Soulpepper’s Electrifying Queen Goneril and apocalyptic King Lear create a conversation worth having

Soulpepper has just premiered repertory productions of the brand new Queen Goneril by Erin Shields; and the play for which it serves as prequel: Shakespeare’s King Lear. 

Artistic Director (and director of Queen Goneril)  Weyni Mengesha sees this as a “truly a special moment for Soulpepper”. Having seen both productions this week, I concur. These are electrifying productions individually – and the way they speak to each other across time, space and imagination is exhilarating, inspiring and crushing.  

First up: Queen Goneril breaks bad 

Set seven years before the events of King Lear, Queen Goneril delivers an experience akin to that which Breaking Bad fans have enjoyed while watching the prequel Better Call Saul over the past few years. The play begins by placing the titular character, her sisters and others into places that – based on our knowledge of the chronologically later King Lear – are unexpected and unfamiliar.

The play’s 2 hour forty-minute run time depicts the actions, attitudes and events which re-shape these characters until finally, as the play closes, the world of Queen Goneril has begun to resemble the beginning of King Lear. Of course, just as watching Better Call Saul retrospectively changes the inflection and meaning of certain moments of Breaking Bad, so, too, does Queen Goneril demand a recursive reassessment of King Lear. 

It’s not evil: it’s asphyxiation   

In King Lear , the sole female roles are Lear’s three daughters. They are cyphers of inexplicable cruelty (Goneril and Regan) and impossible virtue (Cordelia): less characters than plot devices who deliver excruciating insight to the aging doomed hero. Playwright Erin Shields’ script fills in a compelling and complete family backstory centered on their dead, Black and othered mother – and, from the embers of Shakepseare’s sparse characterizations, fans into flame complex backstories for each daughter (and, for good measure, for the cartoonishly evil Edmund, bastard son of Gloucester; and Oswald, Goneril’s brutal henchman). 

Shields’ script imbues the sisters with complex and sympathetic human motivations – love, empathy, fear, jealousy, shame, rage – which are constricted by the suffocating cellophane of social mores, race, class and gender. These are characters striving to be their best, while society and circumstance reduce them to clawing holes and gasping for air.

Even now, years before King Lear, the sisters are in conflict among themselves and with their asphyxiating context. Each is struggling to punch a different kind of air hole.

Virgilia Griffiths’ Goneril is walking a tightrope: playing the game of patriarchy to win power for herself, so she can play the game differently. Griffiths delivers a complex, uncompromising, multi-faceted performance. She is direct, poised and powerful as the unflinching advisor and clear-eyed ruler-in-waiting who is ready for tough change. She is also a passionate and sensual woman who knows what she wants. At the same time, she is fuelled by tragically unfounded optimism laced with self-doubt and determination. 

She sees the unmet needs of her people, and she knows that her aged father is slipping. The biggest evidence is the 300 unburied bodies of soldiers from Lear’s successful war whom he intends to bury honorably . . . but which, thwarted by the external elements and Lear’s intransigent internal storms, lie piled like rotting firewood in the snow and ice outside the palace. The stakes and urgency feel mythical: this is the surface conflict of Sophocles’ Antigone, multiplied by the 300 Athenians who died at Thermopylae. 

Goneril is engaged in an impossibly delicate dance – trying to close an ongoing negotiation with Lear (a mercurial Tom McCamus) for her accession to the throne, without bruising his hypersensitive ego or telegraphing her intent to lead differently. Her hope – privately shared with her extramarital lover – is to have it all: “A kingdom, A family. A future.”  Lear loves and praises her – beaming proudly at her to say “The future is in good hands” – and seeming ready to cede the throne . . . but we know from King Lear that that future is seven years off. 

We also know it’s a poisoned chalice, and Goneril will end up with none of the three. She is just as flawed and human as her father, but she is also doomed by her gender – and his hubris – never to get the chance to grow into the role of ruler and change the seat of power. How she claws out her own power within that cellophane constriction – beginning in a transformative storm that straddles the intermission – is the magical essence of Queen Goneril.   

