King Lear | Get Your Coats On

“An uncondescending condensing of the immortal classic by the acknowledged king of festive Fringe storytelling.”

Pip Utton is the Edinburgh Fringe. His productions are insightful, playful, joyful, and memorable. He’s the most respected player among his fellow professionals and the most beloved among his devoted followers from across the footlights (me included). Getting out of a Pip Utton performance takes several ages of man. You go from mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms to second childishness and mere oblivion in the time it takes for everyone ahead of you in the exit line to gush their appreciation to the master. Utton is best known for his candid biopics. Churchill, Hitler, Dickens, Bacon, Thatcher, and Bob Dylan walk into a pub and the barman asks, “What will you have, Mr Utton? This year we have simply Lear in an uncondescending condensing of the immortal classic by the acknowledged king of festive Fringe storytelling.

We enter to find no king, just Lear. Bereft of the trappings and dignity of power, here is a man who has learned the hard way that it is folly to grow auld without having first grown wise. In the depths of depression, with all his charms o’erthrown, Lear ponders on the cruel reversal of his fortune. Across town, at the National Portrait Gallery, nestled among the artistic jewels of Shakespeare’s great royal patron, James VI and I, are early sketches for the proposed flag of the newly reunited kingdoms of England and Scotland. This was one part of the Jacobean undoing of what, at the time, was seen as the historic Lear’s legacy – the disunion of the island of Britain. Lear is written as a deliberate contrast to James, the author, scholar, and father of sons, although, fun fact alert, it is through James’ only surviving daughter, married to the winter king of Bohemia, that we owe our present royal family.

Lear is Shakespeare’s other Shylock, a publicly bad character to whom bad things publicly happen. Utton’s instinctive feel for the humanity of the great and the good characters he uncannily inhabits downplays the madcap Toby Belchery of the recent retiree. Instead, Utton emphasises the subsequent family drama and ensuing unvirtuous betrayal. Although Catholic missionaries had begun arriving in China from the 1580s, precise knowledge of Confucianism and its emphasis on filial piety, moral governance, family and hierarchy was limited to a few pioneering Jesuits with whom Shakespeare could have had no correspondence. Yet there are uncanny parallels, not undisimilar to the Swan of Avon’s synthesis of the Florentine Machiavelli, who would not be translated into English until the 1640s. Truly, Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time. Utton’s minimalist edition of Lear reopens the text like a scythe to an overgrown, weedy meadow.

Truth be told, I haven’t liked Lear since I first saw the play. It was that 1997 staging at the Leicester Haymarket, the one in which Kathryn Hunter became the first woman to play the title role professionally (I’m still amazed anyone could get paid for a performance that bad). Ponderous, maudlin, a script written for achktors to perform more than for audiences to be entertained by. Lear can bring out the worst kind of feet-apart shouty overemphasis when done to death. By stark contrast, EdFringe’s quiet legend, Pip Utton, brings the play and the role to life as never before or not in a long time. “Walk softly, and carry a big stick”, advised Theodore Roosevelt. Among his properties Utton has just such a big stick. His performance is as soft and rich as an ostrich egg boiled for an hour and is best enjoyed in the cheerful company of friends who know they are in for a big treat.

Come for the familiar megastar doing something a bit different. Stay for an intelligent, gentle performance. Get your magisterial cloaks on and go see this!