King Lear

KING LEAR IN

PERFORMANCE:

THE RSC AND BEYOND

The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.

We begin with a brief overview of the play’s theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half-century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.

Finally, we go to the horse’s mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director. He or she must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.

FOUR CENTURIES OF

KING LEAR:

AN OVERVIEW

The first Lear was Richard Burbage, the leading actor with Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men. He was described by an anonymous elegist listing his best-known roles as “Kind Lear.”¹ Little is known otherwise of the earliest performances. The Fool is thought to have been played by Robert Armin, the company’s leading comic actor after the departure of Will Kempe. A talented singer and musician, Armin was noted for his witty paradoxical fooling. Some scholars have, however, suggested that Armin may have played Edgar, since Tom o’Bedlam speaks a kind of fool’s language and Armin was equally capable of the multiple role changes that the character puts himself through. This casting would have opened up the possibility for a boy actor to double the roles of Cordelia and the Fool, who never appear on stage together. Such doubling would give added poignancy to the line “And my poor fool is hanged,” but it remains counterintuitive to suppose that Armin was cast in any role other than that of the Fool.

There is a record of a court performance at Whitehall on St. Stephen’s night, 26 December 1606. It was a bold choice to play the mad king and the image of a “dog obeyed in office” before the court. A play of “king Lere” was performed at Gowthwaite Hall in Yorkshire in 1610. This was probably Shakespeare’s version, not the old Leir play (which recently scholarship has ascribed to Thomas Kyd, author of the highly successful Spanish Tragedy). A company of English actors in Dresden in 1626 played the “Tragoedia von Lear, König in Engelandt,” probably also Shakespeare’s version.

The play was revived briefly after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and subsequent reopening of the theaters, but in 1681 Nahum Tate staged a production using a text that he himself had adapted. In his dedicatory epistle Tate emphasized the idea of the rough and unfinished nature of Shakespeare’s work. It was a “heap of jewels” that needed to have order, regularity, and polish applied to it for its true beauty to be revealed. Tate simplified language, plot, and character, eliminating the Fool and much of the play’s complexity. He included a love story between Edgar and Cordelia, together with a confidante for Cordelia, Arante. The play’s happy ending concludes with Lear restored, handing his throne over to Edgar and Cordelia. Tate’s Lear and various revised forms of the adaptation, including one by David Garrick, replaced the original on stage, except possibly in Dublin, where the Smock Alley promptbooks are based on Shakespeare’s printed text. The authentically Shakespearean original was not performed on the London stage again, save for a handful of performances by Edmund Kean in the early nineteenth century, until Macready’s restored (if heavily cut) production of 1838.

2. William Charles Macready as Lear in 1838, with the dead Cordelia: until this revival, the stage was dominated by Nahum Tate’s reworking with a happy ending in which Cordelia survives and marries Edgar.

Thomas Betterton had been Tate’s Lear. David Garrick, the most celebrated actor-manager of the eighteenth century, restored parts of Shakespeare’s text in his own production at Drury Lane but retained Tate’s ending. His performance was acclaimed for its pathos and humanity. In his diary James Boswell records: “I was fully moved, and I shed abundance of tears.”² The Shakespearean editor George Steevens, after confessing his view that “Tate’s alteration … had considerably improved the great original,” went on to extol the virtues of Garrick’s acting: “Were we to inquire in what particular scene Mr. Garrick is preeminently excellent it would be a difficult circumstance to point it out.” He did, though, single out Garrick’s “mode of speaking the curse at the end of the first act of the play.” In his view Garrick “gives it additional energy, and it is impossible to hear him deliver it without an equal mixture of horror and admiration.”³ John Philip Kemble (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 1788) played Lear with his tragedian sister, Sarah Siddons, as Cordelia. The critic and poet Leigh Hunt was disappointed: “He personated the king’s majesty perfectly well, but not the king’s madness … he is always stiff, always precise, and he will never, as long as he lives, be able to act any thing mad unless it be a melancholy mad statue.”⁴

During the Regency period, when old King George III was mad, the London theater managers tactfully abstained from staging the play. Soon after the king’s death in 1820, the fiery Romantic actor Edmund Kean played the role at Drury Lane later to mixed reviews. The London Times objected that the storm scene “was less effective than many others” chiefly because it was “exhibited with so much accuracy that the performer could scarcely be heard amidst the confusion,” but the reviewer was better pleased by the fifth act in which “there was scarcely a dry eye in the theatre.”⁵ William Hazlitt felt that “Mr. Kean chipped off a bit of the character here and there: but he did not pierce the solid substance, nor move the entire mass.”⁶ Hazlitt reviewed Junius Brutus Booth’s production at Covent Garden in the same year more favorably: “There was no feebleness, and no vulgarity in any part of Mr. Booth’s acting, but it was animated, vigorous, and pathetic throughout.”⁷

When Macready, who had played Edmund to Booth’s Lear, restored Shakespeare’s text in his Covent Garden production of 1838, the Fool, reintroduced for the first time in more than a hundred and fifty years, was played by a young woman, Priscilla Horton. Macready set the play in a pagan Saxon Britain replete with Druidic stone circles. Critics were generally enthusiastic:

Mr. Macready’s Lear, remarkable before for a masterly completeness of conception, is heightened by this introduction of the Fool to a surprising degree. It accords exactly with the view he seeks to present of Lear’s character.… Mr. Macready’s representation of the father at the end, broken down to his last despairing struggle, his heart swelling gradually upwards till it bursts in its closing sigh, completed the only perfect picture that we have of Lear since the age of Betterton.⁸

It may be asked how someone writing a century and a half after the event could have known that Betterton’s was a “perfect picture” of Lear, but the point here is to stress how much the characterization of Lear gains from the restoration of his foil, the Fool.

