"Waiting out a pandemic — and for our 'King Lear'"

 by Peter Marks

[The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on all aspects of our lives all around the world.  Among the hardest-hit industries, following the health field, has been live entertainment, including theater.  In November of last year, Peter Marks, the principal theater writer and reviewer for the Washington Post, published an essay in his paper about how artists and writers might address this crisis by creating art in the mode of William Shakespeare’s King Lear, which Marks observes was written in the midst of the 1606 bubonic plague in London. 

[Marks’s column appeared on 8 November 2020 in section E (“Arts & Style”) of the Post.  (Online, it was posted as “Shakespeare wrote ‘King Lear’ during a plague. What great work will emerge from this pandemic?” as part of the “Road to Recovery: Perspective” feature on the Washington Post website on 6 November 2020 at https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/great-artistic-works-during-plagues/2020/11/05/6575cac2-1d29-11eb-90dd-abd0f7086a91_story.html.] 

More than 400 years ago, as epidemics raged in London, forcing theaters and other public places to shutter, William Shakespeare was busy crafting stories of kings going mad and thanes coveting power. He was, scholars believe, in the midst of an astonishingly potent creative period, one that produced some of the most extraordinary tragedies ever written — “King Lear” and “Macbeth” among them.

It was a remarkable achievement, one that got me thinking about our current moment and the possibility that during this pandemic, society’s artful dreamers might find their own inspiration and make similarly groundbreaking creations. “The great work begins,” playwright Tony Kushner wrote as the final words of “Angels in America,” his sprawling dramatic diptych of another terrible modern epidemic.

In perilous, isolating times, we hunger with a special zeal for great work by artists who can capture the experience for us. The coronavirus that has infected nearly 50 million people worldwide and killed 1.2 million — including more than 233,000 in the United States — has also created a vacuum in live entertainment of all kinds. That includes the performing arts, whose theaters and studios have been forced to shutter for months as organizations also furlough or dismiss scores of the 5.1 million arts workers in this country.

All at once, the curtains closed on hundreds of plays, ballets, concerts, musicals — as well as the in-person classes in drama, music and dance that feed the future of these forms. Though some arts lovers have followed their favorite companies to the Web, where videos of old productions and super-skeletal versions of new projects are being tried out, one can’t avoid a certain hollow feeling — a cultural deprivation unprecedented in our lifetimes. Pause for just a moment from reflecting on the terrible losses inflicted on so many families by the coronavirus, and imagine another type of devastation: a life’s dream of seeing your new play onstage, or appearing in a recital marking the launch of your career, washed away in a tidal wave of worry about contagion in public places.

What, I wonder, is the fate of so many of these projects and events, some of them topical and inordinately perishable? With arts groups across the country deprived of ticket revenue and focused myopically on survival, where goes the impetus for the sorts of ambitious dramas, operas and other productions that put a stamp on an era?

And when at last we emerge from this cultural drought, is recovery a matter of picking up where we left off, with the work that had to be canceled or interrupted? Or does the energy arising from the experiences of 2020 — the sorrows unleased by this disease, the agony sparked by the killings of Black men and women — lead us in entirely new directions?

In other words: Does the great work begin?

I raise these questions out of curiosity about what goes on creatively at a time when very little is going on. In his mid-century novel “The Plague,” Albert Camus describes in stunning detail the torpor of a city, Oran, Algeria, as it seals itself off from the world to try to contain the bubonic plague. The story concerns a doctor, Bernard Rieux, as he ministers to the stricken population. But through another character, Joseph Grand, the author delves into a kind of imaginative stasis brought on by the epidemic that borders on the absurd: Grand, a city clerk, is writing a novel and can’t seem to get beyond the opening sentence.

He worries that line to death, obsessing for pages of Camus’s novel over every word. “Next he showed some anxiety about the adjective ‘handsome,’ “ Camus notes, suggesting in Grand’s equivocations a case of terminal writer’s block — a shutdown, if you will, of the creative mind.

Not that the times when public gatherings present health risks necessarily have to be devoid of inspiration. Consider the perseverance of Shakespeare during those outbreaks of plague and what might have been going through his mind. Although he alluded poetically to the epidemics, most famously in dying Mercutio’s curse — “A plague o’ both your houses” in “Romeo and Juliet” — experts such as Columbia University’s James Shapiro note that the impact on Shakespeare of these disasters can’t be known.  [See “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare” by Kirk Woodward, posted on Rick On Theater  on 17 November 2020.]

“While his personal life must have powerfully informed what he wrote,” Shapiro observed in a 2015 article for London’s Guardian newspaper, “we have no idea what he was feeling at any point during the quarter-century that he was writing — other than, in circular fashion, extrapolating from his works (which largely steered clear of plague, no matter how profoundly he may have experienced its impact.)”

Still, his life and extraordinary productivity remain fair game for enlightened guesswork. Earlier this year, novelist Maggie O’Farrell published “Hamnet,” a work of historical fiction in which she posited that Shakespeare’s young son of that name died of “the pestilence.” “The father cups a hand to the son’s chill cheek,” she writes. “His fingers hover, trembling, over the bruise on his brow. He says, No, no, no. He says, God in heaven. And then, crouching low over the boy, he whispers: How did this happen to you?”

One is allowed to imagine in such highly speculative accounts that the pestilence would have enveloped Shakespeare profoundly in anguish, of a sort that might have found expression in his plays. A half-out-of-his-mind Lear raging on the stormy heath at the injustices he’s suffered comes readily to mind. “Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air / Hang fated o’er men’s faults light on thy daughters!” Lear exclaims. It would be hard for a father to come up with a more terrible wish for his children.

In “Lear” and “Macbeth,” the grotesqueness of the violence — conjured in grief, perhaps? — is unmatched in his other great tragedies: “Macbeth” features the slaughter of Macduff’s children, and in “Lear,” Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out onstage by Cornwall. A plague on Gloucester’s house, indeed. In some productions, his suffering is so graphically depicted that audience members avert their own eyes.

The frenzied eruptions in Shakespeare would find a concordant fury centuries later in massively influential works such as Kushner’s “Angels in America” and Larry Kramer’s scathing drama “The Normal Heart.” Both were written in the 1980s and early ‘90s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. The conservative Reagan administration’s lassitude in addressing the disease killing thousands of gay men fueled Kushner’s and Kramer’s incendiary prose. The ring of ineffectual, even detrimental official action in response to an epidemic is familiar, no? One wonders what artists of all stripes will have to say about this, and where the concurrent plague of white supremacy will figure in, as well.

