King Lear (28 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
The tradition of adapting the play has been continued in the theater with versions such as Edward Bond’s radical rewriting,
Lear
(1972) and the Women’s Theatre Group and Elaine Feinstein’s feminist
Lear’s Daughters
, as well as Jane Smiley’s novel,
A Thousand Acres
(1997). On film, there were early silent versions in America and Italy (1909–10). A number of stage productions have been filmed, including Peter Brook’s, shot in a stark black-and-white style that intensified the existential bleakness of his stage version. Grigori Kozintsev (1970) produced a beautiful, deeply moving version featuring the sufferings of Russian peasants. It was based on a translation by Boris Pasternak and used haunting music by Dmitri Shostakovich. Akira Kurosawa’s
Ran
(1985), set in feudal Japan, substantially reworked Shakespeare’s play so as to eliminate Gloucester but incorporate the subplot material in a version in which Lear’s daughters become his married sons. It played a major part in stimulating renewed western interest in epic eastern cinema.
Lears for Our Time
Our own century seems better qualified to communicate and respond to the full range of experience in King Lear than any previous time, save possibly Shakespeare’s own.
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In post–Second World War England,
King Lear
has been performed more times than in its entire prior performance history. The play speaks with special power to the contemporary psyche. In a violent age when atrocities, murders, poverty, and acts of self-destruction are commonly seen on television, the violence in the play, and its concerns
about human rights, seem particularly apposite. However,
Lear
is so vast in its conception that, as well as societal concerns, it deals with very fundamental philosophical thoughts about what it is to be human in a godless world, or in a world where faith plays little part in the absurdity of human behavior.
Jan Kott’s influential book entitled
Shakespeare Our Contemporary
(1964) was of great inspiration to late-twentieth-century directors. His thoughts about
King Lear
as a play about “the disintegration of the world” prompted a landmark production of the play by Peter Brook, which would alter the way the play was conceived and the characters performed to this day:
In the 1950s it became apparent that the world might destroy itself through accidental nuclear warfare, and the plays of Samuel Beckett achieved international fame:
Waiting for Godot
(1953) showed a world of absurdity,
Endgame
(1957) a world without meaning at all. Soon afterward the Polish critic Jan Kott wrote an influential essay, “King Lear, or Endgame,” which viewed Shakespeare through the spectacles or blinkers of Beckett and emphasized the element of grotesque tragicomedy in the play.
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Brook was also heavily influenced by the dramatic theories of Bertolt Brecht, with his desire to “alienate” the audience by breaking down the illusions of realism. Brecht’s influence was especially evident in the bare staging of
Lear
. Two large flats at either side of the stage moved in and out at angles to create internal and external spaces. The storm was created by three large rusty thunder sheets with a vibrating motor behind creating a hint of rumbling thunder. The lighting was deliberately bright and constant, only dimming for the storm scene and Gloucester’s blinding. Everything was seen with clarity, leaving no room for the dramatic signaling that darkness evokes. There was no background music. Brook firmly believed that
Lear
should be staged with no music at all. Music almost always controls our emotional reaction to a scene, and Brook was particularly keen to block any easy audience response.
J. C. Trewin described the set:
Visually we are taken to a terrifying world, a place of abstract symbols, a rust-flaking world, harsh and primitive. There are tall, coarse gray-white screens; metal shapes that might have been dredged from the sea-bed: things ancient, scaled with rust. As the night moves on, the stage grows barer and barer until nothing is left but the screens, and Lear and Gloucester play out their colloquy on a bleak infinity of stage; two voices at the world’s end.
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Brook wanted this
Lear
to be a
Lear
of its time. He designed the production himself and wanted to create a totally believable society, both barbaric and sophisticated. It is notable that this production took place just after the Cuban missile crisis. He wished to create a nihilistic vision, to remove the sympathetic responses of the audience and blur the lines between good and evil in the play. As a result of this he was accused of distorting Shakespeare’s tragedy to enhance his own directorial viewpoint.
Brook’s interpretation meant that productions of
Lear
would never be the same after this point. Indeed, there have been very few productions since that have not followed his lead in some regard, whether their focus be political, metaphysical, or domestic.
Critics and directors of the Left have been quick to seize on Lear’s demand that the ruling class expose themselves “to feel what wretches feel, / That thou mayst shake the superflux to them” and Gloucester’s wish that “distribution should undo excess, / And each man have enough” as evidence of the play’s critique of existing political structures, and much recent criticism has discussed
King Lear
as a political drama reflecting the ideological concerns that were to divide England during the seventeenth century.
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This trend in recent criticism has been reflected in performance. Set pre-First World War, the RSC’s 1976 production made reference to
the conditions of those disenfranchised by war. One page of the program featured hundreds of faces of workhouse children; on another there was a bleak landscape with two figures in the distance, presumably working a land that yields little or nothing. In this production Donald Sinden’s acclaimed performance as Lear
5.
“What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes”: the bleakness of Peter Brook’s 1962 production with Paul Scofield (left) as Lear and Alan Webb as the blinded Gloucester.
chronicles the process by which suffering turns self-pity and self-love into outward versions of themselves. In practice this means that Lear learns to identify with the poor and downtrodden, classes never far from the drab, pockmarked, nineteenth century face of this production. Indeed, the three-man directorate of Trevor Nunn, John Barton and Barry Kyle … do all they can to bring period penury to our attention, gratuitously introducing a troupe of vagrants to trot round the stage between scenes, and transforming Michael Williams’s Fool into a bald scrofulous relic, a seedily eccentric song-and-dance man who might have stumbled out of
Bleak House
… determined to stress that
Lear
is a social as well as an elemental play.