Vanessa Sears’ Regan is clawing at a different air hole by playing the party girl clown. In this persona, she amuses her father and the other nobles, gaining the ability to move more freely among them – but only because her value and her insight are discounted and dismissed. Sears is magnetically volatile – by turns brash, raw, alluring and tactless to the point of cruelty – and underestimated by all. The price she pays for playing this role is steep and distressingly relevant.      

Helen Belay’s Cordelia is the ethereal soothsayer who sees things – and people – exactly as they are. But unlike the Cordelia who kicks off the central conflict of King Lear, this younger version speaks her hard truths only in private. She finds her oxygen by eschewing public confrontation for words calculated to soothe feelings and smooth hard edges.     

The set – and the setting – push back 

Ken Mackenzie’s set is simple, anchored by two huge stone columns with doors at their base. These structures stand in for the castle and the solidity of the monarchy and patriarchy it represents. Between scenes, we can see clearly the strength it takes the stage hands and cast to reposition these massive structures. This resistance is a constant reminder of the intransigent structures Goneril, Regan and Cordelia are in conflict with: these are what’s making  it so hard for each to breathe. 

Tom McCamus’ Lear is the manifestation of those structures. His faculties are just starting to slip, but his attitudes and actions display the solipsistic cruelty that a man ruling by “divine right” can casually inflict. His austere but striking throne is a magnetic force centering the stage for key parts of the action. Lear is usually seated or standing elsewhere on the stage, behaving like the scattered, flawed and human head of a family. But pay attention to those moments when he sits on his throne and the persona of the king  – who cannot be denied – comes upon him. 

At these moments, he uses this power in trivial ways – for instance, to insist that his three daughters amuse him by playing prosecutorial games. These games foreshadow the demands he will make of his daughters at the start of King Lear, as well as his mock prosecution of them with Poor Tom during that play’s storm. In fact, some of Lear’s most revered and moving lines surface seven years earlier in Queen Goneril as the play-time inventions of his underestimated daughters. “O reason not the need” cries one in reference to a mock stolen pig. . . surely complicating our feelings when we hear Lear utter the same phrase in his own play, in reference to what he needs in order to retain his dignity.  

A lot can happen in “7 years” . . .

As noted, the Soulpepper production of King Lear features the same actors playing the same roles. Of course, the characters are now in completely different places – psychologically and spiritually, but also literally. We’ve moved from Queen Goneril’s non-specific past era of confining corsets into an emphatically present-day setting where characters use smartphones and laptops, and drive jeeps. 

The change of setting universalizes both plays. This is not a single tale in two parts like the end of Better Call Saul snapping like Lego pieces into the beginning of Breaking Bad. Instead, these stories of female limitation and male hubris are unfolding across all eras. Queen Goneril provides a distressingly plausible backstory that offers reasonable explanations and compelling counter-narratives. But expect King Lear to deliver thematic continuity, not the literal consistency of a sequel. (If you seek to read the two plays as one, the size of certain gaps will confound you. For instance, just how in the missing seven years has Queen Goneril’s repressed realist Edmund, the compelling Jonathon Young, been transformed into King Lear’s gleefully talkative, confident master manipulator?)  

So think of King Lear as conversation, not continuation. For a dialogue plays out in our heads as we watch physically familiar characters like Goneril (Griffiths), Regan (Sears), Cordelia (Belay) Edmond (Young) and Oswald (Breton Lalama) inhabiting radically contracted or expanded personas enmeshed in new and often surprising relationships. 

And echoes and flashbacks to Queen Goneril complicate the way we understand King Lear. For instance, with Lear’s rope-a-dope succession talk, casual misogyny and early-onset madness fresh in our heads, Goneril and Regan’s justification for eliminating Lear’s agreed-upon retinue sounds less vindictive and more reasonable. And fresh from Queen Goneril, Lear’s plaintive “I gave you all” rings hollow . . . while Regan’s cutting response “And in good time you gave it” feels less like heartless derision and more like a well-deserved burn. Finally, Oliver Dennis’ Gloucester undergoes a gouging of the eyes that remains as shocking and horrific as ever (“Out, out vile jelly!”) – but after watching Queen Goneril, it also feels like belated – but just –  desserts

This is a modern, kinetic, apocalyptic King Lear

While the conversation between the two plays is revelatory, make no mistake. Director Kim Collier’s electric production of King Lear stands on its own as a modern tale of late-life male hubris supercharged by dementia. It’s slick and stylish: engrossing and emotionally draining.  