The big dramatic statements about these immense issues are on hold. The paradox of the ubiquity and accessibility of art online is that little screens simply don’t do justice to epic unfoldings of great themes. Watching “Lear” or “Angels” on an expansive stage with 1,000 other people makes the heart pound harder; you are ideally meant to hear a resonant echo in the speeches of Shakespeare’s and Kushner’s characters. A laptop in the midst of a plague is better, though, than what Camus’s denizens of Oran in the 1940s have to work with, as they are left incommunicado with the outside world. Even letters are suspected of conveying disease.

Until the theaters and performing arts palaces reopen, we’ll continue to get small spoonfuls each week of what art is yet to come. A Washington company, Theater Alliance, for example, just completed a mini-festival of plays of Black protest, original playlets online that included stories about the impact of police shootings on the Black community. On Nov. 12, Theater of War, a group that typically dramatizes Greek tragedies to spark conversations of contemporary issues, will feature Bill Murray and Tracie Thoms in a digital evening of “Poetry for the Pandemic.” The work of Joshua Bennett, Mahogany L. Browne and Juan Felipe Herrera, among others, will be recited.

We who eagerly await the next big thing from one of the great imaginations of our time will have to contain our impatience. We have to sustain ourselves with the belief that the great work has begun. I like to imagine that some writer or composer right now is taking time to reread the plays of Henrik Ibsen — maybe “An Enemy of the People,” his timeless drama of a doctor who is ostracized for warning his community about a pestilence in the water supply. And who knows? Maybe when we all can gather again, we’ll assemble in a big concert hall for the premiere of “Fauci, the Opera.”

[Peter Marks joined the Washington Post as its chief drama reviewer in 2002.  Previously, he worked for more than nine years at the New York Times, where he was a drama reviewer, theater reporter, metro reporter, and national correspondent during the 2000 presidential campaign.  He was also a feature writer and reporter at Long Island’s Newsday, where he was a member of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting.  

[Marks started his career at the New Brunswick, New Jersey, Home News and also worked for the Newark Star-Ledger and the Record of New Jersey’s Bergen County.  He has chaired the Pulitzer Prize drama jury four times and is co-author of the book Good for the Money: My Fight to Pay Back America (St. Martin’s Press, 2016).

[I am grateful to my friend and former professor Robert Youngblood for sending me Marks’s column.  He’s contributed the article “The Theater Problem in Education” to ROT, posted on 21 November 2011, and wrote the introduction to William Hutchings’s “Teaching What Shakespeare Didn’t Write: A Dramaturg’s Perspective In The English Classroom,” 24 August 2014.  Bob’s interest and support for my endeavors, including the blog, has been consistently gratifying.]

James Shapiro’s Shakespeare

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk’s an insatiable reader even in ordinary times, but the enforced leisure (if that’s even the right term) of the pandemic shut-down has given him time and the inclination to do more reading.  And thank goodness for that lagniappe.  The Max Beerbohm article he contributed to Rick On Theater on 2 November was the consequence of his having just read a book (or several, I’m not sure) on the man. 

[Now comes another guest-post Kirk drew from his reading.  He just finished four books by Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro and he’s composed a sort of book review of three Shakespeare volumes and one on the Passion Play of Oberammergau.  As you’ll see, Shapiro takes uncommon approaches to his Shakespeare studies; combined with Kirk’s own habitually unexpected perspective, “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare” will be a most interesting read, whether you’re a Bardolater or not.] 

Books of James Shapiro Discussed Below:

Oberammergau. Vintage Books, 2000.

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. HarperCollins, 2005.

Contested Will. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2010.

The Year of Lear. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2015.

 *  *  *  *

The plays and life of William Shakespeare (1565-1616) are inexhaustible subjects, his plays because they are so numerous and so rich, his life because so little is known about it. One person who has done a great deal to close the gap between the two is the writer James Shapiro (b. 1955), who is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

I first became aware of Shapiro’s books inadvertently. Killing time while someone was completing house repairs, I glanced at a library shelf and saw a book called Oberammergau, aptly described as “The troubling story of the world’s most famous passion play.” I had no idea I owned this book and no idea where it came from.

Its subject is the famous play based on the New Testament’s gospel accounts which has been performed in the small town of Oberammergau, in Bavaria, Germany, roughly every decade for the last four centuries or so. Half the town’s citizens perform in the play, which was supposedly first created as a response to the plague, and by all accounts it can be quite stirring.

It has also been, throughout its history, horribly anti-Semitic, and the struggle to eliminate or at least mitigate those elements in the play is the subject of Shapiro’s book. He does a fine job of reporting, and he puts his finger on what seems to me to be the center of the problem it discusses:

For all the ecumenical attention to a shared spiritual heritage, the play forces Jews and Christians to face the painful fact that they read differently, and that a single version of the founding story of Christianity cannot be comfortably shared.

However true this may or may not be, and whether or not it is the last word on the subject, I was impressed by Shapiro’s thoughtfulness and his ability to put himself in many other people’s shoes. So I was delighted to have read the book.

Then, to my further surprise, I found another book by Shapiro on my shelves that I did not remember reading, much less owning, although since there is a bit of underlining in it I may have. That book is A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Shapiro begins by making it clear that “we don’t know very much about what kind of friend or lover or person Shakespeare was.”

I can’t report what Shakespeare ate or drank or how he dressed, but I can establish some of the things he did this year [1599] that were crucial to his career, what he read and wrote, which actors and playwrights he worked with, and what was going on around him that fueled his imagination. . . . I hope to capture some of the unpredictable and contingent nature of daily life too often flattened out in historical and biographical works of greater sweep. . . . I end up focusing more on things that can be dated, such as political and literary events, rather than on more gradual and less perceptible historical shifts – though because Shakespeare’s plays are remarkably alert to many of these, I do my best to attend to them as well.

And he sensibly proposes to avoid “awkwardly littering the pages that follow with one hedge after another – ‘perhaps,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘it’s most likely,’ ‘probably,’ or the most desperate of them all, ‘surely . . . .’

And then we’re off, on the most interesting and exciting presentation of Shakespeare’s life that I’ve read, matched only in my reading by his follow-up book The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.

The choices of 1599 and 1606 are not arbitrary. Although scholars differ on estimated dates for Shakespeare’s plays, Shapiro follows substantial scholarly opinion that 1599 saw the writing and/or first performances of Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet.

1606, in its turn, saw the advents of King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. It makes sense, as Shapiro tells the story, that these seven masterpieces arise in a period of notable, important, and often deeply upsetting events in the history of England and its neighbors Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. It was certainly a dramatic time.

1599 was the year in which Queen Elizabeth (1533-1603; reigned 1558-1603) tried to crush a ferocious rebellion in Ireland by sending there a reluctant Duke of Essex and an equally reluctant ad hoc army, with appalling results. Although Shapiro does not make this comparison, the Irish situation was basically England’s Vietnam War of its time.

