It feels good being pleasantly surprised. Directors’ theatre Shakespeare productions, amateur at that, can be dire. And gathering the main characters would be played as circus freaks did not raise my expectations.  Furthermore, King Lear is a bitch of a play – things go crook in Act I, and mostly just go on getting worse, which is fearsomely hard to sustain.

Well, surprise, surprise, this production – directed by Jaime Dőrner – really works. It’s clever in its quirkiness, it’s adequately (or better than adequately) well-acted, it’s well-cut so it doesn’t drag, and it is in its way very enjoyable. 

Sure, Lear is played as both a king and a circus ringmaster. Kent becomes a kind of maybe-Indian, or maybe Egyptian, servant clown; the Fool not one but three scampering-around clowns; Goneril a bearded lady; Regan a fairground vamp; Cordelia maybe a horse-back dancer; Albany a Strong Man … Others vaguely Edwardian circus functionaries, or patrons.

The effect oddly is to distance the action, to slide in some metatheatrical game-playing, and to bring the play down to a manageable scale.

Ralph Johnson is a capable actor, and while he is no Lawrence Olivier, at this level his rendition of King Lear is quite effective: convincing, moving, and always audible.  His passionate outbursts and rages against his heartless and vicious daughters may not be ‘towering’ yet they ring true. In the outdoor venue, with some audience members seated on the ground, in Lear’s madness, at one point he moves among them, metatheatrically yet without getting out of character.   

Hannah Pratt as Goneril gives the role growing authority and brutality, as the character discovers her power and capacity for ruthlessness. And, highly important with an outdoor venue, her speeches are always audible and well-articulated.

Cassandra Cleland as Regan, the younger sister following her lead, and competing, might give more attention to voice projection, yet renders very effectively the character’s progression into sadism and, eventually, murder.

Jess Hong as Cordelia does well, especially in the later scene where she comforts her father, as he recovers from madness. 

The Gloucester-Edmund-Edgar subplot is anchored well, in a measured and lucid way, by the veteran actor Bruce Sinclair as Gloucester, with Jacob Dale as the black-clad bastard (in every sense) son Edmund, and Sam Daly as legitimate Edgar, both showing some character-development, with Daly as a relatively low-key yet adequate Poor Tom. The sons’ final fight is rendered as wrestling, and strangling. 

The three girls playing the tripartite Fool – Chloe McCarten, Ashleigh Matheson and Kat Sowerby – cope adequately with some interesting verbal and physical business. Tobias Lockhart as Cornwall does what he has to do adequately, but there is greater power in the development of authority, late on, by Richard Mays as Albany. 

The oddest character-rendition, though, is of Kent, played by Rob Lloyd, who is given some blatantly un-Shakespearean dialogue as the character is made to struggle, and experiment, with how to re-invent himself in a make-believe role as potential servant for Lear. It works, entertainingly. 

In the outdoor venue, the set-design by Leda Farrow has a high-raised platform stage, with drapes, up against a rather splendidly branching tree, and on this stage a weirdly quirky throne. The outdoor scenes however take place on the grass between this stage and the audience. It’s spatially coherent – more so than for several other Summer Shakespeares seen. Sarah Carswell’s costuming establishes and maintains its idioms. 

At certain points there’s music, provided by a group of six musicians, seated at stage left, who also provide the thunder for the storm scene, atmospheric rather than very loud. It’s composed, or devised, by Suzy Hawes.

So, there’s some quite clever and courageous directing, to devise all this, and to bring it all together. This is, really, one of the most successful recent Summer Shakespeares I’ve seen. 

It helps that for the first performance, we enjoy a calm, warm evening, and as daylight shades into dusk, and night, a full moon rises at the back of that splendid tree.

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