A bold, intimate staging of 'King Lear'

"King Lear" is not for the timid.

Theater artists approach Shakespeare's mature tragedy with awe and trepidation. And audiences are in for a marathon of base treachery, wild grief and royal-family dysfunction, articulated in language so thick with poetic allusions, a reading of the text is essential.

For all its intimidations, though, English director Peter Brook's contention that "King Lear" is "probably Shakespeare's greatest play and for this reason it's the most difficult," can be justified. In a compelling version of "Lear," the gain really does outweigh the pain.

Seattle Shakespeare Company is boldly taking up "Lear." The small but focused cast, blessed with a clean command of the verse, faces the work head on. And with a thoughtful, robust staging by Los Angeles director John Langs on John Kirschenbaum's steeply raked set color-coded in crimson and black, the troupe achieves a rapport with the play many larger companies would envy.

This is not a "Lear" in which the king is all. But Kurt Beattie, on a brief hiatus from his artistic director duties at ACT Theatre, has impressively morphed into a bushy-bearded, wild-eyed, caustic Lear, imperious and foolish, not blameless yet pitiable.

Beattie is alone in delivering his lines with the sonorous flourishes of an old-school Shakespearean. Jarring at first, the affectation turns out to be a stroke of inspiration. Of course Lear, the elderly, pre-Christian emblem of a dying English order, would sound little like the grasping daughters who get their mitts on his kingdom, then proceed to strip away his dignity and sanity.

These gals are part of a new, rougher order. Amy Thone's Goneril is a steely socialite so pitiless, her appalled husband, Albany (Kevin McKeon), dubs her "a gilded serpent."

And Stephanie Shine's memorable Regan sashays around like a bethroned Barbarella. She's a miniskirted party girl with a leather-clad player of a spouse, Cornwall (Garlyn Punao), and a shocking indifference to the pain of others.

That leaves Sarah Malkin's guileless Cordelia to tell the out-of-touch Lear the truth — and get exiled to France for her frankness.

As Lear's family rips apart, the parallel saga of betrayal renting the bonds between Lear's ally Gloucester (A. Bryan Humphrey), his bastard son Edmund (Reginald André Jackson) and his legit heir Edgar (Nick O'Donnell) also proceeds apace.

In a tale rife with the broken ties, tumbles from fortune and drastic shifts of identity, the cruel blinding of Humphrey's Gloucester and O'Donnell's masquerade as the pathetic beggar Tom stand out. And the downward mobility of Lear's loyal kinsman Kent (heartily played by David Drummond) is also well-realized.

The one interpretation that sputters: Lear's Fool, played by Charles Leggett in a crumpled hat and baggy overcoat as a too-literal echo of the existential tramps in "Waiting for Godot." One doesn't get the full force of the Fool's devastating insights into Lear's predicament from this characterization, which is so offhand it's nearly a throw-away.

SSC's "King Lear" benefits from Deborah Skorstad's rather incongruent but eye-catching costume designs, Timothy Wratten's lighting scheme and the evocative accents of metallic percussion and accordion in Dan Dennis' musical score.

(A quibble: seeing the actors lurk in the wings to double as musicians is a distraction.)

Ryan Spickard's exciting pole-and-sword fight choreography keeps the adrenaline pumping through a show that runs close to three hours yet rarely flags. In fact, Langs' fine pacing makes a good case for "King Lear" as an action saga.

But the play's key insights into the spiraling nature of evil, madness and a warring family/nation's descent into barbarism are not trampled over. Listen, and you'll catch some of Shakespeare's darkest estimations of human nature — and some of his most breathtaking epiphanies about the power of love and illumination.

Indeed, entire treatises have been written on images in the text pertaining to "sight" and "blindness," and to a merciless wheel of fortune which must "come full circle."

That's why reading the text can be so rewarding. But if one can also see it well-played, on an intimate Seattle stage, that stroke of luck is not to be wasted.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com