The health of the Queen, nearing the exhausted end of her reign amid suspense about who would succeed her, was also on everyone’s mind. And nobles and citizens alike thought it likely that Spain would try to invade the country again (everyone thought they knew exactly when), as it had tried to do in the famous Great Armada of 1588.

1606 was even grimmer, introduced as it was by aftershocks from the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the King, Parliament, and most of the rest of the government, a scheme uncovered in late 1605. Although the plot did not succeed, the resulting panicked activity brings to mind an equivalent mood in the United States following the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Partly as a result of the Gunpowder Plot, Elizabeth’s successor, James I (1566-1625; reigned in England, 1603-25), found himself trying to balance political and religious disputes. And in the second half of the year, the situation was complicated by a serious outbreak of the plague.

Shapiro effectively draws us into these stories with detailed and vivid descriptions of events, so it’s hard not to feel we’re learning what it must have been like to be there. I have seen comments on these two books complaining that Shapiro spends too much time describing events like the Gunpowder Plot, as though his only intention were to give an historical narrative. I find these complaints off the mark for two reasons.

In the first place, Shapiro handles beautifully the historian’s dilemma – to concentrate on the great sweep of history, or on the experiences of the “common people” of the time. Shapiro gives us in detail both the objective side of events and the way they may have looked “at ground level,” at the level they would have manifested themselves to obscure but real people who were affected by them.

In the second place, the fact is that in both these years we don’t know much about Shakespeare except that he was writing and at least to some extent acting. Shapiro makes it clear that he doesn’t want to try to describe “what Shakespeare might have been thinking,” and he usually avoids it.

However, he can and does describe where Shakespeare would likely have been at the time of those events, and the results are revelatory.

To give one example, people sometimes wonder where Shakespeare got the impressions of court life that are so convincingly embodied in his plays. Shapiro provides multiple answers. He demonstrates that London was essentially a fairly small place, with a population of around 200,000. Shakespeare would have known members of the nobility.

And Shapiro makes it clear that as a member of the Chamberlain’s Men, and later of the King’s Men, Shakespeare would have been inside the royal palaces many times, often in close proximity to the sovereign.

Shakespeare saw plenty of court life at first hand. He would have known other notables of the time as well – for example, he and his family were uncomfortably close to the social circles of the Gunpowder plotters, a dangerous relationship at a fraught time.

Shapiro is not a breezy writer, but I found both these books engrossing, and I will certainly reread them. Meanwhile, I have not yet mentioned an even more important aspect of his approach: the light that it throws on Shakespeare’s plays themselves.

Shapiro does not claim that Shakespeare wrote any of the plays under discussion as a direct response to historical events. Playwrights who did, like Ben Jonson (1572-1637), whose satirical play Eastward Ho (1605) was considered by the government too satirical, found themselves in jail. Elizabethan England was not a permissive state, and neither was Jacobean England.

However, Shapiro does demonstrate that Shakespeare was attuned to the social and political events and currents of his time, and that he let them flow through his plays, not explicitly taking sides, but letting immediate circumstances influence his work.

I will sketch a few of his insights. Shapiro writes of Henry the Fifth that

Conquest, national identity, and mixed origins – the obsessive concerns of Elizabethan Irish policy – run deep through Henry the Fifth and sharply distinguish it from previous English accounts of Henry’s reign.  . . . Battlefield deaths have not gentled the condition of the [non-noble] anonymous soldiers who fought alongside Henry. . . . In the end this fraternal goodwill doesn’t cut across social lines.

Shapiro sees within Julius Caesar an ongoing discussion of censorship, an issue continually faced by playwrights of his time. “No play by Shakespeare explores censorship and silencing so deeply . . .” as terrifyingly illustrated by the death of Cinna the poet, and by the executions ordered after Caesar’s death.

The trends affecting As You Like It, as Shapiro presents them, have to do with increasing sophistication in the demands on playwrights by the times and the audiences. “Flat” characters like those of The Comedy of Errors (1592-1593?), and routine romances, would no longer do. In As You Like It, Shakespeare parodies, mimics, and overturns stereotypes of romantic love and conventional comedy, even (in the person of Rosalind) calling the idea of love itself into question.

Of Hamlet Shapiro writes

What the Chamberlain’s men did to the wooden frame of The Theatre [they tore it down and moved it], Shakespeare did to the old play of Hamlet [a version now lost, apparently written around 1587]: he tore it from its familiar moorings, salvaged its structure, and reassembled something new. By wrenching this increasingly outdated revenge play into the present Shakespeare forced his contemporaries to experience what he felt and what his play registers so profoundly: the world had changed. Old certainties were gone, even if new ones had not yet taken hold . . . Hamlet [is] a play poised midway between a religious past and a secular future.

In King Lear Shapiro sees those two same elements in conflict, and also identifies resonances with the impact of the Gunpowder Plot, the succession to the royal throne, King James’ desire to make England, Ireland, and Scotland into one nation (“Britain”—of which Wales was already part), the plague, and heated attitudes toward witchcraft, including the King’s own opinions.

Macbeth continues those themes. In it Shakespeare carefully walks a thin line of discussion about Scottish kings (James I, of course, was a Scot like Macbeth), their weaknesses, and their murders – a very sensitive topic. And, finally,

Any play about Antony and Cleopatra would have been seen as a reflection on the past regime as well as on the present one; it would also measure how much had altered in the political landscape during those seven years.

To this brief survey of the seven plays discussed in Shapiro’s two books can be added numerous examples of Shakespeare’s involvement with his own theater company, the Chamberlain’s (and later King’s) Men, and their theater, the Globe. These details help Shapiro answer an often-heard question: did William Shakespeare from Stratford actually write the plays attributed to him?

Shapiro approaches this question, in his book Contested Will, from an interesting angle. Although he discusses the authorship question, and to my mind settles it as well as it can be settled with the available evidence, his primary focus in the book is on why the question of authorship came up in the first place.

Shakespeare had been dead for about 200 years before the discussion began in earnest, and Shapiro asks what changed during that time. What made it a subject that people began to have opinions on? Shapiro provides fascinating answers. For example, how many of these assumptions do you share?

• Shakespeare is virtually a divinity in the world of art. He is in a world by himself. No one and nothing comes close.
• Shakespeare from Stratford was too involved in the world of commerce and business to have been the great artist that we see in the plays.
• The plays show a refinement and an awareness of exalted social circles, professional specialties, and foreign countries that an ordinary citizen from Stratford could never have had.
• Aristocrats, on the other hand, are refined and aware people (particularly the candidate for authorship that an individual has in mind).
• If Shakespeare were well known at the time, his life should have been better documented.
• The world Shakespeare lived in was essentially the same as ours in the way people lived.
• Writers always reveal themselves in their writing. All writing is essentially autobiographical.
• Personal events (for example, his father’s and son’s deaths) must have affected him in the way we assume they did.
• Shakespeare’s plays show him to be a champion of social justice/rebellion/the common people/the nobles/Protestants/Catholics/whatever else is important to the biographer.
• Shakespeare was basically a person a great deal like me (whoever the “I” is that is speaking).

