Theatre reviews: Lear | Big Bad Riding Hood

Big Bad Riding Hood, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★

This summer weekend, Shakespeare fans in Scotland have a rare chance to feast on three fine and very different productions of the Bard’s work. In the Glasgow Botanics, there’s a fierce 100-minute Othello directed by Gordon Barr, while his associate Jennifer Dick offers a delightfully daft and lovestruck outdoor Twelfth Night.

And meanwhile at Pitlochry – with a roll of creative thunder – leading Scottish actress Maureen Beattie takes the stage as a female Lear, in Finn den Hertog’s stunning full-length production of Shakespeare’s most astonishing tragedy; a tale of social, political, familial and mental breakdown that stares into a rare abyss of personal and moral extinction, and yet gleams and sings to the end, with a poetry that sometimes feels fine enough – even today – to redeem a whole broken world.

The play begins, famously, with the ageing monarch’s sudden decision to step down from the throne, dividing the kingdom among her three daughters. It’s a decision that in itself calls Lear’s judgment into question; and by the time the scene is played out at Pitlochry – on Emma Bailey’s grand dust-sheeted set – we are left in no doubt that the queen, while still elegant and commanding, is no longer fully herself.

The wild irrational rage with which she lashes out at her youngest and favourite child Cordelia, after she refuses to mimic her sisters’ insincere speeches of devotion, shocks even the queen’s closest advisors. And although most productions of Lear now highlight the old monarch’s growing dementia, from this moment both Maureen Beattie’s extraordinary performance, and Den Hertog’s bold production, pursue her story of mental breakdown through the very fabric and detail of Shakespeare’s drama and poetry, with an intimacy and intensity as rare as it is heartbreaking.

Around Lear, meanwhile, true evil stalks the world, as her elder daughters Goneril and Regan become monsters of violence and cruelty; while closer to her, Forbes Masson as Gloucester, Dylan Read as Edgar, Ailsa Davidson as Cordelia, and a memorable Mercy Ojelade as Kent, have space to offer more nuance and poetry.

In the end, though, what is most striking about this Lear is how the whole production – from the ensemble acting, through the often spectacular design and lighting, to Mark Melville’s brooding soundscape – not only supports Maureen Beattie’s remarkable leading performance, but sustains an unfailing momentum and coherence of its own; in a production that serves as a vital calling-card not only for Finn Den Hertog as a director, and for this fine company of actors and theatre-makers, but for Pitlochry itself, as a home for world-class Shakespeare, in the Perthshire hills.

In Glasgow, meanwhile, the Oran Mor summer pantomime also features a battle between good and evil, and a central female figure in an impressive wig; unlike Lear though, Gary McNair's new tale of threatened junk property development in the Glasgow Botanics is not quite a classic, even among Oran Mor pantos.

McNair, who directs and writes, seems to forget the basic rule that in the world of pantomime, an uncomplicated moral story, clearly and uncynically told, is the backbone of any successful show; and that complex meta-theatrical layers must never be allowed to distract from it, even if they’re good for the odd joke.

If the plot and script are far too self-consciously “convoluted” though, there’s still plenty to enjoy in George Drennan’s antics as Grannie the Dame and Tyler Collins’s vocally impressive appearance as a Donald Trump-like trio of greedy property developers known as the Three Little Pigs, all backed by Jo Freer, Jamie Marie Leary and Cole Stewart in other roles. And if the story’s media politics are inserted into the narrative at an odd angle, the show’s central point is still well made; that the truth about the Big Bad Wolf is that there is no wolf – just real bad guys who will go to any lengths, to make you believe that there is.

Lear at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 1 August; Big Bad Riding Hood at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 19 July