Costumes: Make Mine Modular

Costume meeting with Melissa this afternoon. Damn, that lady is sharp! She's taken some very vague costume concepts from her director, mixed in a bit of research, added a healthy dose of personal style, and come up with designs which are functional & practical, yet should also please both the audience's eyes and the actors' bods.

The original concept of late Czarist Russia is still there, and it comes out particularly in the hairstyles (high rounded styles for the women) and a certain flowy element in most of the tops. The three sisters start off looking like they could be Chekhov's Three Sisters, which is perfect. Lear himself starts out in white and gold, looking more like a magician (in his own mind?) than a king.

Then, as power starts to shift, the women's styles become more ostentatious; coronets and drippy pearls appear, necklines rise (Goneril) or plunge (Regan), and the muted colours of the opening tableau give way to bright, dangerous reds (for the English faction) and blues (for the French). The only character who really defies this colour scheme altogether is, of course, the Fool. Melissa sees him in a green velvet coat over a traditional Russian peasant's outfit. A link to the past, or just a defiant gesture to separate him from the existing power structure.

The most interesting feature of her design is the use of "modular" costume pieces: accessories which will move from character to character throughout the play, acquiring new meaning when used by different people in different contexts. We already discussed the use of heraldic sashes to represent G and R's new authority; these sashes come from Lear, and may end up in the hands of others (Edmund?) by the end of the play. Another example might be the Fool's green coat, which he gives to Lear during the storm. Or Edmund's black cape, which he swaps for Edgar's nice (high status) coat when he's "helping" him escape (the cape might become a cloak or loincloth for Poor Tom). Or Oswald's gloves, which are stripped from his body and then used by Edgar (in disguise) to challenge Edmund to the final duel.

This modularity might confuse or frustrate actors early on (whose costume piece is it, really?), but once they sort it all out, I think they'll find it tremendously useful to be able to invest these items with significance and status. And as the audience sees the same items appear again and again in new forms, they'll start to understand that the Lear world is one of scarcity and subjectivity: there aren't a lot of resources to spread around (hence the "houseless poverty" of Poor Tom), and one man's trash is another man's treasure. Hence Lear:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feetl,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.