Why does Paul Gross's voice sound like that?
Not much for hard-hitting insight. I am not without my vain fixations, and it's true that in the first half of Kimberley Rampersad's production of King Lear on the Festival Stage at Stratford, I was rather preoccupied with what to me sounded like a vocal affectation: Gross's organ pipe had a bullish, mannered intonation that felt like the noted Canadian TV actor "playing age" (Gross is 64, a few years wide of Lear's textual mark of "four-score and upward"). It never really went away, but I decided to let it alone. I was in the presence of Geoffrey Tennant from Slings & Arrows and getting hung up on the laziest of audience annoyances began to feel stupid.
As a whole, the production is neither travesty nor transcendent. I suspect it'd be a good starter-Lear, which I also remember thinking when I saw Colm Feore in the same role on the same stage in 2014, though that version had a few more stand-out performances. Rampersad's rendition is mostly orthodox in its generally Jacobean setting. She does good work providing some rehabilitation for Goneril (Shannon Taylor) and Regan (Déjah Dixon-Green), who are neither unnatural hags nor somehow deeply misunderstood, but two women caught up in the whirlpool of forces beyond their control. The implication is that when your father divides his kingdom leading to civil war and chaos, one's own moral choices are left to the hands of a power larger than yourself. Goneril didn't poison Regan due to preternatural cruelty: in the fog of war certain terrible choices sometimes seem the only ones available.
No ensemble member is embarrassing themselves, and a few do shine: David W. Keeley is the best Kent I've ever seen. A tall, grizzled veteran of many campaigns, with a missing right eye to prove his loyalty to the cause of Lear, Keeley effortlessly imbues the role with the rugged, unwashed, and sometimes brutal honesty that you need out of the inveterate truth-teller. Not many actors or theatre-folk in general can believably pass as having military service in their past, but Keeley is just such a bulldog. Gordon Patrick White also does commendable work as Lear's Fool: not a role known for its observable personality, White presents the Fool as a Shamanistic sage, notable for his mystery and possibly divine connections in the psychic realm. Michael Blake admirably takes the bastard Edmund from introverted transplant to feudal warlord, and his final duel with Edgar (Andre Sills), an axe-and-shield versus rapier showdown, is a ton of button-mashing fun.
When you have an actor like Paul Gross, who is perhaps better known for playing a great actor on TV than for being one himself, I personally expect a revelation at the end of each verse line, which is perhaps an unfair burden. Though it must be said, the way he points to the far reaches of the Festival Theatre's balcony and implicates the audience in the guilt of "A plague upon you, murderers traitors all" is just such a revelation. Rampersad's insistence on keeping the action light, and surprisingly amusing, especially in the second half, makes the latter portions of the drama sag much less than usual. I mainly wish she had watched the production more from my particular seat on the aisle in the second row, house-right: she would have seen far too many actors staged in a stacked way for far too long, a directorial oversight possibly due to the stage management table being center in rehearsals; such is a temptation to directors newer to the Festival and its unique thrust-stage demands (gotta keep those onstage actors moving).
Having seen Rampersad's 2019 production of G.B. Shaw's Man and Superman at the Shaw Festival, I was happy to see some operatic staging return in the storm scene, with a memorable image of hail descending on a spotlighted Lear. That section is really the only time Rampersad opens up the play to a larger metatheatrical palette, and you find yourself wishing she'd do so more often, as it results in an inventive button to act one. Hopefully she'll continue to have more chances to make Shakespeare weird on the Festival stage.
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