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Colin Friels says he’s mostly felt “terrified” during rehearsals of The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear & His Three Daughters over the past six weeks.
“Rehearsing: there’s nothing good about it,” he says. “I lose weight and feel sick. And you don’t sleep.”
Friels, one of Australia’s most popular and lauded actors, isn’t against the terror. It stems from his deep love of Shakespeare’s words and his passion to serve the play, fellow cast and the audience.
“This play is extraordinary”: Colin Friels at the Belvoir St Theatre rehearsal space.Credit: Kate Geraghty
And also the terror does pass.
“Once you get over the humiliation, after you’ve bedded the play in a bit and you can see that most of the audience aren’t leaving, you start to settle down,” he says. “But, this play, it’s extraordinary.”
Playing King Lear, Friels says, is a big job and a privilege.
“I’m not big on power, but he is,” he says “He’s a big beast in terms of his psyche. And we’re incredibly dissimilar.”
His approach to the role, in a production that also features Peter Carroll, Raj Labade, Ahunim Abebe, Tom Connor and Charlotte Friels, Friels’ daughter, is centred on the text.
“Shakespeare tells every actor how to play their role through his words,” he says. “But only if you can interpret it and integrate it and let it loose. That’s the bit. Because we’re all so used to censoring ourselves all our lives, it’s whether you can just let that rip out of you. With form.”
Tackling Shakespeare is like approaching different styles of music.
Friels with Catherine McClements from his Water Rats days. Credit:
“And this play is infinitely Led Zeppelin,” he says. “It’s not suburban Crowded House. It’s not a little cul-de-sac. This is big f---ing Led Zep. This is Zep at their best. It’s just poetry.
“It’s also a very human play. And it’s got the most unsatisfying ending of any play he ever wrote. It doesn’t end happy. It’s the most nihilistic of any of his plays. Completely realistic.
“Shakespeare doesn’t say, ‘Don’t worry, things are going to get better’. Nuh, nuh. He says, ‘This is what it is’.”
King Lear’s tragic tale of an ageing and tormented monarch who decides to divide his kingdom between his three daughters based on how much they flatter him, has been on the mind of Belvoir’s artistic director, Eamon Flack, for years.
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“That quote by Antonio Gramsci, ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters’,” he says. “For me, that’s a description both of the world we’re living in at the moment and the world of the play.
“This is a play about telling the truth and how liberating and dangerous it is to speak the truth now. We live in such fearful and repressed times. There’s so much to dodge around and hold our tongues about. But, like all tragedies, the truth will out.”
For Lear, Flack only ever thought of Friels.
“He’s an actor who makes language and speech a visceral theatrical act,” he says. “His devotion to the text, his scouring of it, his love of it, his glorious wrestle with the play itself, creates something that you just can’t fake. That’s the mark of a great actor.”
Friels, whose screen and stage roles have ranged from Water Rats to Malcolm, Halifax f.p., Tom White, Mystery Road and performances for almost every major Australian theatre company, says Lear might be one of his last roles.
“I don’t want to end up being some old bloke who spits and coughs in little bits and comes on as the silly old fart.”
Colin Friels“It probably will,” he says. “I don’t know. There’s not that much for older people nowadays. Certainly not in the theatre.
“I don’t want to end up being some old bloke who spits and coughs in little bits and comes on as the silly old fart. They can keep that.”
He’s also no fan of Belvoir St Theatre’s Upstairs stage dimensions.
“It’s my least favourite as an actor,” he says. “It’s so problematic as a space. It’s got terrible entrances, it’s got terrible exits, there’s not much you can do with it and it’s got hard sight-lines for the audience.”
He has two favourite stages – the Drama Theatre at the Sydney Opera House and the Space Theatre at the Adelaide Festival Theatre – but really it’s about knowing the space where he’s performing.
“I like to stand in the dark theatre when no one’s there,” he says. “Every millimetre of that space you can see where it is.
“There’s a beautiful thing that happens, something that happens to me only rarely in life on stage, when you just fly off and you’re unselfconscious and not aware of yourself. It’s a fantastic feeling and it’s magic. That is why I do it.”
The True History of the Life and Death of King Lear & His Three Daughters is at Belvoir St Theatre November 20 to January 4.
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