Shapiro demonstrates that none of these assumptions would have applied, or had a factual basis, in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, and that it is a mistake to assume that people in Shakespeare’s time lived under the same circumstances that we do. Yet all these assumptions are crucial to the authorship debate. Start to question them, and the debate loses its punch.

For me the clincher to the authorship issue is, as Shapiro expresses it:

Whoever wrote these plays had an intimate, firsthand knowledge of everyone in the [acting] company, and must have been a shrewd judge of each actor’s talents. . . . It’s impossible to picture any . . . aristocrats or courtiers working as more or less equals with a string of lowly playwrights, especially with [George] Wilkins, who kept an inn and may have run a brothel.

Whoever wrote Shakespeare’s plays knew a lot of things, but he had inside knowledge of his own theater. The same conclusion, incidentally, is also inevitable after reading On Producing Shakespeare by Ronald Watkins (The Citadel Press, 1965).

Ultimately, it seems to me, the authorship controversy is really just a game, one that anyone can join, which is the source of the fun – but that’s all.

I called this article “James Shapiro’s Shakespeare” because the temptation for each of us, and for the many, many people who have written biographies of Shakespeare, is to see him as a person very much like ourselves - whoever we are.

Shapiro does not do this. He tells us that there are only so many known facts about Shakespeare, and that we have no idea if the plays and sonnets reflect states of his mind and experience (nor do they in the works of many other artists of his time and of ours).

Nevertheless Shapiro has gone remarkably far into the world Shakespeare lived in, dealing with what we can know, and he strikes me as a reliable and valuable guide.

[I have a personal take on the "who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays" debate.  It’s irrelevant to Shapiro’s book Contested Will (I kinda like that title) or Kirk’s précis of Shapiro’s discussion.  In fact, not only do I recognize that Shapiro’s not entering into the debate about who wrote the plays, but I think, from what I glean, I agree with his notions of why the debate exists.

[I also see that, as Kirk pointed out when I expressed the thought that follows, the debate “matters” because Shapiro’s response “extends not just to the Shakespeare authorship controversy, but to conspiracy theories like the Kennedy assassination, and from there on to Trump’s ‘fake news,’ etc.”

[Such as it is, however, the authorship question is a matter of interest only to litterateurs.  We theater people look on the whole issue as both silly and meaningless.  We don’t care.  (Okay, yes—I’m generalizing.) 

[The only thing about the plays that’s important to theater folk is that they exist.  Whoever wrote them, they’re wonderful and we’re blessed just to have them to act in, watch, and read.  Period.  End of argument.  Nothing else matters and is all just masturbatory.  IMHO, naturally—but I think you’ll find that most actors, directors, and others in the business of show will agree.]

Kirk Woodward’s 'King Lear' Journal

[I’ve asked others to contribute “guest posts” to ROT from time to time, and Kirk has previously been generous enough to contribute a fascinating essay on playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (“How America Eats: Food and Eating Habits in the Plays of Suzan-Lori Parks,” 5 October 2009). I’ve known Kirk since we were in college together and I was present for the beginning weeks of the work on the production of King Lear he describes below and knew most of the participants. Though I had to leave campus before the end of the rehearsals and the performances, which I never got to see, I did help build some of the set and props. ~Rick.]

When I first wanted to learn about theater, particularly about directing and acting, I spent a lot of time taking detailed notes on rehearsals I observed and participated in. The following is one such account. These are not stories of triumph, certainly not as far as my part in them is concerned; I had a lot to learn. At least I knew it.

I hope the mistakes recounted here will be of interest to those who have not directed or acted. They will probably bring a smile of recognition, also, to those who have. I hope I make it clear that there was good work done, as well.

I have de-identified my descriptions of people in this account. I suppose the participants themselves may remember some of these episodes, if they have better memories than I do; I would not have recalled most of it, if it weren’t for my notes, which I put down on paper about a week after the production closed.

The purpose of the following is to record what I remember of an interesting production of King Lear at a college theater in 1969. I was spending four months as a shop assistant in the theater, building scenery and so on. The director (and professor of theater) had given me that job after semesters in acting and directing and a month of theater study in England under him. Sometime in September he offered me a job in King Lear – stage manager, as I thought, but as things turned out I was assistant director.

The director respects Shakespeare, does not like him much, and is scared of him. His only previous Shakespeare production was Richard II four years ago. He says he loves that play because it’s so soft and sentimental! This might be his way of saying that he enjoys the characters and language. Three possible reasons he chose Lear: (1) He always picks the most difficult plays. (2) He saw the RSC’s production directed by Peter Brook. Originally he wanted to steal Lear’s entrance in that play: a huge box was carried on and opened, to reveal the King. (3) He loves the language and the emotionality of the play, as he indicated one day while listening to a recording of the piece. He knew he was doing the play by the end of the previous school year.

The director didn’t work at all on the play until his successful production of The Homecoming was completed the third week in October. We all then had to face the fact that the next production was to begin in about a week. Here is what he said about the play in advance: he hoped to train the actors in as natural and specific – as “anti-tragic” – diction as possible. He hoped to approach the play realistically from an acting standpoint, with the emotions grounded in the text and not based on some abstract idea of high serious drama. We all expected B to play Lear, although the director as always gave no indication which actors (if any) he had in mind.

B’s idea for the set (he was also the theater’s technical director) came to him during Homecoming: a series of platforms, with the top of the stage resembling a parapet, with the fronts of the platforms faced like stone. I asked the director if a platform arrangement was the way he had conceived of the play originally and he said yes.

TRYOUTS

As the rehearsal period – five weeks interrupted by Thanksgiving break – was so short and the play so monstrously long, the director decided to rehearse in two places, he working on one scene while I worked on the other. The green/dressing room upstairs was lined off for the purpose, although it is terribly small. We also ended up splitting the tryouts, which I recall as Tuesday and Wednesday, afternoon and evening. He ran the first session: a short welcoming speech and explanation of how the session would run; then groups reading specific scenes. I had chosen the scenes, which he approved immediately and without comment.

We read part of Act I Scene i from Lear’s first lines to midway in Kent’s speeches, and the end of the scene. We read the first Gloucester-Edmund scene; we read a mad scene, and we read part of the great “no cause” scene. In this scene during the first session, one actress gave a reading of Cordelia’s part which was the best acting done in the play until well into performances.

