King Lear has lent itself to many cultural transpositions and re-imaginings, from Kurosawa’s Ran to Jane Smiley’s novel, A Thousand Acres. Shakespeare seldom suffers from such relocations and he doesn’t in this very loose version of the play from Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, set amid the Northern Territory’s Indigenous Australian community.
Only fragments of Shakespeare’s text survive but they are stirred into a rich stew of contemporary English, Kriol and other traditional tongues in which something borrowed becomes something new in a production directed by Michael Kantor. It is co-created by Tom E Lewis who offers a childlike, immature Lear almost gambolling into madness like a lamb to the slaughter.
Real tragedy tends to pass this production by, and even at 90 minutes it feels baggy and underpowered. Some performances are a little perfunctory.
But, as the red dust rises, Goneril and Regan fight each other for both Jimi Bani’s Iago-like Edmund and their father’s mining royalties; Damion Hunter’s Edgar stalks the stage like a lost ancestral soul; and when Frances Djulibing’s female Gloucester observes “this land is cursed”, it becomes clear that what is at stake is the spirit of the land, which the foolish have failed to understand belongs to nobody. A monstrous mining truck hunts down Lear and Cordelia in its headlights, but it is the monstrous nature of greed and the way it deforms that are revealed here.
• The Shadow King is at the Barbican, London, until 2 July. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
