On a mild summer evening in the ivy-clad courtyard of The Eleventh Hour's headquarters in Fitzroy, it's not difficult to think that you have suddenly been transported to a different era. The lawn is studded with marquees; a door behind the temporary bar opens teasingly to a private house with shuttered upstairs windows, which you can't help but imagine must look like something painted by Bonnard or Vuillard. Even your host, artistic director William Henderson, could have stepped out of a daguerreotype.

Maybe it's Europe circa 1912, before world war and revolution wracked the planet, when a disparate bunch of radical artists were creating something that would be called "modernism". Only it's Melbourne 2011: a different place, a different era. Given the present sense of social urgency, perhaps it's not surprising that so many artists are looking to the modernism that flowered as the anxieties of its times thickened and convulsed, picking up the threads of experiment and discovery and attempting to make something new of them. Certainly, this investigation is a crucial part of The Eleventh Hour's eclectic, intelligent theatre, and why they're one of Melbourne's must see companies.


This time, instead of reworking classic texts, The Eleventh Hour presents a new play by David Tredinnick, who is better known as an accomplished actor. Song of the Bleeding Throat is described as a "burlesque", meaning its older sense of comic parody rather than strip-tease. And it's a fascinating beast indeed. Tredinnick is parodying ideas, in particular some of the formative 19th century notions behind contemporary Britain and America. His burlesque features such notables as the historian and social commentator Thomas Carlyle; his wife, Jane Welch (and their dog Nero), Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth and the Statue of Liberty.

The text is foremost a torrent of words. Tredinnick has created a bizarrely Beckettian collage out of quotations and almost-quotations from public figures ranging from PT Barnum to Marx: statements about empire and revolution jostle with domestic intrigues, fancies, poems and obscene malapropism. The language of high oratory or Romantic poetry is continually exploded by the decay and weakness of the body: Carlyle (Richard Bligh) is tormented by his bowels, Welch (Anne Browning) is a drug addict, Nero the dog (James Saunders) is beaten within an inch of his life, Lincoln (Neil Pigot) is dying (or dead). The only personage who seems above all this bodily flux is Whitman.

Each phrase is buffed to a dark lustre. Everyone speaks as if they all wrote out their thoughts in a goose-quill before uttering them. It's about as far as it is possible to get from the conventions of contemporary theatre: this is a text that has little truck with ideas of character or narrative. Its characters are symbols, mouthpieces, carefully constructed puppets - parodies, as Tredinnick claims. But parodies of what? There are all the obvious answers - they parody the vanity of intellectual achievement in the face of death; the selective consciousness of heart-stirring cries for liberty and revolution that ignores, say, those who happen to possess black skin; the tragic gap between ideal and reality (the play itself is prefaced by a quote from the greatest pragmatist of them all, Josef Stalin).

But most of all it seems to me that it parodies language itself. Language, which promises so much, here collapses inward on itself, revealing a pile of rubble that stinks of death, or is anerotically absorbed in the cultural body. The production often forbids us easy access to listening: Nero stutters, the Carlyles speak in Scots accents. Even its visionary clarities decay: Whitman's magnificent "I sing the body electric" becomes a narcissistic anthem in the musical Fame. The only recourse at the end is the solitary voice, Whitman's "song of the bleeding throat", which is cut off in mid-sentence.

This density of meaning and linguistic relations means that if you don't pay close attention, you will soon be quite lost. Even if you do, it's easy to feel that, as Lincoln says at one point, "I’m trying to blaze a way through this swamp". The weight of this orotund 19th century language, almost completely unleavened by contemporary brevity, often lies heavy. The danger of employing this diction is that it attenuates the work's political clout: what do all these words have to do with Now?

If it's anything, Song the Bleeding Throat is an overtly political work, at once exploring and mocking the formative nationalism of our time, US patriotism. Through the figure of Carlyle, a major Romantic essayist and thinker, it picks up European revolution and imperialism, connecting these ideals to the hopes and betrayals of the brash democratic exercise in America. Yet this is an oblique tracing, more a kind of animating of ghosts which still colour the assumptions behind so much public speech.

