In Shakespeare's writing, and in this production, the complete desolation of the play is transfigured by beauty. The language is beautiful — it's easy to forget that Lear has some of Shakespeare's best poetry — and the direction creates many lovely moments, almost like old-fashioned tableaux. On the blasted heath, when Lear begins to sympathise with cold, mad, Poor Tom, and crouches close to him near the ground, Jacobi slowly puts out his hand towards him, in a long, hesitant, tender gesture, somehow expressing all the ambiguities in the maddened king's mind in a way that transcends the pity of it. It is exquisite to look at. On several occasions, characters hold each other in briefly sustained positions as if in a sort of dance. They embrace and stroke each other's hair at moments of fellow-feeling which have the same visual power.
And there was something inspired about the final scene in which Kent and Edgar cradle the dead Lear, above Cordelia's body. Lear is in shroud-like white, the others in black, and the geometry of their positions, with the hopeless anguish of the moment, suggest — in this most un-Christian of plays — a very beautiful Pietà. If there is any redemption in Lear, it is through truth — including self-knowledge — and beauty.
Desolation lies at the heart of Alan Ayckbourn's suburban dramas too, though perhaps with even less hope of redemption than in Lear. All the same, they are often hog-whimperingly funny. At Season's Greetings, superbly directed by Marianne Elliott at the Lyttelton, the audience, including me, roared helplessly with laughter. Ayckbourn loves writing plays set at Christmas. It offers the perfect excuse for forcing together for three days a group of people who cannot stand each other or the misery of their relationships — a suburban version of the tempest on the blasted heath, perhaps.
In Season's Greetings, various unhappy couples and lonely people come together out of a sense of duty to make each other wretched, as they know they will. They struggle in their well-meaning festive imprisonment, with painfully suppressed rage. L'enfer, c'est les autres à Noël: this is an existentialist play too, with the host and hostess bleakly facing their empty life at the end.
However the witty home truths and hilarious slapstick and pratfalls along the way are very uplifting: you've got to laugh.
There are several physical tours de force, which had me almost crying with laughter: a heavily pregnant woman manoeuvres her drunken husband to bed, via a dangerous dance of death round the Christmas tree; the guest's seduction of the hostess under the same tree suddenly sets off a monstrous Babel of noisy children's toys, flashing Christmas lights and blaring Santa music, waking up everyone to general outrage. This is a triumph of comic timing and comic physical skills, and very cheering at this testing time of year.
