The Shackled King

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Shackled King Jennifer Moss Waghorn The Shackled King Presented by John Casken and Counterpoise as a pre-recorded broadcast via YouTube for the online conference Shakespeare and Music: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives, hosted by the Universities of Manchester and Huddersfield, and the Royal Music Association (private performance; world premiere). 10–11 December 2020. Written and composed by John Casken, using extracts from William Shakespeare’s King Lear. Audio and video footage edited by Patrick Allen. Instrumental ensemble Counterpoise directed by Barry Millington. Studio space provided by the English National Opera. With Sir John Tomlinson (bass; King Lear), Rozanna Madylus (mezzo-soprano; Cordelia/Goneril/Regan/Fool), and the Counterpoint ensemble: Fenella Humphreys (violin), Deborah Calland (trumpet), Kyle Horch (saxophone), and Yshani Perinpanayagam (piano). Sometimes the most vivid renderings of chaos and uncontrollable emotion through art come from absolute precision—from expression distilled to a razor-sharp edge. In The Shackled King, composer John Casken took the story of Shakespeare’s King Lear and did exactly this, drawing on the formidable ensemble skills of Sir John Tomlinson, Rozanna Madylus, and Counterpoise. Casken’s “chamber opera” focused absolutely on Lear and Cordelia, exploring Lear’s various shackles: his struggles with madness, his responsibility and grief for the fractured relationship with Cordelia, and ultimately their literal imprisonment and her death. Except for brief appearances by the Fool, Goneril, and Regan, everything else was stripped away, including Kent’s involvement and the Gloucester subplot; the production was an intense fifty minutes long. Sections of text from King Lear were underscored or set to music out of sequence, providing concentrated episodic snapshots of moments throughout the play, but framed within and always returning to the prison environment shared by Lear and Cordelia by the final scene. Originally intended for live performance, The Shackled King was rapidly rehearsed and adapted for performance to camera following social [End Page 313] distancing guidelines. It was filmed in a rehearsal studio space using two chairs and a table for a set, and with minimal costuming, which involved single signifiers (a hat or blanket) to denote Madylus’s rapid character changes. Movement was limited and stylized within the stripped-back stage space. A great deal was done with very little, and this minimalism meant that everything was primarily shaped and expressed through instrumental music, song, and speech. Rhythm and pitch placement afforded by the standard written language of musical notation allows for greater precision than a speech-only play text; Casken went further, developing a sliding scale of spoken to sung text with Counterpoise. This ranged from speech performed freely within temporal “boxes,” through to rhythmic or pitched speech, sprechgesang and recitative styles, and fully sung words. While such a precise performance vocabulary could be constrictive in less expert hands, the effect in The Shackled King was to marry the language and verse rhythms of Lear to a rich palette of sounds from a small and relatively unusual combination of instruments (violin, trumpet, saxophone, and piano), sculpting the sounds of disorder and chaos with almost invisibly exact note placements. I was surprised and extremely impressed to discover that the four instrumentalists and two singers had performed without a conductor or musical director leading them through the cues and tempo changes, which were pin-sharp. The ensemble was small but versatile in the soundscapes it produced; it was most effective in moments of contrast between expressions of characters or mood, such as the representations of the three sisters when asked to express their filial love. Goneril’s magisterial, soaring sung speech was accompanied by uneasy violin glissando and trumpet, creating a disorientating feeling of empty space within the music. Regan’s sounded more like siren song, accompanied by voluptuous saxophone and reaching a climactic discord on “your dear highness’ love.” Cordelia was accompanied first by stabs on the piano, accentuating her stark “nothing,” before a higher sustained trumpet and violin refrain over a sweeter sung passage, feeling more sincere in its expression of sentiment through more comfortingly regular rhythms. Percussion was also used intermittently. The Fool was accompanied by a harsh rattle, and dry claves were played at the start of every section as the piece returned to the prison...