I find myself oscillating between feeling on the one hand that the text rings its changes very successfully, and on the other thinking that all this luxuriant excess of language ends up obscuring itself, that there is, in short, too much of it. (Certainly, coming from a school that prefers poetry of the theatre to poetry in the theatre, I think there's a little too much poetry). Its ideas are in fact often presented with an unsettling clarity, but the whole seems too much jostle. I suspect that there is a myopia of focus, an obsessive close-up attention that forgets the larger architecture of the play's argument and diffuses its point. It's common to claim that less is more, and it's not always true; but in this case, I think it might have been.

Perhaps the only director in Melbourne who could tackle a text like this is Brian Lipson, whose theatrical imagination is as baroque and elliptical as the playwright's. The production is as finely polished as the text itself: it features astonishingly disciplined and, frankly, riveting performances from its cast, although Neil Pigot as Abe Lincoln is the stand-out. The alienations in the text are realised in the theatre with a playful theatricality: in the first half, the three characters are formally placed as in a portrait (the staging is in fact based on a famous portrait of the Carlyles at home), with Nero - an English shepherd dog in the painting - becoming a working class lad in a cloth cap. In the second half, in a stunning coup de theatre, the entire space is reversed, and the audience finds itself looking up at the death bed of Lincoln.

There is no moment that doesn't feel utterly worked, down to the least gesture: even the twilight shading to darkness through the windows outside. And it glints with a dark humour that segues to sheer playfulness: when Carlyle decides to light a spill from the fire, for instance, and irritably summons the dogsbody/author to crouch behind the empty mantelpiece with a lighter. There are theatrical moments which are as good as anything you'll see, seriously, but somehow it meanders, creating palpable longueurs. I kept thinking of a necklace, a string of marvellous pearls with no string. And yet, again, this isn't wholly true.

It's often very funny, but underneath the whole is a vein of pure seriousness that harks back to those 20th century modernists, in particular the formalist experiments of Piscator and Meyerhold. Maybe my reservations exist in its timeliness. It was odd to watch this play last week, as the popular revolution in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East lit a more violent flame beneath the pieties that Song of the Bleeding Throat explores. Suddenly these ideas - democracy, revolution and their betrayals - seem invested with more urgent feeling and moment than seems adequate to burlesque. But then again, the song of the bleeding throat is precisely what is consciously elided in the play: its concern is with everything that silences that song. In any case, this is certainly an intriguing work, uncompromising and painstakingly realised, and worth seeing for that alone. Definitely not for those who like their theatre on a plate.

Picture: Neil Pigot as Lincoln in Song of the Bleeding Throat.

Song of the Bleeding Throat, by David Tredinnick, directed by Brian Lipson. Design by Brian Lipson and Alexis George, costumes by Alexis George, lighting by Niklas Pajanti and Nicola Andrews. With Richard Blight, Anne Browning, James Saunders and Neil Pigot. The Eleventh Hour, 170 Leicester St, Fitzroy, until February 12.

Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding. Because of its intimate and personal nature it is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research. But, whatever our personal feelings may be, our assigned mission as psychologists is to analyze all facets of human and animal behavior into their component variables. So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in this mission.

The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists. But of greater concern is the fact that psychologists tend to give progressively less attention to a motive which pervades our entire lives. Psychologists, at least psychologists who write textbooks, not only show no interest in the origin and development of love or affection, but they seem to be unaware of its very existence.



So begins Harry Harlow's classic paper The Nature of Love, delivered to the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in Washington DC in 1958. And so begins too The Harry Harlow Project, James Saunders' fascinating theatrical examination of Harlow's controversial experiments on baby rhesus monkeys.

The irony - more, the perversity - of Harlow's experiments is that, while they were driven by Harlow's almost lyrically expressed desire to understand something as unscientific as love, they were exemplary in their cruelty. He radically demonstrated the importance of maternal love - the security of physical affection - to the physical and psychological development of an infant by showing what happened to monkeys that received no affection and no socialisation. The result, unsurprisingly, was psychotic monkeys.

Then he went further, producing babies by forcing female monkeys raised in isolation - and who were so asocial they couldn't mate - into what he unblinkingly called his "rape pack", a wire restraining device which he used to force-mate females. Finally, he created his most notorious experiment,the "pit of despair", a cage of total isolation in which monkeys were sometimes confined for two years, with which he deliberately engineered clinical depression.

