PRODUCTION King Lear [Lier zai ci]
Data Type：review
Author：Billington, Michael
Title：King Lear Review
Source：The Guardian
Place：London
Date：2011/8/14
Language：English
Abstract：The author calls Wu Hsing-kuo "the Taiwanese answer to Orson Welles" and acclaims his extraordinary virtuosic power.
I suspect Wu Hsing-kuo is the Taiwanese answer to Orson Welles. He has not only written and directed but also performs, in Mandarin and with the aid of nine musicians, this one-man version of Shakespeare's tragedy. And while it's not a practice I would wish to see widely imitated, there is no denying the actor's extraordinary virtuosic power.
Strangely, it is as Lear himself that I find him least beguiling. That, I suspect, is because he strictly follows the stylised conventions of Chinese opera and shows us an old man whose lower features are obscured by a prodigious amount of facial hair: indeed, Lear's long white beard – sometimes tossed in the air like a horse's mane, at other times fretfully combed and parted – seems to be an index of his emotional state. But there is a gripping Pirandellian moment when Wu Hsing-kuo sheds his wig and beard, and asks, in his own person, "Who can tell me who I am?" The answer seems to be that he is an actor caged and imprisoned by his lifelong obsession with King Lear.
That pays off handsomely in the second half when he essays the play's other key characters. He is good as a dog-toting Fool who unexpectedly tells us, "A funny thing happened in Edinburgh." He is quite brilliant as, with a simple change of costume and gait, he becomes Lear's daughters: his Goneril and Regan, with their exaggerated twitching of the shoulders and fluttering hand movements, become almost menacingly coy. I was, however, puzzled by one aspect of his portrayal of Gloucester: he shows the blinded duke scaling a rocky promontory before his attempted suicide, whereas Shakespeare's Beckettian joke is that he hurls himself at a piece of flat ground. But this is one of the few flaws in an evening that is clearly a product of an ungovernable, deeply personal fascination with Shakespeare's play. Where Robert Lepage's one-man Hamlet, Elsinore, was all about technical trickery, this Taiwanese solo Lear is unequivocally a celebration of acting, even down to the Wolfit-like curtain calls.
Strangely, it is as Lear himself that I find him least beguiling. That, I suspect, is because he strictly follows the stylised conventions of Chinese opera and shows us an old man whose lower features are obscured by a prodigious amount of facial hair: indeed, Lear's long white beard – sometimes tossed in the air like a horse's mane, at other times fretfully combed and parted – seems to be an index of his emotional state. But there is a gripping Pirandellian moment when Wu Hsing-kuo sheds his wig and beard, and asks, in his own person, "Who can tell me who I am?" The answer seems to be that he is an actor caged and imprisoned by his lifelong obsession with King Lear.
That pays off handsomely in the second half when he essays the play's other key characters. He is good as a dog-toting Fool who unexpectedly tells us, "A funny thing happened in Edinburgh." He is quite brilliant as, with a simple change of costume and gait, he becomes Lear's daughters: his Goneril and Regan, with their exaggerated twitching of the shoulders and fluttering hand movements, become almost menacingly coy. I was, however, puzzled by one aspect of his portrayal of Gloucester: he shows the blinded duke scaling a rocky promontory before his attempted suicide, whereas Shakespeare's Beckettian joke is that he hurls himself at a piece of flat ground. But this is one of the few flaws in an evening that is clearly a product of an ungovernable, deeply personal fascination with Shakespeare's play. Where Robert Lepage's one-man Hamlet, Elsinore, was all about technical trickery, this Taiwanese solo Lear is unequivocally a celebration of acting, even down to the Wolfit-like curtain calls.
