspend our disbelief.
In fact, this ending scene enacts in extreme form the demise of the performance, a nihilism that ostensibly suggests the triumph of the alternative: the traditional celebration of textual conservatism and the imagination.
This is arguably reconfirmed when, exiled from the theatre of our minds and relegated as installation art, the characters who earlier occupied the stage dot the public space of the theatre foyer. We amusedly and impassively look at the static bodies of blind Gloucester and his son, ironically negating earlier feelings about ‘violence most veraciously felt only when it is done unto us’ as we forget the light that galled our eyes.
Apart from a kind soul (“Is he a real member of the audience or a ‘secret’ cast”, we sceptically question) who lent the shivering Lear and Fool a shawl, we are forced to realise that even at the end of our experiential theatrical journey, these characters/actors are still seen as coldly alienating pieces of art for us and nothing more ‘human’.
Strikingly evinced when some members of the audience mimic Fernandez (who plays Cornwall) by taking photographs of the quivering Lear and his Fool, we are irrevocably aligned with his character’s brutality as we thoughtlessly ‘blind’ the duo with our camera flash.
The more enigmatic Lear Enters and Dover Cliff thus work better because they are arguably more incisive in their process of defamiliarising the audience through their novel meta-theatrical multimedia experiments, compelling UrbanWire to ruminate the very possibilities and limits of such representations, and their power to truly affect us, or otherwise.
“When priests are more in word than matter”
Nevertheless, it’s interesting to note the diametrically different responses between this UrbanWire writer and her friend: while extreme agitation and indignation lorded over the latter after the first night, the former wore his shoes on the third night as he admired The Lear Universe’s intellectually idiosyncratic gumption to really push the limits.
But can the general audience comprehend such “anti-theatre”?
Or are they just puzzled, tickled, or terribly frustrated and nothing more, as evinced by the visible ennui and confusion displayed by some members of the audience in Circle One who apparently do not comprehend the ending scene of Lear Enters, not to mention their mutinous reaction to The Lear Universe?
While it is easy to dismiss this discrepancy in audience reception as ‘normal’ for any performance, it doesn’t help that critics, or at least those who are in the know about the different language(s) used in this trilogy, lament its elementarily didactic nature and lack of more nuanced, well-developed aesthetics.
Peter Lathan, editor and reviewer of the British Theatre Guide, writes of the Brussels production of the first 2 parts of the trilogy, “It started out as a bold experiment, and I applaud experimentation, but the work staged here should have been part of the research process. They have moved from research to concept to stage too quickly. It hasn’t been adequately followed through. If this is experimental work, what exactly is the experiment? There was nothing new in this approach; most undergraduates doing a short course on Shakespeare will know what was being expounded as ‘new’.”
This uncannily coheres with this reviewer’s friend’s initial thoughts after seeing Leah Enters: he comments that the play’s interaction with its critical text is direct, standard and insufficiently artistic.
In other words, the artistic ‘how’ with regard to staging and rhythm can be improved as the interpretations of Lear are too frigidly pre-determined to actively take flight.
It must also be noted that there is a caveat to the said friend’s admiration of the third play: it is applaudable if we selectively “tune out” on the (aforementioned) high-handedness onstage.
Frankly, as much as this UrbanWire writer is able to micro-analyse abstruse concepts and imagine mountains out of nothing, the best Lear performance that she has watched is still a brilliantly affective – and arguably ‘conservative’ – staging of the play in Stratford Ontario last year, where its beautiful poetry culminated in unexpected tears greeting her eyes in Cordelia’s death scene.
As Rae has said in Dover Cliff – “eyes are not for seeing, but for crying”.
So what does this mean for the trilogy as a whole, where its intellectual and affective sides are apparently not well-developed enough for the intellectuals and general audience?
And it is plagued by extremities of feeling that negate rather than fruitfully stimulate?
Photo courtesy of Ho Tzu Nyen.
Contributor bio: Ong Yi Ling is about to commence her Honors Year in English Literature at the National University of Singapore (NUS), with recent knowledge of the genre of metafictions. She’s an avid lover of the arts, and has been involved in performing arts activities since secondary school.
This article is part of UrbanWires 9-week Singapore Arts Festival 2008 special . Get all the latest Arts Fest updates and reviews on UrbanWire.