Aside from their ingenious cruelty, it's not difficult to discern a disturbing subtext of misogyny beneath some of these experiments: Harlow's "hostile mother", a machine of teeth and spikes that shot cold air on the unfortunate babies, seems like a caricature of a pathology. Yet these experiments revolutionised contemporary attitudes towards child rearing, changing practice in orphanages and rewriting the book on infant psychology. And he initiates a theory of fatherhood - "It is cheering ... to realize that the American male is physically endowed with all the really essential equipment to compete with the American female on equal terms in one essential activity: the rearing of infants," he noted at the end of his paper - which still has reverberations today.

In Harlow's day, childrearing authorities recommended that one should never kiss a child good night, but shake his or her hand. A generation of mothers listened in anguish to their crying babies, sure that should they obey their instincts and comfort them, they should be bad mothers. Harlow changed all that, legitimising human affection as more than mere "indulgence". For all that, it's hard to contemplate these experiments with any sense of ease. And it's hard to escape the thought that, by scientifically proving that maternal love was necessary to develop a healthy child, Harlow convinced the men in white coats of wisdoms that women in so-called "primitive" societies have known since, well, the beginning of time.

It's an ambiguous heritage, and James Saunders accesses much of its bleak emotional resonance in The Harry Harlow Project, which manages to be at once harrowing and funny without either cancelling the other out. The stage becomes a slapstick simulacra of Harlow's psyche, with some deft video work by Martyn Coutts and a subliminally disturbing score by Kelly Ryall framing a bravura performance by Saunders. The conceit - a just one, since in later life Harlow had ECG treatment for depression - is that in his increasingly sadistic experiments Harlow is enacting his own mental distress.

As a theatrical evocation of the hell of alienation, parts of this show are hard to beat. The stage - a white box scattered with minimal props - is fronted by sound and lighting boards, with the artists, their backs to the audience, orchestrating the show like lab technicians. A sequence where the actor interacts with his life-size projection - reaching out, like Michelangelo's God, to his fleshly human image, but finally unable to touch - is masterly. It's set up by an earlier sequence where Saunders is interviewed by a television, a device that works seamlessly through split-second timing but which here is comedic. Saunders' performance invokes the damaged monkeys through physical movement, which itself also presages Harlow's death through Parkinson's disease.

The narrative is told through fragmentary episodes that examine the experiments in tandem with glimpses of Harlow's personal life. At one point Saunders puts on a wig and becomes his own biographer; at another, he becomes Harlow's son. Curiously, in both these enactments he doesn't cease to be Harry Harlow: these other characters seem like mere projections. Perhaps what I found most interesting is how Lipson's direction coins a kind of dramaturgy of anxiety: from the beginning the comedy is uneasy, and despite the explosive release of laughter the tension subliminally winches up, not permitting any release, until the show is over. It left me with all that anxiety still in my body, bleeding out a slow release over the following days.

Perhaps because its black and white aesthetic so successfully evokes the sixties, it got me in personal places that I wouldn't have predicted from its set-up or subject. It made me think of how my father was sent to boarding school when he was four years old, and of my mother's unhappiness, raising babies alone in a mining village at the same time as Harlow was torturing monkeys. It made me think of the post-war scientist-god, certain that all human knowledge can be dissected and measured, sure in his march towards the ultimate good of Progress. It made me ponder again how such smart animals as human beings can get things so wrong.

Picture: James Saunders as Harry Harlow. The Harry Harlow Project, written and performed by James Saunders, directed and designed by Brian Lipson. Composition and sound design by Kelly Ryall, video art by Martyn Coutts, dramaturgy by Kate Sulan. Full Tilt, Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre until December 5.

A Large Attendance in the Antechamber, written, designed and performed by Mr Brian Lipson and Sir Francis Galton. Tower Theatre @ The CUB Malthouse until December 9. Bookings: 9685 5111

Twist my arm even slightly, and I’ll break down and admit it: Ms TN is an unabashed fan of Mr Brian Lipson. His theatrical imagination has amused, intrigued and astonished me so much over the past three years that I’ve awarded him the Theatre Notes Seal of Approval (Class #1), a very pretty trinket that has myriad applications (eg, as a bath plug, a fishtank accessory or a very fetching hat). But up to now (I’ll whisper it), I haven’t seen his best known work.


A Large Attendance in the Antechamber premiered in 2000 and has had several seasons here, gathering enthusiastic praise along the way, as well as touring the festival circuit around the world. It even has its own Wikipedia page. Yet somehow, despite the glowing word of mouth, I missed it every time. This Malthouse season allows such delinquents as myself to catch up, and it seems I am not alone: the initial season booked out more than six months ago, and has been extended. Though it could be that it’s been booked out by those who want to see it again.

