The Utopian

By Charles Petersen.

Will there ever be a persuasive staging of Lear, or is the aging king condemned forever to remain most at home in the theater of the mind?

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There is a long and celebrated tradition of talking about books you haven’t read — see last year’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (which I haven’t read) — but less well known are the pleasures of talking about plays you haven’t seen. Charles Lamb, the great early nineteenth century essayist and gourmand, wrote that “The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted” and that “Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on the stage.” What Lamb neglected to mention was that he had never actually seen King Lear, or at least not the Lear of Shakespeare: between 1681 and 1838 the original play was banished from the English theater, deemed too bleak and cruel for public consumption. A notorious revision by the Restoration dramatist Nahum Tate, in which both Lear and Cordelia survive, took its place. This, rather than the Lear of Shakespeare, is the play Lamb saw.

Even after Tate’s revision was repudiated, Lear remained, until the 1950s, rarely staged and more rarely seen. The play contains some of Shakespeare’s most emotionally harrowing and most extravagantly allegorical lines, as when the old king announces his daughter’s death — ”Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones! / Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so / That heaven’s vault should crack” — both declaring the immensity of his own grief and calling forth the apocalypse. Shakespeare’s combination of such personal sorrows with themes of deep philosophical, even cosmic scope, and his creation of characters who are simultaneously empty vessels and terrific individuals, resulted in the sense, lasting several centuries, that Lear was simply too huge for the theater.

The play’s fate changed at mid-century, amidst the mood of cultural doubt brought on by the Cold War, when new critical takes emerged. In 1962 the director Peter Brook famously put on a Lear in the spirit of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, and in 1964 the critic Jan Kott placed the play at the center of his influential study, Shakespeare Our Contemporary. For Brook and Kott, Lear’s very bleakness, and the play’s almost absurd mixture of minutely human and grandly mythic themes, made it all the more effective on the stage. Brook’s production cut the few redemptive lines, going almost as far as Tate — if only in the opposite direction — to remake the original to fit the vision of his time. The play has since become one of Shakespeare’s most often-performed.

For me, however, growing up in the desert of Lewiston, Idaho, at the mouth of Hells Canyon, later studying Shakespeare at a small college in the Midwest, Lear’s popularity has remained, until recently, little more than rumor. As for most Shakespeare fans of the past four centuries, my experience of Lear was limited to the theater of the mind — a standard any real production would find tough to beat. A.C. Bradley, professor of poetry at Oxford, and no provincial, expressed my feelings exactly a little over a century ago: “There is something in [Lear’s] very essence which is at war with the senses, and demands a purely imaginative realization.” It was thus with something of an anachronistic feeling that I walked into BAM’s Harvey Theater to see what after a string of sold-out performances at the Donmar Warehouse in London is being hailed as perhaps the greatest production of King Lear in recent memory.

DIRECTED BY MICHAEL Grandage and starring the legendary Derek Jacobi in the title role, the Donmar production succeeds in part precisely because it leaves so much of the play’s essence to the imagination. The set amounts to nothing more than a series of large planks laid out on the floor and erected as walls to the rear: with a splattering of white paint and the occasional smudge of wood showing through, the boards create the effect of an old house stripped down to the studs, its plaster walls and ancient flooring removed. Against this backdrop, Lear’s announcement that he will pass on the kingdom to his daughters seems almost superfluous; the House of State is more than ready for renovation.

Derek Jacobi, as Lear, dominates every scene. I found myself watching him nervously for each new sign of decline, as one might one’s own aging parent. He circumvents the problems of the first act, where Lear asks his three daughters to compete for their inheritances by proclaiming their love, through an ingeniously careful reading. Instead of presenting this “love test” as a premeditated scheme — in which case it can seem only a dramatic expedient, unimaginable as the work of a wise old monarch — Jacobi acts as if it were only a spur-of-the-moment jest. He then listens to the “glib and oily” praise of his older daughters, Goneril and Regan (a pair easily confused for evil twins, here well set-off by the icy Gina McKee and the schoolmarmish Justine Mitchell) not as if their words were deeply satisfying, but rather as merely another round in the endlessly ironic game of life at court.

When Cordelia, the youngest daughter (played with warmth and assuredness by Pippa Bennett-Warner), subsequently attempts to bring some earnestness into the proceedings — “I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth” — Leary’s fury, and his sudden decision to disown her, becomes not an inexplicable outbreak of madness but an instance of what might be called, in the language of our time, a “senior moment.” Lear can be his playful old self as long as his daughters stay within the bounds of accepted social niceties, but the moment Cordelia insists that her once-great father exercise a more than mechanical form of judgment, going beyond the bounds of etiquette to real thought, the impoverishment of his mind becomes terrifyingly evident.

