Lear bender

Actor and director Michael Hurst tells PAUL LITTLE why he has no qualms about making Shakespeare's epic tragedy more accessible for a 21st-century audience.

- PAUL LITTLE

'It's easy to get people's attention - you just turn the lights out. But to actually keep it there is tricky," says director, actor and passionate Shakespearean Michael Hurst. Take King Lear, for instance, which he is starring in and directing next month. It has 18 named characters, well over three hours' running time if you're not careful, and a famously bleak conclusion, even by Shakespearean tragedy standards. Just a few of the obstacles at which a 21st-century audience might baulk.

One thing that won't be an obstacle for them is the language. "I've just been trying to bash the script into shape, because, bloody Shakespeare, he may have been brilliant but fuck he was wordy," says Hurst, who is aiming for a run time of around 2½ hours.

He reckons Shakespeare is big enough to handle a bit of creative interference for the audience's sake, especially if it makes the plays easier to understand: "You don't want to be fighting through the language. You want to be going, 'Wow, I, understand it."

He points out that modern audiences, unlike those of Shakespeare's time, are used to visual signals, such as looks and gestures. "We don't need to have the internal thoughts externalised so much. Not that we want to get rid of the poetic stuff - that's amazing. There are some weird words that have to change, and I don't mind shoehorning the audience in by using some modern words."

King Lear is the story of an ageing monarch who wants to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. He tests them by asking each how much she loves him. The two bad sisters deliver over-the-top songs of praise. Cordelia, his favourite and the one who loves him most, refuses to play his silly game and is banished. His retirement plan, and in fact his kingdom, fall to pieces and things go from bad to worse before all ends extremely unhappily. No spoiler alerteveryone dies, except three of the least-interesting characters.