Samuel Phelps produced the play at Sadler’s Wells in 1845 using simpler staging and a fuller version of the text than that of Macready, which had remained heavily cut despite the rejection of Tate. The naturalism of Phelps’ performance was praised but the storm was thought excessive: “It is not imitation, but realization.”⁹ Charles Kean staged a successful production at the Princess’s Theater in 1858. Set in Anglo-Saxon Britain, it boasted a strong supporting cast including Kate Terry as Cordelia. Meanwhile in New York, Edwin Booth, son of Junius Brutus, revived the play using Shakespeare’s text, giving a performance described by William Winter as “the fond father and the broken old man. It was the great heart, shattered by cruel unkindness, that he first, and most of all, displayed.”¹⁰ The great Italian actor Tommaso Salvini, also won praise for his performances at Boston’s Globe Theatre in 1882 and London’s Covent Garden in 1884, despite the fact that he spoke in Italian while the rest of the cast spoke in English, a proceeding that the novelist Henry James described as “grotesque, unpardonable, abominable.”¹¹ Henry Irving’s elaborately staged production at the Lyceum in 1892 was set in a Britain of Roman ruins with Druidic priests and Viking warriors. Using a heavily cut text that reduced the play’s violence and sexuality, Irving emphasized Lear’s age and paternalism in a performance that attracted mixed notices, although Ellen Terry’s Cordelia was widely praised.

At the end of the nineteenth century directors such as William Poel and Harley Granville Barker promoted the simple staging of Shakespeare’s plays, attempting to recreate the conditions of the Elizabethan playhouse, with its fast continuous action in contrast to the spectacular staging of the Victorians, which involved lengthy scene changes. In his Prefaces to Shakespeare (1927), Granville Barker argued vigorously against critical prejudice toward the play in performance and insisted on its theatrical viability, a judgment borne out by the many productions since. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced a number of distinguished Lears but have also concentrated on more balanced productions that give greater weight and opportunity to lesser roles.

John Gielgud first played Lear in Harcourt Williams’ production at the Old Vic in 1931 at the age of twenty-six. Despite his obvious talent, critics thought him too young for the part. In 1940 Gielgud had a second opportunity to play the part, again at the Old Vic, in a production set in early modern Europe, based on the ideas of Granville Barker, who oversaw the early rehearsals and personally coached Gielgud. In an essay of 1963 Gielgud claimed that the ten days in which Barker worked with the company “were the fullest in experience that I have ever had in all my years upon the stage.”¹² The production was a success, although the noted critic James Agate concluded that Gielgud’s performance was “a thing of great beauty, imagination, sensitiveness, understanding, executive virtuosity, and control. You would be wrong to say—this is not King Lear! You would be right to say that this is Lear every inch but one.”¹³

In 1936 the director-designer Theodore Komisarjevsky staged a memorable and radical production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. There was a simple but effective set, consisting mainly of a grand staircase, illuminated by a cyclorama that changed color to reflect the mood of the scene. As the London Times review put it:

3. Expressionist design in the 1930s: the opening scene of the Komisarjevsky production.

On this simple stage of steps and platforms, where every movement is sharp and significant and the light-borne colour keeps pace with the changing character of the scene, Mr. Randle Ayrton has complete freedom to act Lear.¹⁴

A decade later Laurence Olivier played Lear at the Old Vic as “a whimsical old tyrant who takes this way of dividing his kingdom simply as a jest, until the joke turns serious because Cordelia refuses to play.”¹⁵ His performance was not to all tastes but Alec Guinness as the Fool was widely praised. Sir Donald Wolfit, an old-style actor-manager, toured his own production between 1947 and 1953—Ronald Harwood’s experience as Wolfit’s backstage dresser inspired his play The Dresser (1980).

Gielgud played Lear for a third time in 1950, in a production which he co-directed with Anthony Quayle. Although his performance had developed in a number of ways, it was still largely influenced by his work with Granville Barker. He played the part again in 1955 in a production directed by George Devine and designed by Isamu Noguchi. This time Gielgud aimed for psychological realism in his performance but it was generally agreed that while the stylized set worked, the heavy costumes were problematic.

4. John Gielgud as Lear in the hovel (1950 production), with Fool and Poor Tom in the foreground, the disguised Kent behind.

In 1956 Orson Welles directed and starred in a production at the New York City Center. Falling and breaking one ankle and spraining the other during rehearsals, Welles, undeterred, played the part in a wheelchair, pushed around by the Fool. In 1959 Charles Laughton played Lear in a production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, directed by Glen Byam Shaw. Critics were divided, especially about Laughton’s conception of the role. One of them, Alan Brien, complained that Laughton developed “from boyishness to senility without even an intervening glimpse of maturity.”¹⁶

Three years later Peter Brook directed his groundbreaking production starring Paul Scofield (discussed in detail below). There have been numerous distinguished productions since: in 1968 Trevor Nunn directed with Eric Porter playing Lear; in 1974 Buzz Goodbody directed a pared-down version for the RSC’s small studio theater, The Other Place; in 1976 Trevor Nunn directed Donald Sinden as Lear; in 1979 Peter Ustinov played Lear in a production directed by Robin Phillips at Stratford, Ontario; Adrian Noble’s 1982 production with Michael Gambon is discussed below. In 1989 Jonathan Miller directed Eric Porter at the Old Vic; 1990 saw the Renaissance Theatre company’s production, directed by Kenneth Branagh with Richard Briers as Lear and Emma Thompson as the Fool; in the same year Nicholas Hytner directed John Wood at Stratford; in 1993 Noble directed the play at Stratford again, this time with Robert Stephens as Lear (discussed below). In 1997 in the (London) National’s intimate Cottesloe studio, Richard Eyre directed a production (his swan-song as artistic director) with Ian Holm playing Lear—a highly acclaimed production that was later recorded for television; in the same year Peter Hall directed Alan Howard at the Old Vic; and in 1999 Yukio Ninagawa directed Nigel Hawthorne for the RSC; in 2001 Julian Glover played Lear in Barry Kyle’s production at the Globe and the following year Jonathan Kent directed Oliver Ford-Davies at the Almeida, a performance much admired for its intelligence; Jonathan Miller again directed the play, this time for the 2002 Stratford Festival, Ontario, with Christopher Plummer in the lead; in 2004 Bill Alexander directed Corin Redgrave in a production that used a full conflated text and ran for nearly four hours; in 2007 the RSC’s Complete Works Festival in which all Shakespeare’s plays were performed closed with Trevor Nunn’s production at the Courtyard Theatre with Ian McKellen as King Lear (see interview with Nunn, below). Powerful small-scale productions include a touring one by Kaboodle Theatre Company (1991–94), which made very strong use of a mix of Oriental-imperial costumes and modernity (a feisty Cordelia in Doc Martens boots).

