Haring Lear (2012)
Direction:
Nonon Padilla
Adaptation:
Bienvenido Lumbera
Production Design:
Gino Gonzales
Cast:
Photos by Jojit Lorenzo courtesy of the PETA Facebook Page.
Videos
PETA uploaded a series of teaser videos for the 2012 production.
JackTV’s Gatecrash promoted the production for a wider audience not only by defining the WhoWhatWhere’s of PETA’s Haring Lear, but also by featuring spectacular and perhaps shocking scenes from the play, thus emphasizing its entertainment value.
RPN9 featured Haring Lear in their news segment, Spotlight. The production was described as a “risky, creative, musical Shakespearean interpretation.” Director Nonon Padilla, in the brief interview, explained how the staging makes use of Brechtian “alienation effects,” and how the characters’ shaved heads give an effect of post-nuclear war physical deterioration.
Reviews
Shakespeare in Black and White
by Mario A. Hernando | The Philippine Star
It is a monumental, masterful stage production of one of William Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies… Padilla quotes Lumbera as saying that this version of King Lear is a “textual adaptation rather than a straightforward translation.” Lumbera says this allows the actors to deliver the Tagalog/Filipino lines with ease and the Filipino audience to understand them better, even if the adaptation may unavoidably depart from so-called “faithful translation.” – Hernando, Philippine Star
Teroy Guzman as Lear projects the commanding presence of the doomed King, and negotiates the long and complicated roads of his pitfalls and downfall. A curious feat: Guzman has a long, punishing aria as he curses the heavens while acting in the rain. We are sure that for both the actor and his character, it isn’t a glorious feeling, his shouting at clouds so dark up above while cool waters pour on his body unceasingly. – Hernando, Philippine Star
PETA stages King Lear in Filipino
by Walter Ang | The Philippine Daily Inquirer
“Originally, it’s set in prehistoric Britain,” says Padilla. “Shakespeare had very good reasons to set it in that time [instead of his own time] because he was trying to camouflage all of the touchy political issues about the [current] king. I thought it would be interesting to go the opposite. To set it in the future, a future that is as bleak as it was in barbaric or primitive times.”
“It is one of the mature plays of Shakespeare. It’s emotional and riveting,” he says.
“The play is all about legacy. It’s about leaving something behind. It’s about somebody in the grips of mortality and facing mortality. What do you leave behind? You can leave your material wealth, or you can leave your soul, your compassion. In ‘Lear,’ that’s what he learns. He learns to become human. It’s a running theme in Shakespeare, about how a man gets crushed by his own guilt, and ‘Lear’ is a prime example of that.” – Nonon Padilla quoted in the Philippine Daily Inquirer
by Katrina Stuart Santiago | GMAnews.com
It’s difficult after all not to be enamored by that stage to begin with. Looming large and dark with drama instead of dreariness, that set is able to capture notions of royalty and its undoing, without grand displays of wealth. In fact it renders this space familiar to some extent, like those epic koreanovelas unfolding before your eyes, men in skirts included. – Santiago
Instead of cowering in fear or getting lost in confusion, Guzman’s Lear is one that struggles in his fall from grace, and here is its gift: he is not weakling in the conventional sense, as he is one to kick and scream despite the inevitable outcome. Here is how Guzman is able to take us by the hand through Lear’s psyche, walking through storm and natural calamity, and you don’t want him to let you go. He comes out of it more sane – more real – than any of us. This Lear is by all counts quite awesome. – Santiago
…[R]ight here is a production that’s larger than any of those things, precisely because it references and refers to us, as audience and spectators, ones who cannot just be watching, removed and distant, but necessarily engaged and involved in a narrative written by Shakespeare in the 1600s, but is about third world Philippines in the year 2012. That to me is a feat in itself, one that director Nonon Padilla must take credit for. – Santiago
Nothing to fear but Lear himself
by Sam L. Marcelo | Business World
The Tempest scene, in particular, was a high point. Wooden scaffolding edged with fluorescent lights blinked in the background as Mr. Guzman, dressed in a monochromatic Hawaiian shirt, channeled Lear’s inner turmoil.
