I don't doubt the sincerity of the RSC's commitment to new writing, but at the moment, it is tending to produce duff stuff from good dramatists. The latest example is this play from Marina Carr, who, having married the mythic and the real in Portia Coughlan and Woman and Scarecrow, here succumbs to Shakespeare-saturated fantasy.
Carr confronts An Old Man (David Hargreaves) and A Woman (Michelle Gomez) in a spartan loft. It transpires that they are father and daughter locked together by ancestral love-hate and innate rivalry as composers: he is a self-proclaimed genius who hasn't finished anything for 25 years, while she has a professional facility. What brings them rancourously together, after a gap, is her dream of them as a Lear and Cordelia whose fates are tragically enmeshed.
By constantly invoking Shakespeare, Carr plays a dangerous game. The daughter observes that "Lear changes and grows till the last second". Exactly so, but it is the father's failure here to move much beyond viewing his child as a vicious ingrate that gives the play its emotional stasis. Where Shakespeare mixes the concrete and the cosmic, Carr's play also seems curiously removed from reality: you can't believe that the father's fame has endured or that, if he did turn up at his daughter's concerts screaming obscenities, he wouldn't have been removed. In short, Carr aims for the mountain peaks without having secured her base camp. Admittedly, she is well served by her actors in Selina Cartmell's production: Gomez suggests all Lear's daughters rolled into one, and Hargreaves, pottering around his flat in a floral hat, echoes the mad king. But the result is a play that owes a huge debt to Shakespeare which it never properly repays.
