Pierre Bokma plays ‘King Lear’ big in his madness

Pierre Bokma is already far gone in the opening scene. Weathered and orphaned, he roams the stage like old King Lear – alternately excited, sad, stamping his feet and pleading: “Don’t laugh at me!” Yet, in the two and a half hours that follow, he manages to get his character ever deeper lost in the directionless maze of his unreliable brain.

King Lear was staged last year by the renowned German theater house Schauspielhaus Bochum and played there as one of the first major productions since the corona outbreak. From last Thursday, the performance could be seen in Amsterdam for four days in a row.

In addition to Pierre Bokma, another major Dutch theater name is central to this production: director Johan Simons, intendant at Schauspielhaus Bochum since 2018. It’s their second for both Lear: Simons staged Shakespeare’s text in 2013 at the Münchner Kammerspiele and Bokma performed the royal drama in 1990 at Toneelgroep Amsterdam, directed by Ton Lutz. Back then as a jester, now as a nasty king.

abstracted setting

A prominent wall, which you can only see through a number of doorways, divides the stage into an interior and an exterior. Inside, the characters initially wait patiently to be allowed on, later they plot their plots or claim the camera that registers the space there almost incessantly. Outside, directionless chaos reigns: a mountain of black sand, wood chips and above all emptiness, a total lack of support. Especially in the second half of the performance, this provides a beautiful arena for a silently wandering Lear, who gropes around the backstage.

In this abstracted setting, Johan Simons situated this King Lear. The result is an entertaining, but distant performance.

Shakespeare’s relatively complex double plot is explained in a smoothly cut first half. Lear divides his land among his three daughters, on the condition that they immerse him in declarations of love. Goneril and Regan (Mourad Baaiz and Michael Lippold) rush to their father in praise, each more hypocritical than the next, but Cordelia (Anna Drexler) refuses: she loves him just as much as a daughter should love her father, she says. . She is therefore the only honest one, and so actually loves her father the most – but he is already inflamed with blind rage, disinherits and chases her and thus mercilessly inflicts his own mischief on herself.

Generation struggle

Simultaneously with that story, another father also disowns his child: the Earl of Gloucester falls for a trick of his (bastard) son Edmund and drives his son Edgar away. Edmund then takes it out on his father, while Goneril and Regan turn against Lear. And as the war between England and France flares up, Lear and Gloucester are hunted down, pushed away by the generation below them. At the end of their lives, the two meet at the cliffs of Dover, on the verge of death: two displaced fathers in an inevitable swan song.

The often played frontally, slightly exalted game often keeps the emotion at a distance. Simons opts for a static staging that appeals more to the head than to the heart. Some actors manage to bridge that with their empathetic text handling: Steven Scharf is accurate as the old Earl of Gloucester, whose fear and sadness you gradually feel. Patrick Berg plays his bastard son Edmund sinister and power-hungry, but gets little space to explore the other side of his character: the sadness and insecurity that drive him to his actions. In this way, more characters remain stuck in one-dimensionality: Goneril and Regan also get stuck in transparent, almost cartoonish toxicity.

It is no coincidence that Drexler plays the jester in addition to Cordelia – who is in fact the only one of his children who remains faithful to Lear – the other character who holds up mirrors to Lear and does not abandon him. Where Drexler in her somewhat flat portrayal of Cordelia does not stir much, she plays the jester pretty angular and elusive. Edgar – later disguised as the half-naked vagabond ‘Poor Tom’ – gets enough peace and focus from actor Konstantin Bühler, which makes Lear’s fascination for him completely palpable.

Bokma defenseless in madness

For example, Lear clings to jesters and vagabonds, while slowly losing all grip. Bokma plays him incomparably: Lear stumbles to observe his surroundings, in his madness he copies and persiflates his bystanders and at the same time becomes a parody of himself: the patriarch he once was. When Goneril and Regan take his hundred knights from him, he reacts like a toddler who has to hand in his toys. Dejectedly, he looks into the room when he later finds himself lost on the heath – like a child that has to be picked up from the ball pit.

Read also Why Pierre Bokma is the best actor in the Netherlands

Bokma delivers a tour de force without constantly drawing attention to itself, skilfully avoiding a major pitfall for Lear performers. Wandering around the backstage, he can almost disappear, making his character even more elusive. He likes great gesticulation and small gestures, from minute inflections to thunderous voice raises.

Wuft and furious, and hopelessly alone, Lear does what he started in the first act: he dies. Not in a big scene, but in an almost casual inevitability. Bokma plays Lear in his madness and takes this King Lear mercilessly through the emotional mud.