A Large Attendance in the Antechamber is a theatrical conceit concerning Sir Francis Galton, Victorian genius, founder of the controversial science of eugenics, discoverer of the anti-cyclone, inventor of the silent dogwhistle and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton had the highest IQ ever recorded, though it seems that for all his brilliance, he lacked a little in what these days is called “emotional intelligence”. But this is as far from worthy biography as it is possible to get. Part scientific lecture, part séance, part slapstick and part theatrical essay, it’s riveting and intelligent theatre.

Lipson has made a kind of theatrical machine with which he investigates the workings of Galton’s mind. The title comes from a suggestive note of Galton’s, quoted in the program, in which he describes how he thinks. “There seems to be a presence-chamber in my mind where full consciousness holds court, and where two or three ideas are at the same time in audience,” he says. “And an antechamber full of more or less allied ideas, which is situated just beyond the full ken of consciousness…. The successful progression of thought appears to depend, first, on a large attendance in the antechamber.”

It’s a striking description that suggests the possible anarchy of the subconscious (those attendees in the antechamber are often a ragged and disreputable lot). The connection to Berggasse 19, Lipson’s wonderful conceit about Freud's psychoanalysis, is immediately obvious. Both works have a fascination with the ellipses and eruptions of the subconscious, and both are intricately designed shows with an obsession with objects. The set for Antechamber seems to be have been made out of a packing case, the interior of which is a simulacrum of Galton’s study, complete with oil lamps, ceiling rose, hat stand, pictures and strange instruments that are produced, like rabbits out of a hat, out of the crammed interior.

Galton – complete with sideburns, Victorian dress and high forehead – is waiting for us as we arrive, seated in his absurd box. When he begins to speak, it is to apologise for what he considers an unsatisfactory presentation – he is being impersonated by an actor. And so begins the long series of conflicts between Sir Francis Galton – the speaker – and his rebellious subconscious, the actor Mr Lipson, who clearly is outraged by some of Galton's ideas.

It’s a conflict that escalates throughout the show with increasing absurdity: since it is Galton who, as it were, holds court, Lipson’s presence is reduced to subversive gestures – notes pinned to Galton’s back perhaps, or suspended from a helium balloon. At one point, he invents a ridiculous mechanism by which to introduce the actor without actually breaking the conceit by speaking his name; at another, he arrests himself; at another we are presented what is surely the most devastating parody of blackface I have seen, fatally undermining Galton's account of his adventures with the Hottentots in Africa.

The ostensible subject matter – a kind of whistle-stop tour of Galton’s achievements – is fascinating in its own right. Galton lectures on the necessity for selective breeding to achieve the potential of the human race, on ideal female beauty and on how to make a perfect cup of tea. He gives a slideshow in which he demonstrates the creation of a virtual woman – a woman created with the new photographic technology out of the features of different sisters. Using the same technique, he creates a generic image of the "Jewish type". And later, underlining the instablility of performance, he melds Lipson’s face and his own photographic image to create a third creature, the fiction being created before our eyes in the theatre.

It was, of course, Galton's idea of eugenics, or selective breeding, which was picked up and obscenely taken to its logical conclusion by the Nazis. In this show, it's clear how the idea stems out of the British class system (a certain class has always insisted that its sons and daughters, like its horses, exhibit "good breeding"). Our - and Lipson's - awareness of this darker subtext gives a sharp and discomforting edge to Galton's eccentricities. Galton was of his time: racist, sexist, a firm believer in the Victorian virtues of categorisation, the imperial virtues of discovery and the superior qualities of the British male.

For all its slapstick subversion, Lipson's show evades mere caricature. Its playfulness, a series of mirrors within mirrors within mirrors, is deeply serious: it asks us to be conscious of the artifice of theatre, and becomes ultimately a metaphor for the performances and masks of the self. Beneath Lipson's portrayal is a constant and uneasy subtext of madness, an unexpressed pain that occasionally breaks the surface in some throwaway image of Galton's (his description of sanity, for instance, as a tabletop surface with no safety rails).

