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GVSU Performance Review

I thoroughly enjoyed the performance of King Lear that we went and saw as a class. It did a wonderful job of taking the story we had read and providing a much needed visual element. To quote Jared DeBacker, my friend who worked on Broadway for a few years, "Plays are meant to be performed, without performance they are just weird stories with no action." To see the story performed as we did was a wonderful way to truly experience the play.

I thought that all the acting performances were very good, but Lear and the fool were particularly good. The fool added significantly more raunchiness to the story through their actions and movements than I had envisioned while reading the story, and it was an addition I quite enjoyed. Additionally the actions chosen made many of the interactions involving the cock's comb much more clear in my mind, as its many references were hard to discern without a visual. Additionally I thought that the performance of King Lear was quite convincing. While at times he was a little bit melodramatic, overall I thought he did a good job selling the very difficult tragic part. My one gripe was that for the storm scene, they got him a little bit wet, but I thought that if it was supposed to be this huge storm they should have drenched him in a bunch of water to really sell the effect.

Additionally I found the lighting and scene production to be a bit distracting at times. They had a few issues where the lighting of the backdrop would mess up and flicker aggressively which completely drew my attention away from the action occurring right in front of my face. I also found the use of 3 chairs a a hovel and again as a stocks to not work very well. Neither prop would have been hard to produce, and I think would have gone a long way in selling the scenes they were trying to pull off.

Overall I thought that the people performing in the play did a wonderful job, however I disagreed with some of the presentation decisions they made.

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 8, 2018 at 6:58 PM

    I agree with you on the quality of the performances! I also thought it was disappointing to see the chairs used as stocks and a hovel; I'd commented on this in my blog post, but it seems like a strange choice for the hovel particularly, given that all that really needs is some cloth and sticks to make a more convincing prop. Lear's gradually increasing wetness is a good detail to catch; I think it's an interesting idea to completely drench Lear, but that might be an example of them choosing to avoid a course that could potentially inconvenience the rest of the play by leaving water all over the stage.

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  2. AnonymousOctober 9, 2018 at 4:11 PM

    I agree that it is very important to see plays performed instead of just reading them. I especially noticed this in class when we watched the performance of Act III by Sir Ian McKellen. When I read this part of the play on my own, I skimmed through the beginning of it, and was unable to truly appreciate the chaos and madness of the Act, without McKellen's booming voice and the torrential downpour in the background. Seeing and hearing it performed added a whole new element and made it much more enjoyable!

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