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.

AT THE RSC

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.¹⁷

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.¹⁸

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.¹⁹

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.²⁰

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.²¹

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.²²

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.²³

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.”²⁴

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.²⁵

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.²⁶

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.”²⁷

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.²⁸

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.”²⁹

Described by critic Irving Wardle as “an all-too-familiar story of family life,”³⁰ 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.³¹

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.”³² 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.”³³

Fools and Madmen

Real and assumed madness play an essential part in the plot of King Lear. In a program note by Michael MacDonald, author of a historical study called Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth Century England (1983), Adrian Noble’s 1993 production was contextualized by means of the suggestion that the audience

is presented with three kinds of madness: real in Lear himself, assumed in Tom/Edgar, and professional in the Fool. To its original audience, in a population largely uneducated, unable to distinguish between epilepsy, demonic possession and a skilful beggar on the make, the spectacle of an old man and a half-naked creature railing at the weather and babbling about demons would not have been especially unusual: like the unemployed and other vagrants the countryside teemed with, they were a fact of life.³⁴

Lear is very rarely played as being driven mad exclusively by the cruelty that is inflicted on him, but is often portrayed as being dangerously unhinged from the start. In Nicholas Hytner’s production,

the early household scenes are honeycombed with … micro-sequences, which take you inside Lear’s head, showing his hunger for affection, his need to play the strong man, his short attention span, and his helpless descents into blind rage. These are an embarrassment to the court and they give the sisters every pretext for saying something to keep the old man happy. But it is only when they try to draw the line that you really see what they have had to put up with. At the suggestion that he should shed a few knights, all hell breaks loose in the Albany dining room, with Lear emptying his gun into the ceiling, crushing Goneril to the ground like a blubbering child, clearing the space for carnage by hanging the Fool on a coat-hook: and finally vanishing into the night leaving his shaken hosts facing each other down a long table for their solitary dinner.³⁵

Very clearly a man with no control over his own emotions, John Wood’s Lear was also an emotional vandal to his daughters, and his influence could be seen in their learned behavior.

In Buzz Goodbody’s 1974 production, to be a sane man in a cruel world was to be part of that cruelty. Lear’s madness became the transitional stage from cruelty to humanity:

Tony Church did not play Lear as a virtuoso acting part, but as a down-to-earth king, a patriarch who got his pleasure from hunting. He is out in the cold because of who he is—not a mighty monarch fallen from grace, but an old man on the point of death, facing himself and his life.… When he is “sane,” he represents the cruel world, arbitrary and aggressive, and only when he is “mad” does he embody human values.³⁶

In the stunning visual sequence that started Adrian Noble’s 1982 production, lunacy not only led to virtue but was linked to it through the characters of the Fool and Cordelia:

On Lear’s throne the Grock-like Fool and Cordelia sit facing each other, with their necks at opposite ends of a taut halter (resembling a noose), as if lunacy and virtue were inseparable.… What follows is a delirious descent into a world of barbarism in which farce and tragedy are umbilically linked.³⁷

Antony Sher played the Fool as “Lear’s alter-ego, the visible mark of his insanity. His Master’s Voice as he perches on his lap like a ventriloquist’s doll, the conscience of the King.”³⁸ In the words of the reviewer in the Jewish Chronicle, “There is a strong sense in which, just as the great comic double acts are like watching a schizophrenic trying to pull himself together, Antony Sher’s red-nosed clown and Michael Gambon’s violent old man are two warring parts of one psyche.”³⁹ The poet and critic James Fenton, writing in the London Sunday Times, pushed the point further:

Michael Gambon’s Lear was a man all too willing to cast off his role as king, and his relationship to the Fool pointed to this uneasiness.

Lear’s foolishness and his love for his Fool are the points of departure for the interpretation. In all his madness, his anger and his suffering, we do not forget this. Indeed, I wonder if Lear has ever fooled around so enthusiastically.

Imagine a production in which the King, though condemned to kingship, would clearly love to have been a comedian, while the Fool, although unable to stop jesting, is transfixed by the horror of his true perception of the tragedy. This is the version which Adrian Noble has directed.… This is not the Fool of criticism, not an A-level “assess-the significance-of-the-Fool” fool. This is your genuine professional fool. Inside whom is a man in a panic, the Cassandra of the play, whose raving prophesies terrify the prophet himself.⁴⁰

Sher described how in rehearsals they came up with a solution to the disappearance of the Fool after the arrival of Tom o’Bedlam.⁴¹ During the mock trial scene the Fool picked up a pillow to represent Regan. On the words “anatomize her,” Lear stabbed the pillow in a frenzy of rage. In his insane and violent outburst he fatally stabbed the Fool accidentally. With all the attention on Lear leaving the hovel, the others did not realize what had happened. The Fool slumped down dead into a barrel in which he stood.

The emphasis put on the Fool in this production (the program cover featured a fool’s face with a red nose that appeared to be an amalgam of Lear and the Fool), along with Sher’s magnificent performance, led many critics to feel that the play became unbalanced, losing impetus in the final acts after the Fool was killed.

At the end of the hovel scene Edgar has replaced the Fool as Lear’s spiritual mentor. Lear takes Edgar off in one direction as the Fool exits in another. According to director Adrian Noble,

That happens accidentally. He doesn’t plan that.… For some reason he decides to take on the sins of others … in exactly the same way as a pilgrim, monk or nun … dedicate their lives in a particular way that enables other people to have a richer spiritual life. It is a gift of humanity to God. This is exactly the same thing with Edgar.⁴²

Lear’s journey into his own fooldom takes him from the enclosed mental space of the court out into the world and the secrets of humanity, to emotions denied and hidden from him by dint of his position in society. This awakening by the Fool and Poor Tom leads to a political and spiritual epiphany that is life-changing and possibly world-changing. Many directors have seen the following lines—often quoted in their program notes—as the core of the play:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your lopped and windowed raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp,

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them

And show the heavens more just.