In its final few moments the entire theatrical conceit is dismantled before our eyes, and leaves us unsure whether we are looking at Sir Francis Galton or Mr Brian Lipson. Or perhaps we are given a glimpse of someone else, a man denuded of all titles and labels and masks, a strangely anonymous human being who is simply exhausted at the end of a demanding performance and, trapped in the gaze of his audience, is unsure how to finish it.

It's one of those moments when the artifice of theatre becomes a means of revelation; although a very different kind of theatrical epiphany, it's not so far from Lear's vision in the midst of storm, in which man, stripped of his hubristic self-importance as the centre of the universe, is revealed to be only "a poor, bare, fork'd animal". It's the kind of risk that can only be ventured by an actor as accomplished as Mr Lipson. It might require all his skills to get there, but this kind of exposure is not about the art or the craft of acting, but about the sort of courage that is prepared to destroy both.

Picture: Brian Lipson in A Large Attendance in the Antechamber. Photo: Lisa Tomasetti

King Lear by William Shakespeare, directed by Brian Lipson. Set design by Noami Wong, costumes by Jessica Daly, lighting design by Tom Willis, A/V design by Martyn Coutts. With Ben Hjorth, Celia Mitchell, Julia Markowski, Joanne Trentini, Brendan McCallum, Anthony Winnick, Gerard Lane, Cameron Moore, Brett Christian, Stuart Bowden, Tim Ross and Grant Foulkes. Victorian College of the Arts Company 2007 @ Space 28, 28 Dodds St, Southbank until November 6. Bookings: online or 9685 9234

A student production of King Lear is the sort of prospect that generally makes a critic mutter hasty excuses and flee for the exit. I can’t think of a play less hospitable to youthfulness and more likely to expose its performers to the consequences of biting off more than they can chew. One has premonitions of adhesive beards, overblown gestures and a general sensation of creeping embarrassment and boredom.

But a VCA student production directed by Brian Lipson is another thing altogether. VCA shows are always worth a look – they have the resources, human, imaginative and material, to mount ambitious theatrical experiments that are impossible in other venues. It's worth noting here that in repertoire with the Lear season are productions of Ibsen’s A Doll House, directed by Daniel Schlusser, and Yes, adapted from the film by Sally Potter and directed by Tanya Gerstle. I can't make Yes, and won't see A Doll's House until Saturday, so I'm alerting you now: if you miss them, don't blame me.


When I saw that Lipson had chosen to direct this play for Company 2007, I was consumed by curiosity. Whether it worked or not, it was sure to be interesting: Lipson is one of the most restlessly intelligent theatrical imaginations in this country, and his VCA production of Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker was one of my highlights of 2006. And while I don’t think this production quite reached the dizzy heights of The Skriker, it was pretty damned impressive. In terms of liveliness, humour, imagination, passion and – perhaps most interestingly – fidelity to the text, it beat the much hyped RSC production hollow, and at a tenth of the price.

Lipson’s conceit is to stage King Lear as a drama of contemporary celebrity culture. As he says in his director’s notes, noting the premiere of King Lear before James I in 1603, “the very public nature of the humiliations of Cordelia, Kent and Lear in the early part of the play remind me strongly of the kind of thing that happens so publicly nowadays in a TV show like Jerry Springer or Judge Judy. In addition, most of the characters in King Lear would have been perceived by their first audience as ‘celebrities’.… There is a strong element of schadenfreude in seeing the glamorous disgrace themselves that is not normally apparent in modern productions.”

As Bell Shakespeare has demonstrated so often, it is wise to be cautious about contemporising Shakespeare: it seldom works. The usual effect is to jam contemporary “relevance” uncomfortably onto the text, like an ill-fitting suit that gets more and more crumpled as the play winds up to its climax. One that indutibly works is Richard Eyre’s Richard III, starring Ian McKellen, in which the action is transposed to a fantasy 1930s Fascist Britain: the metaphor is at once loose and profound enough to escape the trap of literalness. In some ways, King Lear reminded me of that adaptation, but here the metaphor goes deeper, into the nature of performance and spectacle itself.

Lipson has elected to perform the entire text (it’s usually judiciously edited for performance), with brief intervals between the five acts. Aside from making this a long evening (four and a half hours), it makes you very aware of the structure of the play, and changes its focus and balance: minor characters and incidents are given more emphasis, and the texture of the play is much more various. One interesting aspect is that the double narrative of family betrayal is foregrounded. Edmund (Tim Ross) is visible on stage for the entire play; when he is not performing, he sits slumped at a table on the end stage, a sinisterly glamorous avatar over the action. Lipson’s endlessly imaginative direction, which surely uses every inch of Space 28 (and quite a lot of the space outside the theatre), gives this extra complexity vivid life. By the end of this densely-textured, intriguing production, I felt I had really seen the play.

