Lear not as you know it but still traditional

MELBOURNE’S Malthouse Theatre will stage an Aboriginal adaptation of King Lear next year, undaunted by the storm created by Melbourne Theatre Company’s recent “gender-blind” take on the Shakespeare classic.

The Shadow King, an Aboriginal-language production created by Michael Kantor and the play’s star Tom E. Lewis, will be staged in October next year.

Malthouse artistic director and dramaturg Marion Potts said the wide-ranging criticism last July of MTC’s Queen Lear — most of which was aimed at director and dramaturg Rachel McDonald’s interpretation of the original — “hasn’t been part of our consideration at all”.

“One of the things about a classical text is its ability to carry a number of different meanings: in this case it’s an Aboriginal meaning,” she said.

“This production and the concerns it’s likely to be dealing with will be very different to the ones dealt with in (the MTC) production.”

Queen Lear, with renowned actress Robyn Nevin as the tyrannical monarch, was savaged by critics, including The Australian’s Chris Boyd, who said, among other things, “the verse and meaning of the play have been massacred”.

Lewis, star of 1978 film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, will play Lear alongside Jim Bani (Mabo) and Shareena Clanton in an all-Aboriginal cast.

“Michael (Kantor) rang me up and said ‘We have the crown here, and it’s going on your head’,” Lewis said from Darwin yesterday. “I laughed and said, ‘Well that’s a privilege but how do I do it?’ I mean, this is just enormous. An enormous responsibility. I’m really looking forward to it.”

The production, four years in the making, is being created in consultation with indigenous communities around the country.

Lewis said the Lear story, with its struggles over land and power, is in many ways the story of Aboriginal Australia.

Potts agreed. “This is very much about our relationship towards the land and attitudes towards the land that prove to be divisive,” she said. “It feels like a story that is relevant to Australia right now.”

Potts, who unveiled Malthouse’s 2013 program last night, also sees parallels between the language of Shakespeare and Aboriginal tongues, many of which are at risk of being lost forever.

“Shakespeare acts as metaphor for the erosion of other languages and the disintegration of culture, so we’ll use Shakespeare maybe once or twice in this production, to bookend it, but it’s about returning to (Aboriginal) languages,” she said.