Aside from that, the tryouts were grim. B, reading Lear, used a hollow, rhetorical, more-or-less senseless reading which when asked he labeled “stage-English.” He had no real competition except a student half his size with muddy diction. The women were limited in numbers: the director’s wife; another faculty wife; the actress mentioned above; and a faculty wife from another campus whom the director read but refused to take seriously. We saw no Edmund developing. The director finally recruited a student who hadn’t planned to try out, being mildly uninterested in the production; he read once, the second night, and was cast. The outstanding Fool, a brilliant school radical and character, the director ruled out as undependable. The part finally went to a stocky fellow the director felt could be worked with. I handled the second and third sessions while the director watched; he ran the final one. We saw a possible Kent, who then decided he wanted out; we settled on a tall, steady, not-very-fast-moving student, the president of the drama group.

When I say “we,” I mean that the director, who agonizes over casting, had a preliminary list drawn up Thursday morning; I listened to him debate out loud his alternatives and agreed with his decisions. The actress who had read so well was indeed Cordelia, with the two faculty wives as the two other sisters. B was Lear; his competition, Gloucester. France was a burly young philosophy professor with no theatrical experience at all, but interested. Cornwall was a speech student and a fine speaker; Albany was one of the director’s acting students with no stage experience. The school’s talent pool doesn’t have much depth; the director believes in his ability to develop inexperienced actors for parts, and in The Homecoming he had done so in three of the six parts with great success. One of the Homecoming graduates was Edgar. The director was pleased with the cast, all in all, and said so. The tryout experience drove me batty; I can remember waking up in the middle of the night hearing flat readings in my mind.

The actual rehearsal period can be divided into sections: Before line memorization; after line memorization; last stretch.

BEFORE LINE MEMORIZATION

The director’s blocking didn’t come easily to him. Once he suggested that I block the last scene for him; he was joking but he was also having trouble. He used a model of the set and moved chessmen around on it. The blocking was not naturalistic but, well, pictorial (not “symbolic” either, as the director insisted, e.g., characters didn’t stand on higher levels during moments of emotional superiority). He knew that not everything he plotted would work on the tiny Troubadour stage, and by George it didn’t. “It’s the nature of the animal,” he said. The director isn’t an English professor. He refuses to discuss plays in abstract terms. We did talk about form and pace, and to clarify that I must talk, a little academically, about the play itself.

THE MONSTER

Lear, the very summit of drama, is also the most eccentrically shaped, curiously laid-out, unwieldy piece of theater extant. If it were not the kind of play it is, its tone and temper would be different and we would suffer irreparable loss, but in considering the play for production one must come to terms with all the obstacles Shakespeare has thrown in the director’s way. They are many and well known. Among them:

(1) The amount of heavy acting required for the play is not a drawback; by itself a mad scene can be played by any good large-scaled actor. But Shakespeare has maliciously constructed Lear’s role differently from every other great role. Normally an actor adds layers to a role as the evening progresses. Lear, however, must be entirely visible at the first moment he is seen. Other performances resemble the inflation of a balloon, but Lear resembles taking pieces out of a mountain. Some of the pieces:

He must love his daughters.
He must be willing to crush his daughter Cordelia.
He must be capable of unjust actions to his closest supporters.
He must possess keen anger against injustice (Act IV Scene v).
He must possess an unreasoning and hot temper.
He must be capable of comforting and showing compassion.

And so on. There is no indication that Lear’s character alters as the play progresses; what does alter is the side of the character he reveals at a given moment. The actor who can make the audience believe at one glance that he embodies all Lear’s contradictory aspects, and who can then display single aspects while still maintaining the whole . . . has never lived.

(2) The play contains elements of the two least-intrinsically worthy forms of drama afoot: the all-out melodrama and the well-made play. Granted the melodrama can be redeemed; Shaw points out what an uninteresting thug Macbeth, for example, “really” is without his glorious language. The Scribian aspect is more puzzling. How much of the play is taken up with exchanges of letters, with people standing around discussing what has happened someplace else! Granted, again, that these characteristics of Scribe serve the same thematic purpose for Shakespeare as the conversations within conversations serve Plato in the Dialogues – a way of reminding us where we are. Still, they are a bitch for the director.

(3) It’s hard to think of another Shakespeare play where so many central characters do nothing for literally hundreds of lines of blank verse except stand and listen. Kent especially comes to mind in this respect. This suggests a possible style of production: a murky world where characters drift in and out of focus, becoming no more than shadows as others take the center.

(4) Finally and very important, the play has no “theatrical shape,” that is, no progression of currents, now dense and buffeting, now lighter and relieved by a little humor. Or, if it does have some sort of shape of this kind, we didn’t discover it and the director wondered aloud if he ought to invent and impose one. The play has enormous weight. We decided to pace it moment by moment.

BEFORE LINE MEMORIZATION (CONT’D)

There were four blocking rehearsals. They dragged, as blocking rehearsals do, and unsettling signs appeared early. The worst was that no one in the cast seemed to be doing any work on the play at all outside of rehearsals. Lear especially gave curiously unintelligent readings, more thunder than anything else. At this stage of work an actor can say, “I’m just reading the lines now, wait until we finish writing in the blocking, then I’ll start to act.” Lear said just that. There was also a melancholy air around rehearsals. A number of people had small parts but had to wait hours in order to do them. A few, like Edmund, didn’t like anything much that was going on. Several others were dreadfully uncertain about how well they could act now that they got the chance.

An English professor cut the script – not enough, I thought; I would be inclined to cut until the play had a shape, even at the risk of being a Henry Irving in the matter. The director, less craven, took the recommended cuts, which were basically lines in the Quarto not found in the Folio.

We alternated who used the stage and the upstairs. The director directed more scenes since he took the ones where no doubling was possible, except on a handful of occasions, and he directed the entire fifth act. His chief concerns, perhaps, are two: making the actor penetrate the sense of what he says, and pacing. He appears to believe that a solid characterization follows on the actor’s understanding of his lines; afterwards, even if the tempo has to be induced artificially, a beginning actor can then be guided into a good performance.

LEAR

Lear had to be begged to make even the most rudimentary sense of his lines. I directed the first rehearsal of Act III Scene vi. After we had gone through it once I asked him what was happening in the passage beginning at line 79. “He’s getting angry,” said Lear after a moment’s looking at the words. In fact he’s getting sleepy. This kind of problem usually led to rant and at one point it was disastrous. In the great speech “O reason not the need,” Lear delivered it as “O reason – not the need,” thus turning the major theme of the play completely on its head. Lear’s enunciation was none too clear at this stage, either.

CORDELIA, GONERIL, REGAN

The difficulty with Cordelia’s role is that it’s not a role at all but a function. It has no transitions except in Act IV Scene vii. Act IV Scene iv is an aria and should almost be set to music. Cordelia had enormous trouble with that speech until she finally relaxed in it. I over-directed her one night and nearly destroyed, at least for the moment, her natural sense of pace, which is good, a real gift. The experience made me gun-shy. (The director commented that as he becomes more experienced he gives less and less direction.) Cordelia’s remaining speeches are all set-pieces. She never talks directly to France at all. Those speeches require, perhaps, not acting but character, which the actress supplied. She had a wonderful moment where one could see in her eyes the awful realization that she too would have to say something to her father about her love – a moment for choice.