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The setting for the 2004 production directed by Bill Alexander was of a postwar world in which the country was in a flux of insecurity, distinctly modern in feel but without reference to a specific time:
This
Lear
appears at times to be set in a crumbling mental home, backed by the scaffolding and half-destroyed brick walls of Tom Piper’s bleak setting. It suggests that a nuclear bomb has already fallen on Lear’s kingdom and the survivors are left wandering about trying to work out—post-Apocalypse—who they are and what has happened and above all where the hell they are supposed to be going next.… There is a bizarre timelessness here—so that in a post-Victorian world, when the old King comes on dressed like a mad deserter from the First World War, there is no real surprise, just the feeling that Alexander and his cast have had yet another disturbing thought about the many insights into madness and identity-crisis offered in the play.
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Of the setting, designer Tom Piper explained:
Bill [Alexander] felt very strongly that you can’t set this play in one particular place, it has to be an invented world, so we’re
aiming to create parallel worlds: the Victorian married with strange bits of technology.… I wanted to include a broken element, to convey a sense of a world that could be in decay or on the edge of industrialisation.
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Corin Redgrave, a noted left-wing campaigner as well as a member of a distinguished acting dynasty, played Lear in this production. He saw the play as “modern, topical and relevant because it so vividly portrays a country divided by an almost impassable fault-line between those who have enough and those who don’t. Any attempt I make to build up an idea of Lear the man, Lear the ruler, is still very strongly influenced by that thinking.”
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Again, although not overtly political in the actors’ focus, Adrian Noble’s 1993 production infused the political implication of Lear’s decision into the setting:
This production turned the map into paper flooring whose divisions the Fool (a gag over his mouth emphasizing his obvious outrage) was made to mark with red paint. It was then gradually reduced to tatters until the ground beneath, which was covered with a great blood-red stain, was wholly revealed.
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There are numerous references in
King Lear
to the stars, gods, and the fates. Setting the play in a non-Christian era endows the play with an adaptable metaphysical stance that has international appeal. In 1999, Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa of the Sainokuni Shakespeare Company undertook a joint production with the RSC. This production focused on the elemental nature of the play, the dark forces of nature that emerge from the void created by Lear’s misjudgments:
This is a hauntingly but savagely beautiful production. Yukio Horio’s set is dominated by a huge black wooden walkway sloping gently toward you and widening into an immense platform. At the back the walkway seems to disappear into black darkness, whence the actors emerge like mythological figures,
both real and remote. All this suggests the structure of the classical Noh stage, where the curtained entrance also leads somewhere indeterminate: a primeval darkness that holds no moral secrets … this reinforces the uncomfortable Shakespearian vision of a world where you are left without the consolation or guidance of a moral order.
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The handling of the storm scene was particularly controversial. Boulders of various sizes were choreographed to drop onto the stage as Lear raged against the storm. Most audience members and reviewers were more concerned about the safety of the actors than the director’s vision, which “conjures a world in which Nature’s moulds are cracked.”
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The breakdown in family relationships is, of course, central to
King Lear
and modern directors have often used this as an accessible focal point in productions. Initially produced as a touring production for schools, Buzz Goodbody’s small cast chamberpiece version of
Lear
in 1974
was performed by a cast of nine, with one musician playing gong, trumpet, snare and kettle drum. An all-purpose servant was added, while one sub-plot was cut (losing Albany, Cornwall, Oswald, and the French King).… The acting area was empty, except for a few props, like a rug and banners which unfurled when Lear appeared.… Scenes were set simply, using props and, as with the storm, music and lights, which at key moments in the production underscored the director’s point.…
Lear
was not seen as epic in terms of great public scenes of wide-open spaces peopled with a huge cast.… Its focus was on two families, in which the personal as well as the age differences played a more important part than is usually recognised.
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In this powerful, intimate production, “the play as a whole became an intense study of private griefs of their two families, with Kent and the Fool both reduced to appalled outsiders, helplessly looking on.”
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Described by critic Irving Wardle as “an all-too-familiar story of
family life,”
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Nicholas Hytner’s 1990 production also turned
Lear
into a tale of dysfunctional family neurosis. He encoded his very cerebral reading in the set design of David Fielding, creating an enclosed space for the staging of
Lear
that took the form of a cube:
Open on one side with its outer walls painted to look like heavy steel, the cube simply revolves and stops, to present a succession of interiors and exteriors. Sometimes it will stop with a corner pointing toward the audience so that actors can stand out of sight of each other while Shakespearian eavesdropping can take place. In the storm scene, it will revolve continuously—the idea being that, as a metaphor for the world of the play (as well as Lear’s mental world), it is spinning out of control.
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The effect of the cube was to reduce the scale of the play—something apparently deliberate in the director’s interpretation. Psychological and domestic, Lear’s world became both a mental ward and the interior of his mind, a controlled civilized space allowed to go mad through neglect and misjudgment. John Wood’s very human and neurotic Lear went on an inner and outer journey of physical suffering and mental awareness: “We are left with an interpretation which is as much medical as moral. The geriatric ward slugs it out with the psychiatric wing. There is little sense of hubris on the one hand, or of concentrated evil on the other.”
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The emphasis on Lear’s genuine insanity stemming from the family reflected the wider world of the play and the state of Britain. Michael Billington described it as “an exploration of the insane contradictions of a world where the gods are seen as both just and wantonly cruel, where Nature is both purifying and destructive.”
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