Despite his best efforts, the drenched actor was upstaged by a pair of props men who wielded their handheld showerheads with distracting gusto. At times, Mr. Guzman’s halting delivery was worrisome, making one wonder if Lear had lost his lines along with his mind. – Marcelo, Business World Online
What is one supposed to make of a half-naked man in a leather codpiece gyrating to a Noel Coward song, or an ending that includes both T.S. Eliot and “Lupang Hinirang”?
“Those are alienation effects,” explained Mr. Padilla.
…this distancing, a concept advanced by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht, saves the audience from participating in the emotional violence of Shakespeare’s tragedy. “You want them to think about it; you want them to contemplate,” he said, “and so you give them a pause, a breather.” – Marcelo, Business World Online
Stark, stylish, daring–an un-tragic ‘Lear’
by Gibbs Cadiz | Philippine Daily Inquirer
As the body count rises, Padilla appears to consciously pull back from the horrific to the ironic, allowing the scenes to stab not at bone-deep drama but at something more blackly comic, the audience’s uneasy titters at the Brechtian flourishes substituting for any easy surrender to grief. – Cadiz
Padilla’s point seems to be that “King Lear’s” story of greed, betrayal, power, politics, opportunism and family strife is as present now in this country as it was in Lear’s time. The same ills haunt the land and can rend it to bits just as easily, but for citizens who can learn to live by the tenets of their humanity and citizenship.
And there it is, the existential despair of “Lear” transposed into something more urgent and hopeful, the bleakness graced by faith in a redemption of some kind. Taking its cue from Eliot’s modernist masterpiece, Padilla’s re-imagining of this Shakespearean colossus gleams with intellectual rigor. But, at gut level, it can also leave one quite cold, baffled and unmoved. – Cadiz
Haring Lear (2015)
Direction:
Nonon Padilla
Adaptation:
Bienvenido Lumbera
Cast:
- Bernardo Bernardo – Haring Lear
- Abner Delina, Jr. – Cordelia/Lakayo
- George de Jesus III – Regan
- Buddy Caramat – Goneril
- Jack Yabut – Gloster
- Juliene Mendoza – Kent
- Jay Gonzaga – Edmundo
- Myke Salomon – Edgardo
- Renan Bustamante – Duke ng Albanya
- Roi Calilong – Hari ng Francia
- Jeff Hernandez – Duke ng Cornualles
- Gilbert Onida – Oswaldo
- Jason Barcial – Duke ng Burgonia
Reviews
Bernardo Bernardo’s tour de force, in an unrelentingly bleak ‘Haring Lear’
by Cora Llamas | Philippine Daily Inquirer
This version of Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” translated by Bienvenido Lumbera and directed by Nonon Padilla, wove the elements of truth and falsehood as undercurrents in its characters’ lives. A sense of foreboding hung like a cloud of gloom from the start, the darkness on the stage and in the auditorium emphasizing the inherent blindness that was a shared flaw among the many players. – Llamas
Bernardo Bernardo headlines new run of Haring Lear
by Amadis Ma. Guerrero | Philippine Daily Inquirer
In the director’s view, “classical plays are what we need today in the theater world because they are limitless, and students should be exposed to the masterpieces of the world.
“The computer generation is different, it has different values. So, it’s important to introduce this generation to literature.”
Language is another factor. “Keep in mind that we have a special culture,” Padilla said. “It has to be raised to the intellectual level for the language to grow. It’s important that we express ourselves in our language.”
Bernardo had a similar observation. “By doing plays in Tagalog,” he said, “you can get people to appreciate the language. With support from the public, mabubuhay ang pangarap (the dream will be realized).” – Guerrero
Hair-raising experience in Taiwan
by Hannah Ledesma | The Philippine Star
As Bernardo pointed out, “There’s a whole lot of highly-charged emotional and psychological storms going on in Haring Lear. Scene after scene, there’s all that blood, a relentless flood of violence, tears, curses, insanity, rage, conversations with Death and invocation of spirits — again and again and again… – Ledesma
The PETA production also merited positive feedback from Hollywood producer (and current associate professor in Filmmaking at TNUA), Randy Finch, who wrote that Haring Lear was “an exhilarating production. . . (where) fearless actors and inspired design choices coalesce into a landmark production of Shakespeare’s relentless tragedy: Haring Lear resonates long after the curtain falls.” – Ledesma
Elsewhere
https://www.instagram.com/p/z2gmwSt6wZ/?tagged=haringlear&hl=en
Shakespeare in the Philippines 