Theatre Royal Bath Summer Season - Candida and King Lear

It was another exciting summer in the Social Programme Office at the University of Bath's English Language Centre - so much so that I feel like I'm only just recovering from it now! Like last year, I was lucky enough to meet some wonderful people from all over the world and enjoy sharing British culture and landmarks with them. One particular highlight for me was being able to take my students to the beautiful Theatre Royal twice this summer, even if I was underwhelmed by the two very different plays themselves: George Bernard Shaw's Candida and Shakespeare's King Lear.

Candida

Although in recent years it has been eclipsed by Shaw's triumph Pygmalion, Candida (1898) was quite the hit in its day, questioning Victorian ideas about love and marriage with a side order of socialism. The play centres around a love triangle: popular priest and orator, Reverend James Mavor Morell (Jamie Parker), whose seemingly perfect live unravels when a young poet who he had taken pity on (Eugene Marchbanks, played by Frank Dillane) arrives and announces that he is in love with James' beautiful young wife Candida (Charity Wakefield). While considerations of the practicalities of socialism rumble in the background, most of the action is the conflict between the two males, making it clear that neither affords Candida any agency in her own love life. The most interesting part of the play for me, therefore, was how Candida deals with this situation, eventually resisting the Victorian ideal of female passivity that both men unwittingly force upon her.

I expressed concerns about Jamie Parker in my review of Henry V and his performance in Candida left me with similar doubts. I can't work out if he's just a boring actor, or whether he is intentionally accentuating the staid nature of the character, making it clear why Candida might seek entertainment elsewhere. By contrast, Dillane (famous for playing Tom Riddle in Harry Potter), was very full on, to the point of being highly irritating at times, but it worked for the nervous, conflicted young poet. Of the main cast, I was most impressed with Charity Wakefield's (Land Fothergill from Any Human Heart) sensitive portrayal of the title character. Overall, Candida was at turns funny and thought provoking, but lacking the spark that makes Pygmalion such an enduring hit.

King Lear

Regular readers will know that I'm quite familiar with King Lear after following Cardiff University's Act One as they took their adaptation to Edinburgh. However, my students were happy to learn that even I struggled to follow every word of this incredibly dense tragedy. The main attraction for this particular adaptation was David Haig (Four Weddings and a Funeral) in the title role. The dramatic weight of the role was quite a departure from Haig's usual comedic roles, and at times he seemed to struggle with it - just one of the many let-downs of this production. A particular strength of King Lear is how the universal themes of greed and ambition can be adapted to an enormous range of settings, but for me the 1960s East End gangsters premise which had seemed so promising just didn't pay off. There were some strong performances and the notoriously difficult eye-gouging scene was impressively depraved and gory, but at a certain point the production just seemed to lose its way. Rather than the emotional punch the end is supposed to provide, this Lear's eventual denouement left us feeling only relief.

Find out more about the Theatre Royal and their upcoming attractions here.