The political dimensions of King Lear are most clearly evidenced in the king’s interaction with the mad beggar. Edgar, the abused son, and Poor Tom, the forgotten citizen of Lear’s England, embody both familial and national neglect. Edgar’s disguise as Bedlam beggar is also crucial to Lear’s spiritual journey. In Noble’s second production of the play for the RSC in 1993:

[Lear’s] growing obsession with this emblem of “unaccommodated man” causes the displacement of the Fool … was brilliantly visualized in the image of Ian Hughes clinging forlornly to Poor Tom’s hand at the end of a human chain that Gloucester led across the stage.⁴³

Visually Edgar has variously appeared as a Caliban-type figure, the poor bare-forked animal spouting obscenities but in need of the world’s pity, as Christ-like with a crown of thorns, bloodied and suffering for the world’s sins, or alternatively as demonic, as in the RSC’s 1982 production when “Jonathan Hyde’s Edgar as a virtually naked Poor Tom [burst] through the splintering floor like some infernal demon born on to Lear’s ‘great stage of fools’.”⁴⁴ “It was the modern equivalent of the entrance of a devil from the pit of Hell, and Tom’s demonic side, which actors so often miss as they go for shivering pathos, was established at once.”⁴⁵

Thrown to the wilderness by his family, Edgar evolves from “worm” to potential king. His suffering appears as a barbaric initiation rite designed by the toughest of gods. It is a trial of cruelty fitting for the evil world that is unleashed in the play.

The Absence of Humanity

King Lear is a play rich with vicious bestial images, all symbolic of the barbaric capabilities of man and woman. Goneril, for instance, is described as having a “wolfish visage.” Edward Topsell’s Historie of Foure-footed Beastes (1607) mixed scientific fact, folklore, and classical allusions to animals and mythological creatures, giving them often exotic and fantastic attributes. It describes the customary attributes associated with the wolf in animal lore: treachery, deceit, hypocrisy, ravenousness, and cruelty. These associations gave Shakespeare’s audience an accurate idea of Goneril’s character and her subsequent behavior. However, for modern directors, “Another interpretative decision that must be faced … is whether to accept the moral polarity of Lear’s daughters as a fact of the story or to suggest more naturalistic reasons for their behavior.”⁴⁶

In recent years patriarchal repression and child abuse of one form or another have often been regarded as the defining reasons for evil in children. Lear has accordingly been portrayed as physically and mentally abusive or neglectful, demanding, cantankerous, a bully who has created so much pent-up anger in his two elder daughters that it erupts when they are given the opportunity to release their feelings without recrimination; that is to say, when they are in power.

In the influential 1962 production, Peter Brook portrayed Lear’s knights as rowdy and destructive, while Irene Worth’s Goneril was self-contained and cool, remonstrating with Lear in measured tones, speaking as somebody with cause to complain. Some critics thought such a treatment a distortion of the text, but most modern directors have followed this interpretation to some degree. Though it helps to humanize Goneril, it does make the descent into evil very difficult to portray.

Janet Dale, who played the part in 1993, admitted that “I am trying to play her with a conscience, but I suspect the lines won’t support it.” Rather than an outright evil woman, she wished to portray her as a woman “of moral degeneration.”⁴⁷

By focusing on the psychology of these extremely dysfunctional families, the violence in Nicholas Hytner’s 1990 production became rooted in explainable terms:

The production is about confused people destroyed by their incomprehensible emotions or, as with Wood’s massively erratic Lear, struggling through new ones.… The effects of long abuse are evident in his daughters. Alex Kingston’s Cordelia has become rebellious, bloody-minded and rejects Lear almost more than he does her. Estelle Kohler’s Goneril and Sally Dexter’s Regan, seem still to want the love of this old, impossible man.… It is fashionable nowadays to allow us to see the “bad” daughters’ point of view, but rarely as strongly as here. Both of them seem badly in need of Valium, psychoanalysis, or both. They are frustrated, exhausted, at the end of a tether which finally breaks, liberating all that suppressed anger and barely contained madness. Their evils proliferate, but they, like Goneril and Regan themselves, are ultimately Lear’s fault.⁴⁸

Order opens up to reveal chaos. And the same pattern is visible in erratic human behaviour. Lear, having cursed Goneril with sterility, rushes back to embrace her. Astonishingly, Regan first conspires in the blinding of Gloucester and then tenderly asks him, rather than her wounded husband, “How dost my lord?” Mr. Hytner ushers us into a morally topsy-turvy universe in which good and evil frequently cohabit within the same person.⁴⁹

One cannot escape the fact that what Regan and Goneril do is evil and unnatural. In Buzz Goodbody’s 1974 production, which cut the role of Cornwall, “Regan put out Gloucester’s eyes unaided, with a broach.”⁵⁰ Modern stagings of the blinding scene nearly always show Regan’s active participation in the mutilation of Gloucester. Emily Raymond, who played Goneril in 2004, felt that Goneril and Regan “had a brutal upbringing—[with] smacks of physical violence and mental abuse. I think Lear probably took his daughters to hangings and taught them the brutal way to deal with traitors—you don’t hang them, you pluck out their eyes and let them live, to serve as a deterrent to others.”⁵¹

What impact does it have to turn the violence and evil in Lear into something psychological instead of metaphysical? Does the implication that it is somehow the “natural” result of a bad, neglected upbringing diminish the epic nature of the play and the horrific impact of the sisters’ monstrous acts? Lear’s world is thrown out of order by his inability to be an adequate father and king. James I, in his publication The True Law of Free Monarchies, underlined the divine right of kings and the duty of all monarchs to treat their subjects as a caring father would do his children. Lear’s misunderstanding of his role as a fixed point in the natural order of things and his irresponsibility in relation to his position in society unleash unnatural chaos.