With Goneril and Regan the problem is to keep them from overacting early, and we didn’t really even try. The two became the Awful Sisters fairly early, but circumstances and their own weaknesses make them evil, they aren’t born that way. Cordelia in theory should perhaps seem more dislikable than the other two in the first scene; she certainly is catty, while the others say, first, nice things, and, later, accurate things.

The actress playing Goneril gives an impression of supremely scornful intellect; she plays evil well but has difficulty shading it. She also felt extremely uneasy about her role despite quite a bit of experience; I was never certain why, and she never lost her apprehension. Regan, on the other hand, is an emotional actress who was in danger of losing her ability to make specific responses on stage. One night in Act IV Scene v she did her part mechanically. I told her so and she agreed. Then she did it again and it was still mechanical, but this time she felt better about it and was upset that I didn’t agree.

GLOUCESTER, EDMUND, EDGAR

Edmund, who hadn’t wanted to be in the play and didn’t like the director’s approach to it, is experienced, took direction well, and gave the best performance I’ve seen from him. (He tends to be thoughtless.) He only needed occasional toning-down.

Edgar, however, although also talented, played all polish and no substance until well into rehearsals, when the director finally forced him to build and build the Poor Tom scenes until they had some variety, some depth, and some madness. Even so he tended to ignore the meaning of phrases in his Edgar scenes, giving them all about the same significance.

Gloucester almost became a total disaster. He apparently began with the idea of “playing an old man.” His speech became clouded and inarticulate, he dragged every word, and his character seemed entirely without spine. I tried to show him that Gloucester’s actions reveal him as, not weak, but as not quite bright enough for Edmund. I recommended guts for the old man. It was the director who saved him, though, by beating a tempo on the stage with his fist and making him follow it.

KENT, ALBANY, CORNWALL

Our Kent never responded at all and he missed, with excuses, a couple of rehearsals. More below. Albany couldn’t act worth anything, to start with. One night we all realized that he was coming along. The director credited me with the success at the time; I am inclined to credit the actor himself, who had the sense to see what we meant about listening on stage and respond. Afterwards his limitations were largely technical: uncertainty about how to move, and a whopping Southern accent. Cornwall, the rhetorician, had a steely, extravagant voice and he certainly was evil, but he tended to overpower everyone else with his intensity. He was fun to hear.

AFTER LINE MEMORIZATION

Lear could not memorize his lines at all. The director broke his own inflexible rule and allowed Lear to carry his book on stage after the others had put theirs down. The director did not, however, allow prompting after the limit, except when things came to an absolute and utter standstill. This exception to the book rule caused some grumbling among the cast.

I began spending half the day with Lear trying to get his lines into him, continuing through dinner. We did this until dress rehearsal night, and would have gone on through performances if we both hadn’t been so tired of it. I believe Lear could not memorize his lines because he had never read the play and had no idea what it was about, so he had nothing with which to associate the lines.

The last of the week before Thanksgiving, the director went to New York on unavoidable business, leaving me to run rehearsals. The next day we discovered that Kent was leaving school early because of personal problems, and that he would not attend another rehearsal until after the holidays. We gave out that he was sick and debated whether or not to tell the director. We finally did. The director decided to wait and hope for the best, but Kent left the cast and we quickly cast the student who had read once and then decided he didn’t want to be in the play.

I cut Kent’s lines in half – something I had wanted to do anyway. The new Kent picked up the part quickly and easily. A romantic actor by nature, he tended to play the role like a figure from Robin Hood’s days, but he gave a badly needed dose of spirit, and he fit the role. His was among the best performances, although one part, where he pushes back the men who would put his legs in the stocks and then puts them in himself, was so melodramatic I could hardly stand it. Still, it’s Kent.

LAST STRETCH

The director worked with Cordelia, France, and Edgar over Thanksgiving vacation. (France never did conquer his scene, which after all is a difficult one. He had no sense of spontaneity. Once he tried, however, just after the gorgeous – but heavy – costumes from the Lincoln Center production had arrived. On his “Fairest Cordelia” speech he took off his crown and held it in his hand, like a hat.)

After vacation the cast, with exceptions, seemed to be going through the play by rote. The director had been waiting for some time for the right moment in which to introduce an improvisation. One dreary and draggy night he stopped the run-through and assigned a new routine:

I want you, in character, to define a space for yourself on stage. Then, in character, I want you to act out, without words, the events leading up to and including your death, if you die in the play; or the end of the play, if you don’t.

They did, over about half an hour. They were thrown back on whatever memories, lessons, skills they had. I saw clearly for the first time how personality exists to fill a void which nevertheless can always be recalled, and I was shaken all the way through. (“I didn’t think you’d lose your objectivity,” the director said.) Then a second improvisation:

In your character, without words, concentrate and feel your [character’s] way through the entire play. Then when I give the signal, walk past the dead Lear and react vocally and physically.

They did this too. By now I thought it was too much – too much tragedy. The director didn’t think so, and apparently he was right, because the next night the energy level improved greatly. The director referred to the exercises whenever he wanted to increase the energy level in subsequent rehearsals.

B himself (Lear) choreographed the sword fights, and he had a hard time keeping the fighters from overplaying and ruining the swords, as well as risking injury. He wanted them to make music with the clanging of the swords (he’d forged the hilts himself). Instead they hacked, cutting deep gashes in the blades. Amateur actors tend to mistake emotion for technique; on nights when the cast felt good the fights were (unnecessarily) frightening. Edgar and Edmund missed a beat in the fight on the first performance, with the result that one of them nearly lost a leg.

I skipped technical rehearsal, figuring I wouldn’t be needed. The next night was the first I knew of several of the director’s inventions. Three stand out. After Gloucester’s eyes are put out, two servants have a short scene. Neither of the two was an experienced actor and the scene was unsatisfactory. The director found a simple solution. After Cornwall’s court leaves, the lights go out. The two servants enter carrying a torch and do their scene in near-darkness. Then the lights go on again. . . .

Another problem was the Old Man who helps the blinded Gloucester. The director turned this actor, also inexperienced, into Long John Silver, with a limp, a crutch, and growling voice. . . .

But the very best was the “No cause” scene. Lear lies UR on highest platform, dressed in white. When Cordelia and the doctor go up to him, the lights go down downstage, the sky becomes a bright red, clouds float across it, soft recorder music (from the RSC production) begins to play. There’s the music and the poor old man and the clouds and the pretty girl and good Kent and it’s absolutely irresistible. People cried at the first performance. I was so astonished when I first saw it that I laughed out loud, and the director and I chattered merrily away while the actors tried to concentrate. It’s a trick, but a splendid one, mechanical in the extreme but not unjustified.