In Shakespeare’s play, Lear’s reign is drawing to a close, so the King is carving up his kingdom among his multiple heirs. In exchange for the territory he proposes to give each husband, all he asks is that each daughter describe how much they love him. WIth Queen Goneril still in our heads, their responses ring true. Goneril (Virgilia Griffiths) professes the sincerity and indescribability of her love, as we saw her do in Lear’s bedroom in the former play.  Regan (Vanessa Sears), still the actor, improvises a witty response that one-ups and minimizes Goneril’s for a cheap laugh. But Cordelia (Helen Belay) refuses to play the game of one-upmanship sought by Lear’s ego. Seven years on, she can speak the kind of plain truth that she saw so clearly but could utter only privately in Queen Goneril.

Cordelia’s growth and unwillingness to placate her father’s ego sets the plot in motion. And this production of King Lear prioritizes motion. If Queen Goneril is about the resistance of power structures to movement by those they exclude, Kim Collier’s sure-handed direction makes this King Lear a study of the ease with which entitled, unseeing men can introduce motion – destructive motion – into those structures, with terrible consequences for all.    

The same set looms, and the effort required to manipulate it is the same. But where the massive columns feel so obdurate and ponderous in Queen Goneril, during Lear’s rapid scene changes they pivot with dizzying rapidity into the interiors, then exteriors, then interiors again of different castled seats of power. Immobile long tables in those halls of power turn from static furniture into weapons of aggression or stages for self-aggrandizing performance. Men, it seems, can manipulate these intransigent structures – but the results, like the structures themselves, are destructive and chaotic. 

Kimberly Purtell’s lighting design and Thomas Ryder Payne’s sound design are a revelation. The storm surprises with thunder rolls punctuated by unexpected thundercaps synched with horizontal lightning bursts that run across the bottom of the back of the stage and punctuate character movements. Pathetic fallacy runs rampant: the natural world and the buildings alike are a psychic male hellscape reflecting the madness of Lear, the psychosis of Edmund and theugly menace of Phillip Riccio’s Cornwall.  

McCamus’ Lear dazzles as the ruler whose rock-solid sense of self cannot survive the surrender of his power. The one time he sits on that familiar and simple throne is to banish Cordelia and proclaim the kingly irrevocability of this arbitrary banishment. His subsequent dementia, riddled with uncertainty and questioning, feels directed at us, the spectators. With a rueful twinkle, McCamus teeters on the verge of breaking the fourth wall: almost – but not quite – accusing  audience members as individual objects and collective enablers of his delusion. 

A strong cast in the remaining major roles aid us in disentangling Lear’s deeply flawed humanity from the power structures. Sheldon Elter’s Kent brings unflagging energy as the earnest, straight arrow whose loyalty is our proxy for Lear’s initially unseen depths. Jordan Pettle’s Albany grows subtly into a parallel energy. Nancy Palk’s Fool is Lear’s sad, subdued sidekick – more a spent second than a vitalizing force for truth. And in a tour-de-force performance, Damien Atkins’ Edgar Poor Tom inhabits the persona of “unaccommodated man” with shocking, near-naked, raving-mad force that feels truly sufficient to penetrate Lear’s delusion and spark his self-reassessment. 

As it hurtles towards its close, this dynamic production takes on a darkly apocalyptic, end-of-days feel. With manic energy, it races to its close, piling up the requisite body count for Shakespearean tragedy. At its center lies Lear, surrounded by his three daughters. 

The conversation pauses, but it doesn’t end

Echoes of Queen Goneril – pathways closed off, choices disallowed, and violence committed – glow brightly in the ending of this King Lear. 

What we see onstage is ugly, base and reductive.The structures of power – ego, gender, family, relationship, nation – have been dismantled and lie strewn across the stage. 

What will follow? What can follow? What should follow?

That’s our continuing conversation.  

Reserve tickets on soulpepper.ca.

© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2022