In 1993 Adrian Noble emphasized violent cosmic forces prevalent in the play by use of an abstract but symbolic set:

When David Bradley’s superlative Gloucester, his eyes gouged out, staggers away from the scene of atrocity and from Simon Dormandy’s chillingly, psychopathic Cornwall, the focus clears at last. Noble used the Folio edition of the text, so cutting the aid of Gloucester’s servants after the blinding. The sightless Bradley gazes in the direction of a blue and white model of the globe, fixed above the stage. As he stares, a crack runs across the globe’s circumference and the sands of time begin to pour out of it. The society of King Lear, with family life collapsing in warfare and inhuman cruelty … is ominous of all civilized human life ruined and coming to an end.⁵²

In this bleak vision,

Noble’s most original stroke is to suggest that the cruelty unleashed by Lear’s folly spreads to even the conventionally good characters. The chief beneficiary is Simon Russell Beale’s extraordinary Edgar who starts as goody-two shoes and who is turned by the horrors he has witnessed into a symbol of revenge. In this production he doesn’t just kill Oswald; he batters his face with a staff as if in retaliation for the blinding of his father. The most unplayable major role in Shakespeare suddenly acquires a specific identity: a man forever tainted by the contagion of violence.⁵³

In his final battle with Edmund, Russell Beale as Edgar tried “to rip out the dying Edmund’s eyes in reprisal.”⁵⁴ Similarly, Bill Alexander’s 2004 production included “chilling touches that alert you afresh to the barbarism of its world. For example, in the climactic duel between Edmund and Edgar, it’s only chance that stops the virtuous brother from exacting primitive ’eye for an eye’ justice”⁵⁵—“In order to force Edmund to drop his arms, [Edgar] grabbed him by either side of his face and pushed his thumbs into his eyes. This reference to the blinding of Gloucester was eerily resonant.”⁵⁶

Our opinion of Edgar will determine how we consider the end of the play. His spiritual journey, which echoes Lear’s, provides him with a unique understanding of humanity and the preciousness of life. But he is also a very human avenger who has to set the world right and provide hope for the future. To overbalance his character with deliberate malicious and violent action furthers a nihilistic vision of the play by removing the certainty of redemption for a lost and barbaric world. Adrian Noble in 1982 stressed this element of unredeemed cruelty. The Guardian critic Michael Billington explains:

Edgar slays Oswald by breaking his back with a staff, and the fraternal duel between Edgar and Edmund is a bare-chested, bloody, unchivalric combat that ends with Edmund’s head being dumped in water. Even at the last the characters look out into the future in a spirit of skeptical uncertainty.⁵⁷

In Peter Brook’s vision of the play chaos was part of the natural order. His production emphasized the inhumanity and disinterestedness of the forces that annihilate Lear. There was no moral structure beneath the surface of civilization: “Everywhere one looks, one sees only the facades and emblems of a world and, ironically, as characters acquire sight, it enables them to see only into a void.”⁵⁸

Brook removed key moments of redemption and humanity: the servants did not tend Gloucester after he has been blinded but callously bumped into him as they cleared away the stage. Edmund’s attempt to redeem himself and stop the order that will see the death of Cordelia was cut. As Lear died, his final words “Look there” were spoken as he stared ahead into nothingness. We were not left with the usual tableau of survivors grieving over Lear and Cordelia. The cast left, carrying out their dead bodies, leaving Edgar and the dead Edmund on stage alone. Edgar moved center-stage, and then went to his brother. As he dragged his brother’s corpse up toward the back of the stage a distant rumble of thunder sounded in the background, leaving the audience with the impression that worse was to follow. “[W]e that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long” took on a genuinely apocalyptic meaning. This was an image of the horror of “the promised end” of the world.

Where Brook’s production succeeded was in making the audience grieve for humanity, or more specifically for the absence of humanity. It seemed a fitting statement for its time, and it is one that still touches us today. Lear’s speech in the hovel is central to Brook’s vision—it is not by chance that he used this quote in the program for the production’s world tour: “Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” Corin Redgrave, who played King Lear in 2004, also took this line:

The play investigates how, in a dying or decaying world, we can live better and be better toward one another. It can’t produce any conclusions to that because the world as Shakespeare saw it at that time was dying, just as our world as we see it is dying. Shakespeare was writing in a world which he sees going to hell on wheels and writing a text book in case the world should ever recover. So it is the most bleak of plays, but it is a very salutary play, a very necessary play … you could not possibly lose King Lear without impoverishing ourselves terribly.⁵⁹

THE DIRECTOR’S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH ADRIAN NOBLE, DEBORAH WARNER, AND TREVOR NUNN

Adrian Noble, born in 1950, arrived at the RSC from the Bristol Old Vic, where he had directed several future stars in productions of classic plays. His first production on the main stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford was the acclaimed 1982 Lear, discussed here, with Michael Gambon as the king and Antony Sher as an extraordinarily powerful Fool. Two years later his Henry V sowed the seed for Kenneth Branagh’s film. Among his other major productions during his two decades at the RSC were Hamlet, again with Branagh in the title role, The Plantagenets, based on the Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy, and the two parts of Henry IV, with Robert Stephens as Falstaff. Stephens returned in 1993 to play Lear in a second production of the tragedy, also discussed here. Noble’s 1994 Midsummer Night’s Dream was made into a film. He was artistic director from 1991 to 2003, since when he has been a freelance director. His production style is characterized by strong use of colors and objects (such as umbrellas), and fluid scenic structure.

Deborah Warner, born in 1959, trained in stage management at the Central School of Speech and Drama. At the age of twenty-one she formed her own “fringe” company, Kick Theatre, imaginatively staging stripped-down productions of the classics, including King Lear (1985, discussed here), at the Edinburgh Festival. In 1987 she made her RSC debut with a rigorously simple but deeply moving Titus Andronicus, starring Brian Cox, on the intimate stages of the Swan at Stratford and The Pit at London’s Barbican. A King John in a similar style followed the next year and in 1990 she directed King Lear, again with Brian Cox, on the proscenium Lyttelton stage of the National Theatre in London (also discussed here). She has subsequently specialized in Samuel Beckett and opera, but has returned to Shakespeare with a Richard II at the National, featuring her collaborator Fiona Shaw cross-dressed in the title role, and a large-scale Julius Caesar at the Barbican.