PERFORMANCES

Performances always tell the truth. They are what they are. The audience at the first performance was pleased beyond words, but we saw all the faults, which were: technical; faults of pacing and transition; faults, always, of meaning; and occasional muffs. The good thing about it was that it kept moving. Our version was plenty long and we had only one intermission (between Acts III and IV) but we sustained the weight of the play. But strictly speaking a lot of it didn’t make any sense – was un-interpreted – and the director and I found out, by asking people, that no one could say what the production was about. Apparently it just was. This may be all right.

The second night was a real mistake, like many second novels. Cordelia’s crown didn’t fall off, as it had before, but everything else went wrong. The second half was strictly mechanical. Lear’s precarious hold on his lines gave way, and in his last scene with Cordelia he made the famous speech

And we’ll wear out, within a walled prison,
Pacts and sects of good, strong people . . .

(not exactly the right words), which took us all back to the days when he would forget all his lines in mid-scene and exit shouting “Go, go, my people!” Cordelia looked positively glad to go to prison. The audience seemed puzzled.

On the third night, however, everything held together and it was the best of the performances. It almost lived up to the promise of Lear’s splendid slow entrance to the RSC score in Act I Scene i while all the court bows. The fool and mad scenes went well; the blinding was intentionally horrifying; Lear was convincing and occasionally moving; Cordelia, who as an actress has great emotional directness, was as good as her first stunning reading in tryouts.

I watched the fourth performance but could barely face it, staying only because of my favorite scenes, those with Edgar and those with Cordelia, and finding it hard even to sit through those. I’d seen the production too often. The director says he enjoys rehearsals more than performances; he’d do only rehearsals if it weren’t for the actors, he says, which is probably a half-truth. “We know how good it was,” the director said.

[Kirk Woodward’s a playwright and director, among other accomplishments, and I’ve mentioned his children’s plays in the past (see “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Children's Theater in America,” ROT, 25 November 2009). His book, The Art of Writing Reviews (http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272), on which I commented on ROT (4, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009), was published in June 2009. Kirk’s works are available through his own website, http://spiceplays.com/index.html. His previous contribution to ROT was a report on the performance of David Mamet’s Race (3 May).]

Ian McKellen’s 'King Lear'

PBS is broadcasting Ian McKellen’s King Lear under the auspices of its semi-regular program Great Performances. (The first airing on WNET, chanel 13 in NYC, was Wednesday, 25 March, but it's being repeated on WNET and other area PBS outlets.) I thought it would be worthwhile to revist the stage performance on which the video is based and which I caught at BAM’s Harvey Theatre on 15 September 2007. (The 2½-hour TV version was recorded at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, not on a theater stage, but all reports indicate that the production and the cast are essentially the same as the stage production. It was performed in 2008, at the end of the RSC tour, after the performance I saw.) I scored a ticket to the Royal Shakespeare Company presentation starring McKellen in the title role at the last minute when a friend had to give up her seat. (They were doing Lear in rep with The Seagull in which McKellen shared the role of Sorin with another actor, William Gaunt--who played Gloucester in Lear.) I think that, for once, Ben Brantley got his evaluation exactly right in the Times on 14 September. My only quibble would be that he was harsher on the rest of the company than I would have been; perhaps they hadn't settled into the new space as comfortably when Brantley saw the show as they had by the time I got to see it at the Saturday mat.

I had tried to get seats for Lear back when BAM opened their box office for single tickets, but the show had sold out in subscription already. (My theater-going friend, Diana, and I couldn't put together the minimum number of shows required for a subscription this time around. That happens sometimes, but the last time, when Vanessa Redgrave came in with Hecuba, we had no trouble picking up single seats to see her.) Anyway, Diana called the week before to say that a friend of hers, an actress whom I also know, had a ticket but had a rehearsal that afternoon and couldn't go. Since Diana also had a conflict, she offered me the seat, and I grabbed it. (Fortunately, I have no life, so I was available at no notice to go on a Saturday afternoon!)

The stage production ran 3½ hours (with a two-hour first act!), but the time moved quickly, despite what Brantley described as "a heightened costume melodrama" with "overbaked acting." Director Trevor Nunn created a compelling momentum--and when McKellen was on stage, it was filled with vibrancy anyway. In fact, in my opinion, if McKellen hadn’t been so terrific in the role, the production would have seemed fine; he just showed everyone else on stage up. Not his fault--though perhaps Nunn could have cast a higher-caliber company to support McKellen. He had the RSC to draw on, after all--yet none of this company had a name I've ever heard before. (I don't know if this was a touring cast, different from the one that played the roles back home, but I sort of doubt that.)

So, let me save my description of McKellen's work till the end or so, and get the small observations over with first. I didn't see Seagull, so I don't know what that production looked like, but Lear seemed to have been designed to save on costume expenses. Everyone was dressed like characters out of Tolstoy! (Costumes were "supervised" by Stephanie Arditti. Why this distinction was made for costumes, rather than "designed" as the other elements were credited, I don't know. The Voice said the costumes were mostly "pulled" from stock. Did RSC ever do a stage version of War and Peace?) Lear looked like a Cossack king and all the others, except the French soldiers Cordelia brings back with her, looked like they were plopped down somewhere in the steppes of Russia. (I assume the uniforms the Frenchies wore were based on period French military dress, but I wouldn't know. The British soldiers looked like they might rush off to fight in Crimea or some place!) The women's dresses were late-19th-century gowns, as if they were all about to take off for the ball. (Goneril had a stunning red-and-black velvet outfit she wore throughout the second act.) Edmund and Edgar, and Albany and Cornwall were costumed pretty much as matched pairs (until Edgar, played by Ben Meyjes, became mad Tom, when he was nearly naked and curiously resembled Golum in the films of Lord of the Rings--in which McKellen appeared, coincidentally)--all Cossacks; Burgundy and France were paired, too, except for some trim on Burgundy's uniform: a couple of panels which were . . . well, burgundy! (I'm not sure this was meant to be a joke--but I thought it was funny.)

(Side remark: Cornwall was played by Guy Williams. Didn't he play Zorro on TV in the '50s?)

