Published: 25 March 2010
BY EMMA KLEIN

TO DIVIDE a business empire may be seen as the modern equivalent of dividing a kingdom. And this is the starting point of Dennis Kelly’s new play for the RSC, inspired both by Shakespeare’s King Lear and Edward Bond’s recent version. 

Colm has resolved to remain in the background as chairman of his global conglomerate, Argeloin, and to hand power as CEOs to two of his officers, Richard and Catherine. This decision is greeted with disbelief by the assembled members of the board, not least Castile, Colm’s loyal henchman. 

Colm has deliberately excluded his son, Jimmy, deeming him to have failed in his dealings in Belize and to be too soft to succeed in the corporate maelstrom. He confesses, however, to envying Jimmy his capacity to love.

That Richard and Catherine will take rivalry to the extreme and seek to destroy not only their opposite number but Colm, too, may not be surprising. Kelly is keenly aware of the brutality of the business milieu, so frequently lurking under a civilised surface. But when, following the newly tough Jimmy’s assault on his father, the drama descends into scenes of violence, with Richard and Catherine and their respective loyalists bearing guns, it is not clear, at first, what is actually happening. Is this a nightmare of the injured Colm? Is it a metaphor of corporate ferocity? Or is it real?

That civil war has, in fact, broken out is, perhaps, a little preposterous. And the proportion of the drama devoted to these scenes in Maria Eberg’s production may be excessive. 

Relief is provided by Jimmy’s romantic dalliances, both with Catherine and with Beth, the company’s insurance broker, who seeks revenge when he leaves her.

It is Colm’s relationship with Barbara, the daughter of a man he had “destroyed”, which provides the redemptive quality both for Colm and for the play as a whole. Barbara has taken the wounded “stranger” into her home and in the second half of the play, they are stranded together in what has become a wilderness, and their closeness survives Barbara’s justified fury on learning her companion’s identity.

Jeremy Irons convincingly conveys Colm’s soul-searching transformation from heartless mogul to devoted father-figure, Joanna Horton is a down-to-earth yet moving Barbara/Cordelia, while Jonathan Singer is a psychotically heinous Richard and Luke Norris succeeds in depicting the various incarnations of a post-adolescent Jimmy.

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