Sir Trevor Nunn is the most successful and one of the most highly regarded of modern British theater directors. Born in 1940, he was a brilliant student at Cambridge, strongly influenced by the literary close reading of Dr. F. R. Leavis. At the age of just twenty-eight he succeeded Peter Hall as artistic director of the RSC, where he remained until 1978. He greatly expanded the range of the company’s work and its ambition in terms of venues and touring. He also achieved huge success in musical theater and subsequently became artistic director of the National Theatre in London. His productions are always full of textual insights, while being clean and elegant in design. Among his most admired Shakespearean work has been a series of tragedies with Ian McKellen in leading roles: Macbeth (1976, with Judi Dench, in the dark, intimate space of The Other Place), Othello (1989, with McKellen as Iago and Imogen Stubbs as Desdemona), and King Lear (2007, in the Stratford Complete Works Festival, on world tour, and then in London).

One of the first questions one always wonders about with King Lear is: What do you decide on as a setting for the play? We’ve seen everything from a Stonehenge-like world to contemporaneity by way of Samurai Japan. So what kind of a world did you and your designer seek to create?

Noble: There are two or three driving forces in relation to the setting. First of all there is the need to create a series of credible family units, because the dynamic of the play emanates from damaged families; in particular Lear’s and Gloucester’s two parallel families. So one needs to be able to create a domesticity and parallel familial worlds. The second thing one needs to be able to explore is an epic quality, by which I mean the fact that the reality we live in fractures and splinters as the reality inside Lear’s head fractures and splinters. Shakespeare quite deliberately expresses the horrors and the madness that are happening inside the human being through the physicality of it.

In both productions I sought for a setting and a world that could fragment and start behaving in an almost independent way. With both productions the walls started splitting and almost exploded apart. In 1993 with Robert Stephens as Lear I found an image at the very end of the first act which I felt was rather telling: the moon started bleeding sand. That seemed to me an exquisitely painful image, with the moon’s very strong connection with the eye. The milk of human kindness had completely disappeared.

I found myself eschewing a completely modern, contemporary world, because it seemed to me that would quite swiftly become a highway to nowhere. In a similar way I eschewed the old Stonehenge version which seemed to me as silly as setting it in Wapping. So we found a world that probably related to Europe a hundred and fifty years ago, with greatcoats, where people still hunted, where the motor vehicle hadn’t taken over our world. Neither myself, Bob Crowley, who designed the first, or Anthony Ward, who designed the second, would I think be able to place it within fifty years of a particular date.

Warner: My interest in both my productions was to release the characters through their language and their relationships. What the play does is to take the audience into the interior of themselves. It is a mirror of the desolation of the human spirit, how lost it is, how far we fall in families and how hard sought are the conditions that prompt personal change. That’s why the setting of any given production has little connection to the key that may unlock the scenes and acts. The play has to flow through our imaginations and then it has to lodge, and that is why I used such a pared-down aesthetic so that the space is clear for that to happen. All great plays do this but each must be met in their particular. With Kick Theatre in 1985 we were in a church hall in Edinburgh with three ladders and a bucket of water for the heath scene. With the NT [National Theatre] we were on the wide open stage of the Lyttelton Theatre where different aesthetic choices needed to be made before we began. Hildegard Bechtler’s set was poetic and beautiful but bare, and the “world” was not precisely named by it. It was not the “Stone Age Lear,” or the “Third Reich Lear” but the Brian Cox, David Bradley, Ian McKellen, Susie Engel, and Clare Higgins Lear. It was actor led and actor inspired and I still believe that that is a very good way with Shakespeare. Belief in casting and the group creation of the world is what matters.

Nunn: Shakespeare says that King Lear is the king of Ancient Britain. On the other hand, Shakespeare includes scenes involving dueling with swords, there are references to a graced palace, to women wearing gorgeous clothes that scarcely keep them warm, and Gloucester refers to wearing spectacles. Shakespeare is making clear that he doesn’t mind breaking the rules as far as historical accuracy goes. It’s very likely that King Lear was performed at the Globe, or indeed at court performances, with the actors wearing a mixture of contemporary Elizabethan/Jacobean clothing, with some additional elements of cloak and robe that would indicate an earlier period.

I think Shakespeare was interested in the idea that a history play should apply acutely and precisely to the age that the audience lives in, so he was keen to have it both ways. I’ve seen Stonehenge-based productions of King Lear, and frankly it does seem very odd that Lear should make such a fuss about being out on a heath in a storm when his normal domestic condition appears to be open to the elements.

Shakespeare is presenting the huge contrast between a man who has been encouraged to believe that he is the closest thing to a god in human terms, and the man who comes to perceive he is like a beggar “no more but this.” Lear is a conduit of the gods and he’s in totally autocratic authority. His smallest whisper is converted into law, and nobody, such as Kent, can question him. So, in this production, I have elected to set the play in a seemingly nineteenth-century environment with resonances of the tsarist order in Russia and/or the Austrian autocracy of Franz Joseph. The intention is to stress that Lear’s power is total and dictatorial like a tsar or an emperor, in all matters, political and social, and that it derives from god with whom he communicates. This, I think, allows us to encompass the requirements of the social structure of the play and, what’s more, the anachronisms make complete sense. Lear’s journey takes him from that autocratic power to somebody who, in the storm, asks himself for the first time, “How do wretches survive in conditions like these, if they cannot keep warm because they have no proper clothing?” And then, wanting to embrace that houseless situation, he meets Tom o’Bedlam (who happens to be a man going through the same crisis, another man who’s been used to comfort and is now, in order to survive, turning himself into a crazed beggar), and as he studies the beggar’s naked exposure, Lear urgently wants to place himself in that condition, so he can experience being the “forked animal” for himself.

Shakespeare had long been fascinated with the philosophical idea that a king can journey through the guts of a beggar. He has used the notion of king to beggar on a number of previous occasions, but in Lear he takes it to the extreme. I think Richard II is almost a sketch for King Lear; here we have a godlike king who in the end is sobbing, “I need friends and since I am ordinary like you—how can you say I am a king?” Shakespeare takes that king to a small prison cell, and then, alone and the lord of nothing, he grants him extraordinary self-knowledge. But in King Lear, the journey of the king is to a yet more extreme destination.

Why did your Lear react so extremely to Cordelia’s refusal to play the game of quantifying her love in words (or perhaps of quantifying her love all too literally—if I marry, my father will have 50 percent of my love and my husband the other 50 percent)?