When you enter the theatre, it’s decked out as if for an awards ceremony. It’s filled with circular tables, each with a table-cloth and speccy centrepiece – a triangle representing the kingdom – decked with candles. At one end is a stage, on which are more tables, and a microphone. A man with a digital camera roams the room, videoing audience members and actors in the dressing rooms. Their images are projected onto huge screens either side of the space. There’s a bar to the side where you can buy wine. The protagonists are formally dressed “celebrities”, and enter like stars coming up the red carpet, with the video our voyeur, practically peering up their noses.

Lear's (Ben Hjorth) division of his kingdom between his daughters is performed as an Oscar acceptance speech, with Goneril (Celia Mitchell) and Regan (Julia Markowski) unfolding pre-prepared speeches. But when Cordelia (Joanne Trentini) refuses to play the game, the action moves off the stage and into the audience: Lear’s angry vanity, played with icy restraint by Hjorth, is here driven by public embarrassment.

This awareness of lives played out in the public gaze is highlighted through the first two acts: the audience is, like the servants and other lowly denizens of the kingdom, fascinated spectators of the downfall of the powerful. (One remembers that in the French court, the public was able to watch royalty dress and eat: their most private moments were open to the public gaze). But gradually the stage is dismantled, until – after a 10-minute interval counted down electronically on the hanging screens – by the third act we are back in a theatre, ranged around three sides of a huge empty space, on which are played out the private outcomes of these earlier public actions. For Act V, the public sorting out of the battles, alarums and intrigues of the previous four, we are back at the tables.

This constant shifting of perspective makes the production fascinating: the action might erupt from beneath your table, or around it, or move outdoors, or overhead among the lights, or in mercilessly intimate close-up on the screens. You can never escape the fact that you are witnessing an act of theatre, a thing of artifice and invention, of masking and unmasking. One convention I especially liked was how actors used the microphone when making asides, stepping out of the imagined reality of the scene and speaking their amplified confidences to the audience.

But how did the play fare through this intricate web of alienation and intimacy? Remarkably well, I thought: the play preserves its tragedy and power. Lear’s appearance with the hanged Cordelia in Act V is a coup de theatre. The unwatchable scene of atrocity when Gloucester’s (Brett Christian’s) eyes are plucked out by Cornwall (Anthony Winnick) was genuinely horrific. In their night attire – luxurious red dressing gown and silky red nightie – Cornwall and Regan (Julia Markowski) are the image of empty, privileged amorality. For them, the transgression of mutilating their host is exciting, hilarious, sexually arousing. The act itself, performed with a spoon that Regan has been using to eat a dainty dessert out of a glass, is brilliant grande guignol, but Gloucester’s scream goes to the heart.

There were longeuers – surprisingly few, however, and mostly in Act IV. And not everything worked: the storm scene. effectively sounded by the Fool (Cameron Moore) at the microphone as ear-splitting beat box effects, suffered from its amplification: at that point for me it was very important to know exactly where Lear was in the theatre, and for a short time I actually thought his lines were being said by the Fool (bold, I thought, in a puzzled fashion, until I tracked Lear down…)

The performances demonstrate the talents, skills and energies of this VCA intake: there’s no moment where you wince and wish for a “proper” cast. I was particularly impressed by Cameron Moore as the Fool – a remarkable performance – Brett Christian’s authoritative Gloucester, Tim Ross’s elegantly predatory Edmund and Joanne Trentini’s interestingly martial (and certainly not low-voiced) Cordelia.

Ben Hjorth was on a hiding to nothing in the role of Lear, which is frankly an impossible ask: age is something no talent can fake. That he pulls it off creditably, in a performance strong on restraint and intelligence, is a considerable tribute; that he manages to generate scenes of real feeling and a moment – the first speech where he pleads not to go mad – where I went cold with sudden, prescient horror, is more than that. It will probably be worth waiting the four decades or so until he’s actually old enough to do the role.

Picture: Ben Hjorth as Lear. Photo: Jeff Busby