The set (designed by Christopher Oram) was of this image, too. The basic element, which remained in place throughout, was a kind of balcony running from down right around to up left. (Otherwise, the stage was mostly bare, except for set pieces--tables, the beggar's hovel, the stocks, etc.--that were carried on and off for specific scenes.) It looked like marble, with wine-colored drapes across the openings like the boxes at an ornate opera house and the same fabric draped beneath the balcony rails like bunting. (This was torn down in one scene and carried around the stage when Lear's men behaved raucously in Goneril's castle--you know, drunken carousing.) As the play proceeded, the framing set piece became more and more decrepit as if it were decaying as the kingdom fell to ruin (The Picture of Lear's Kingdom?). The opening scene was resplendent in gold robes and rich costumes in grand ceremony, as if to set up the visual decline that began almost immediately. In the second act, it looked like Grey Gardens, especially when the ceiling collapsed. It was a tad obvious, and I'm not sure what any of it meant--Brantley suggested "the audience-wooing" Nunn was just doing "popcorn" theater and he may have been right. In any case, it was not destructive or disturbing.

I was put in mind of the last time I saw McKellen on stage, also at BAM. It was the Royal National’s fascist Richard III, and in that 1992 production, the costuming had real significance. Making Richard a military dictator à la Hitler, Mussolini, or Pinochet enhanced the interpretation and gave an added dimension to the production. (Costumes had been supervised by Anne-Marie Winstanley.) I'm reminded of an essay Robert Brustein published in the New York Times back in 1988 in which he contrasted what he dubbed "simile" productions of classics with "metaphor" stagings. "Simile directing," Brustein wrote, "is a prose technique. Its in­novations are basically analogical--provid­ing at best a platform for ideas, at worst an occasion for pranks." This seems to be what Nunn accomplished in Lear, just laid a look and set of images over the text without doing any real reinterpretation. "Metaphorical directing," Brustein continued, "attempts to penetrate the mystery of a play in order to devise a poetic stage equiv­alent--a process considerably more radical in its interpretive risks . . . ." This lines up with Richard Eyre’s R3 17 years ago (and which became a film, I recall). It accomplishes a deeper reimagining and tells us something new or unrevealed about the play. Nunn didn't seem to have attempted to do this, it seemed to me; he just dressed it up. I certainly don't know why Nunn decided 19th-century Russia was a useful image (except, as I suggested, that it dovetailed with Chekhov). It did no harm, and it looked nice, even if it didn't really add anything. (My one objection was that, since Lear is set in pre-Christian Britain, the Imperial Russian look is just a little too spiffy. I'd have preferred something rougher, more elemental.)

Now let's get to the acting. (I don't really have anything to say about the directing, except from the point of view that the actors' work was Nunn's ultimate responsibility. I can't say he made any wrong choices or interpretations; he just didn't seem to have pushed his cast to do anything extraordinary.) I'm not really going to single out anyone here--no one excelled or fell egregiously short. I'm just going to capsulize the whole thing--with the exception of McKellen, of course. Everyone did pretty much what you'd expect--no one surprised me or startled me with a novel idea or interpretation. Philip Winchester's Edmund was a little too actorly in his technique, especially his gestures. (The New York Post called him "hammy," though the Village Voice said he was "strong" and "lucid.") In his first scene, when Edmond extols his assets and says, "My mind as generous," Winchester made a sweeping, graceful arc with his arm, all his fingers extended, to point to his temple. This is the action of an actor trained to make gestures visible from the back row of the balcony--but it's not the gesture of a man talking heatedly to himself alone. If I'd been playing the part--and Edmund is one that I always wanted to play, second to Iago (I like the villains in Shakespeare! I got to play Don John, a sort of Iago-manqué)--I'd have done a simple short, sharp jab at my head with one finger (two, if the visibility demanded it--some theatrical adjustments are necessary!) That's just an example, of course, but Winchester did this same kind of thing all the time, and the other actors were only slightly less stagy, punching their dominant character traits (e.g.: Frances Barber and Monica Dolan's Goneril and Regan's villainy and treachery). It was always clear that they were in a play, while McKellen was in a world. (I'll get to that in a moment.) Considering that this was the RSC and this is their bread and butter--what they do with their lives, as it were--I expected much more. If this production were on the stage at the Public, say, or the Shakespeare Theatre in D.C., I'd have said, 'Okay, it was a little flat, but good. It was a nice show.' But the RSC--they're supposed to be like the Comédie-Française doing Molière or the MAT doing Chekhov. It's what they do.

And none of this would have been all that obvious if it hadn't been for Ian McKellen. He was Lear--and I don't mean that in the clichéd way Hollywood uses it. He was a real man, aging, weakening, failing, floundering, lost, grasping for his waning strength and stolen dignity. However he did so, McKellen used both emotion and intellect to make Lear infuriating and sympathetic--by turns and often at the same time. McKellen was only 68 in 2007 (less than eight years older than I am--good grief!), but I never for a nanosecond doubted Lear was 80. I don't know if this was at all intentional, but there were times, after he'd turned over his kingdom to Regan and Goneril and been wandering about the land depending on their hospitality, that he appeared to be suffering from the beginnings of Alzheimer's. I saw this with my father in his last years--McKellen even looked a little like my dad, with his longish white hair and full white beard--and in the early days of the illness, Dad sometimes seemed lost and confused, but he was aware this was happening and it made him angry and afraid. That's what McKellen was doing. I brought my opera glasses with me this time, and I was able to watch McKellen's face. His eyes changed from fierce and angry to afraid, to lost, to insane, to determined--and then through all those responses again as fate buffeted him about. Not a moment was false or "acted." (He must be either brilliant or oblivious--I couldn't figure out how the other actors, who weren't really giving him much, didn't throw him at least now and then. If he was doing all this technically, not only did he fool me good, but he must be as great an acting technician as Olivier was said to have been.) I know this sounds like puffery--as if I were overwhelmed by the Great Actor or something--and maybe I was. I don't think so, though. I watched him--having read Brantley's review beforehand--to see what he was doing, and when I began to feel he was giving this incredible performance, I tried to see if I could figure out why or how. (I couldn't: whatever technique McKellen used, he's mastered it beyond analysis by me. I can tell you the results, but not the method.)

I was particularly impressed with McKellen's performance of the two big speeches--"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!" (for which he stripped naked before the storm's elements) and "Howl, howl, howl, howl!" when he carried Cordelia's body on stage at the end. Again, I can't really analyze the technique, but he managed to make these moments both significant and ordinary. I mean that he didn't underplay them so as to downplay their iconic theatrical nature and he didn't overplay them to signal their momentousness. I can only say that he conveyed the impact of the moments by the force of his voice--though not principally through its volume--and his face and body, but at the same time, they were part of a man's experience--however soul-rending that was. Of course, the play, being Shakespeare and Lear, is oversized, even melodramatic, but within the world of the play, McKellen was going through it all--while the other characters were portraying images--showing what it should look like.

I used to keep a mental list of the greatest individual stage performances I had seen. I don't do that anymore, but at the time it included James Earl Jones in Great White Hope, Alec McCowen in Hadrian VII, Virginia Capers in Raisin, and Cronyn and Tandy together in The Gin Game, among a few others. I'd have considered adding McKellen's Lear to the list, I think.