Noble: In a way you have to go back a step from that to ask yourself why Lear loves Cordelia so much more than the other two girls. There are dozens of reasons why, and I think most families could find their own reason why one child is, or appears to be, more beloved than the other. If the character in question is an obsessive like Lear then it starts getting potentially dangerous. His little girl has grown up and defies him, and he can’t deal with that at all. He can’t deal with retiring, he can’t deal with getting old, he can’t deal with not being in control anymore. And as a consequence of all these things poor Cordelia gets it in the neck. And he regrets it almost immediately. Within a day he regrets it—probably within hours.

Warner: My Lear was a spoilt Lear, a vain Lear—a man who wants to hear what he wants to hear. His foolish gung-ho confidence is to wrap and disguise his need—a desire for a public show of affection—in a party game. He makes light of something that is weighty and important to him so that nobody suspects his underlying vulnerability. He demands that his daughters play out in public something that is private, and he claims this right because the prizes are high and marvelous. However, he knows who will take which prize because the “game” is rigged—the parcels of land are already named, signed, and sealed by king and court. The whole extravagant business is a contrivance to feed his vanity, to continue to make him feel that he holds the center even in old age. We are witnessing a grotesque public massage of ego. Lear is a man used to getting what he wants, but he gets badly burnt. He discovers that love is not a commodity, that it must be given freely. It may be that he has lost sight of what love is a long time before the play begins. He’s getting the answer he wants in two cases from the very daughters he did not treat well—if their behavior later in the piece is anything to go by—and seems to barely know the character of his favorite—Cordelia—whose reaction is a huge surprise to him. There is a lot we do not know about this mysterious man, but his short-sightedness is placed on the table at the very opening of the play. Here is a man who will need to travel far to begin to gain the gift of personal insight. His friend Gloucester will literally lose his sight: blind men both.

6. Ian McKellen as Lear in Trevor Nunn’s 2007 production, in the opening scene with quasi-military “Ruritanian” regalia.

And why didn’t your Cordelia, or why couldn’t she, put her love into words?

Noble: That’s a much more difficult question to answer. It’s a young person’s thing, whereby the spoken truth is more important than making your mum and dad happy. It’s the moment of leaving home. The domestic psychological detail is very precise in the play. In Lear’s household, Cordelia is at the point of leaving home to go and get married. That’s a huge moment in every family, although it’s very often not recognized. Some daughters never leave home. They are still at home, in the thrall of their parents, when they’re seventy. Cordelia leaves home and Lear can’t deal with that. But she knows she has to do it, especially with a father like him.

Warner: Cordelia does not want to play this extravagant and obscene party game. She is young, she is shy, and she is about to be married, perhaps even the public nature of this serious business of land division is difficult for her. Anyhow, extravagant party game or not, it is the wrong moment for her to speak of her love to her father, and she certainly does not want to talk about such matters in public. When her sisters speak she is appalled by their preparedness to speak on cue, and especially so since she knows they are being dishonest. Cordelia wants to hold to her own truth. Horrified by what is happening around her, she wants to stop the game, and that is just what she does. It goes horribly wrong because she won’t play, and she advertently or inadvertently humiliates her father in public. She is young and she believes with stern clarity in the virtues of honesty, truth, and love. She is earnest—some might say overearnest in this context, and she causes an atomic explosion.

7. The opening scene in Deborah Warner’s 1990 production: a party game goes horribly wrong, with Brian Cox as Lear in wheelchair and paper crown.

Lear is both a king and a father. That often seems to be a choice that directors and actors have to make—are you going to give the primary emphasis to Lear’s journey as a king giving up his crown, or is the primary emphasis going to be on the family relationships? Or do you actually think that the essence of the play is that the two are inextricably intertwined?

Noble: Without question they are entwined. I didn’t find that a choice. It isn’t a choice that I recognize.

Warner: The father relationship is the most interesting, he is a father who happens to be a king; but since all fathers are kings then, yes, all is intertwined. There is a lot we don’t know about him, about his reign—but we know that he owns the land of his country and chooses to divide that up in such a way that will benefit his retirement most comfortably. He is a king/father heading toward retirement, a dangerous time in all families and in all monarchies.

Nunn: You won’t be surprised to hear that your “third way” alternative is the one this production goes for. Shakespeare is frighteningly brilliant at doing “family breakup.” He does it superbly—in Hamlet, for example. I would say he does it equally shockingly in The Merchant of Venice, and in Macbeth we watch a marriage coming apart at the seams. There are small insights in King Lear into how the king’s family has been pushed apart by events and attitudes. Lear is eighty years old. He has three daughters, and there is no Mrs. Lear. The older daughters are married to powerful men and live in their own palaces. The youngest daughter is only just of marriageable age. Hidden behind the play, is there a story that he was a king who had two wives?—the first wife producing two daughters, Goneril and Regan, and then after her death (as we can frequently see in modern complex family histories) there is the child of a second marriage, the late child (as far as that father is concerned) who then dominates the father’s affections. There’s sufficient evidence in the play to suggest that jealousies and rifts within the family derive from such a backstory.

But I don’t think exploration of a family feud is where Shakespeare wants matters to stop. It’s not where his focus is. Routinely at the start of rehearsals, I say we have to first uncover the theme of a Shakespeare play. If you’re a director, you must X-ray the play to find out what its bone structure is and where its vital organs are. A production shouldn’t work from the outside, it must proceed from a sense of what the internal structure is, and thereby discover how everything contained in the play is meaningful because it is contiguous to that thematic structure.

In the case of Lear, it being one of the greatest plays of Shakespeare’s maturity, the investigation is not going to be easy and the wellspring is not going to lie very close to the surface. Those who have written about Lear as Shakespeare’s study of Nature are, to my thinking, somewhere near the mark, in the sense that Shakespeare is certainly inquiring into human nature in Lear, and he often uses the term “nature” to encompass human behavior and its contradictions. But let’s take that definition of a theme just a little bit further. I would say Shakespeare is wanting to look at the human being, both sublime and ridiculous; I think he is asking, “What is the human condition?” Why do humans say to themselves they are close to being angels, aspiring toward those qualities that are spiritual and godlike? And yet, why are they, in much of their action, so close to behaving like animals? Why, as it were anthropologically, do they have animal instincts that the species appears not to be able to get rid of?