The king’s decision to surround himself with such candid and fearless servants as Kent and the Fool leads one to presume that, in his right mind, he would have been far more pleased with Cordelia’s insistence on changing the rules of the game than with the unctuous praise of his older daughters. The tragedy is that Cordelia loves her father so much, at least as he once was, that she refuses to recognize how much he has changed, and insists that he love her as he once did, or else not at all.

As the first acts move forward, Jacobi’s alternation between the imperiousness proper to a king and the whining of an old man in decline, culminating in the frenzied denunciations of each of his older daughters — “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!” — allows us to see the great range of the king’s emotional capacities. His performance shows the extent to which Lear’s righteousness is mixed up with a need to terrorize his offspring, as well as a longing (after the expulsion of Cordelia) for his own self-destruction.

YET, FOR ALL the ingenuity of the Donmar King Lear, I still found myself longing for the richness of the unadorned text.

Coleridge stated the problem plainly: “Lear is the only serious performance of Shakespeare, the interest and situations of which are derived from the assumption of a gross improbability.” Like Lamb and other early 19th century critics, Coleridge meant this observation not as a criticism but as a statement of fact: the idea that an experienced old king — and everyone on stage suggests that Lear deserves this reputation — would partition his kingdom at all, much less by making his daughters declare their love, must at the outset be admitted as absurd. (The decision to partition a kingdom among one’s heirs had by Shakespeare’s time been acknowledged as one of the worst decisions a monarch could make.) The premise of Lear is not something out of the well developed political tradition of Shakespeare’s history plays, but rather something out of fairy tales or myth — as its setting in pre-Christian England, and its source in the clearly legendary early sections of the Elizabethan historian Raphael Holinshed’s  Chronicles, would lead one to expect.

It may well be possible, as this performance has shown, to make Lear’s demand that his daughters compete for their portions of the kingdom by declaring their love seem almost plausible. But to diminish the feeling of improbability — not something Lear works in spite of, but something it works through — is to damage the rest of the drama.

The next scene, where the bastard Edmund persuades his brother Edgar that their father, Gloucester, intends to kill him (for no discernible reason), is thrown off balance by the naturalism that precedes it. After the mad division of the kingdom and the expulsion of Cordelia, this scene should appear as, at most, no more incredible than what has gone before. In the Donmar production, despite fine performances by Gwilym Lee (Edgar) and Alec Newman (Edmund), the scene cannot help but come off as completely unpersuasive. If the “love test” can be made to seem plausible through some ingenious readings, there is simply no way to make an audience believe that a bastard who has been away from court for nearly a decade could persuade his legitimate brother that their father intends to kill him, based on no more evidence than his word. This scene should serve rather as another sign that we are not in the world of history but in that of myth, or what might be called “pre-history,” where actions take on the force of allegory.

WHEN READING LEAR, it is far easier to maintain a double awareness, a sense that we are both hearing the words of a specific old king named Lear, and the words of an archetype of a particular form of kingship. When Lear says, “I am a very foolish fond old man, / Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less,” he is both a half-crazed old man and a figure out of allegory, an epitome of old age. This holds true for other characters: When Edgar strips down and becomes a wandering beggar, he is both a particular nobleman brought low and what Lear calls “unaccommodated man.” When Cordelia revives her father, and he says, “You are a spirit, I know: when did you die?,” she is both Lear’s daughter and an angel of grace and forgiveness. When Kent, at the end, mysteriously intones, “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go; / My master calls me, I must not say no,” he is both Lear’s tenacious servant and a figure of loyalty, declaring that he will follow his master even into the grave.

Given how little patience many now have for allegory, and how much more interested we tend to be in the particularities of character than in old-fashioned concepts like loyalty, kingship and grace, it can be tempting simply to ignore the allegorical possibilities in Lear.  In another age, of course, it may have been equally tempting to ignore the shadings of character and concentrate instead on the implications of allegory. The problem with Lear, and the greatness of the play, is that through some mysterious alchemy it combines the most specific characterization with the widest allegory. Shakespeare makes Cordelia’s death both the murder of a singular daughter and the end of grace itself, of “a chance which does redeem all sorrows.”  This, at least, is the richest experience I have had reading the play, and it is an experience that seems almost impossible to convey on the stage, where it is so much more difficult to suggest both the broadly cosmic and impossibly intimate meaning of each line.

The mid-twentieth century Shakespeare critic Maynard Mack compared the play to great allegorical works like The Divine Comedy, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Finnegan’s Wake, and said, ”When we are given a Lear in the theatre that honors both its intimate humanity and its position in the company of such works as these … the problem of the play will be solved. But not before.” Mack’s point remains valid. Having seen a great Lear only further persuades me that, despite its dramatic form, transferring the play to the stage in anything approaching its full meaning would be about as easy as making The Divine Comedy, or indeed Finnegan’s Wake, into a play. Despite many new revelations, Lear remains for me, as it always has been, most at home in the theater of the mind.

Charles Petersen, Associate Editor at n+1, has written for the New York Review of Books and the Nation.