I think it’s no surprise that in this play Shakespeare doesn’t define exactly who the god or gods are. There’s a shadowy Apollo or Jupiter, and the sun is sacred, but the largely anonymous gods are referred to, as a sort of necessity for human beings to believe in, so that somehow humans can feel their actions are predestined, or governed by forces above and beyond themselves. Everything is under the control or the will of the gods.

But then, close to the center of the play, there’s a young man who says: “Thou, nature, art my goddess: to thy law / My services are bound”—a young man who seems to be saying, “I don’t believe in the gods above, it’s human nature that I am influenced by.” At the end of that first soliloquy, Edmund says, I sense almost in mockery: “Now gods, stand up for bastards.” Well, he implies, you “gods” have supposedly stood up for everybody else, it’s high time you let bastards have a go. It’s an extremely dangerous bit of comedic dramaturgy, but atheistical Edmund, creating mayhem in his world, is placed in sharp contrast to the majority who genuinely beg the gods to intervene, at times almost obsessively. And I think Shakespeare makes it clear that “the gods” don’t. Repeatedly they are deaf or callous or nonexistent. They do nothing, even when their intervention would be an affirmation of “the good” in opposition to what is evil; they don’t utter, they don’t move a muscle. Are the heavens empty?

An actor who has played Lear has said that the real difficulty in playing the part is deciding how much to let rip how soon—if you give too much to the anger in the first half you’re too exhausted for the madness in the second half, but if you have too much control to begin with, the transition into madness can seem too sudden and extreme to be convincing. Do you recognize that difficulty? And as a director, what can you do to help your Lear through it?

Noble: I think that’s very true. Most Lears I’ve talked to find the second half much easier than the first half, because the first half requires such a level of energy and a very skillful control of your resources. The truth is, it’s almost unplayable—the pain is so great, the vocal demands so much. I’ve seen people cop out of it and say I’m going to do it quite quietly, but that’s complete crap. They are selling the part and the audience short. It gets actors down a lot actually, because it magnifies your failures. The same is true for directors. It’s like Everest, it’s an unforgiving mountain, and people die on the way up, or they get badly hurt. It is like singing Wagner, and not everybody can sing Wagner.

Warner: You need all your energy and all your fight to play Lear, just as an opera singer needs theirs for Tristan, Wotan, or Siegfried. You cannot leave it too late. Brian Cox was forty-four when he played it for me. The first scene demands that the actor hit raw and engulfing fury within minutes. Throughout the opening scenes this anger is further released until it lets fly and the play climbs from there. You have to risk exhaustion to play it well. This play is not gentle on its lead actor, but where Shakespeare is brilliant and kind is in letting the evening be shared and there is, of course, the famous break at the start of the second half for a rest in the dressing room. Shakespeare always acts as helpful assistant to the director and he supports the actors by graphing and arcing their evening. Actors must follow him for their physical well-being, but they must follow what he asks for too. Real anger, real madness … or, no play.

How did your production deal with the part of the Fool and his disappearance halfway through the action?

Noble: In the first production in 1982 with Michael Gambon and Tony Sher it became quite famous. We did an improvisation in rehearsal, and I said just hold that a fraction longer, and the net result was that King Lear accidentally stabbed the Fool, and he died. I had teachers coming in to say “You have to write in your program that that is not what Shakespeare wrote!” Because it is completely logical. Just before this, there’s: “The little dogs and all, Trey, Blanch and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me” and there’s “lie here and rest awhile”; “draw the curtains.” And so we had the Fool using a cushion and Lear chasing him, and in stabbing the cushion he accidentally stabs the Fool. And then the little feathers became dogs. It was very beautiful and completely logical.

8. “The oldest hath borne most”: Robert Stephens (right) as Lear and David Bradley as Gloucester, finding a human bond in their anguish, in Adrian Noble’s 1993 production.

The Fool’s function in life is entirely tied up with the king. He’s like a soldier’s batman. There’s no logic for him to exist once the master’s dead, or mad.

Warner: My National Theatre Fool (David Bradley) died during the interval of exhaustion and cold. He went to sleep in a wheelbarrow somewhere in the dark interior of the hovel and never woke again. A sad and quiet death that went practically unnoticed. In my Kick Theatre production the actress Hilary Townley played both Cordelia and the Fool (a doubling I am sure Shakespeare intended), which solves so many issues so very easily. For example, “my poor fool is hanged” draws effortless and painful meaning from such casting.

9. Michael Gambon as Lear and Antony Sher as the Fool, with mask, in Adrian Noble’s 1982 production.

One striking feature of Shakespeare’s reworking of the old anonymous Leir play is his removal of its Christian frame of reference (that was one of the reasons why Tolstoy perversely said he preferred the old play!). The characters are always appealing to the gods but not getting the response they want. And then there is Edmund appealing to “Nature” as his goddess. What was your thinking about religion in the play?

Noble: The first time I did it I quite consciously sought a godless universe. I was very influenced by Brecht and Beckett. I sought a godless universe and a quite vengeful, spiteful universe. I made heavy cuts at the end of the play to highlight that fact.

The second time I imagined a universe that was not godless, but in which the gods sat back and refused to interfere. The choice is as much to do with the director or interpreter as the writing.

Warner: The removal of any uniting Christian frame makes this text all the more available to us now. The characters are struggling away as we are all struggling away, and have ever been struggling away for centuries. From the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, Shakespeare allows us no simple answers, and that is why productions should beware of giving them.

Nunn: Remember, in the old Leir play, the king is restored to his throne and Cordelia lives. By changing the ending, Shakespeare deliberately violates a seemingly fundamental rule of drama, namely that plays serve as a moral or cautionary influence on their audience, because they show, regardless of trial and vicissitude, that the good will triumph in the end. In King Lear we’re surely expecting just that, but Shakespeare won’t allow it. I think this is proof positive that Shakespeare’s intentions were very different from those of the old play. Shakespeare’s investigation of the extremes of human behavior, into the nature of man the species, concludes that life isn’t like a morality play. When everything in our religious and cultural history requires us to believe that ultimately the gods will intervene on the side of virtue, Shakespeare says emphatically that they don’t. It’s more than the conclusion that his play is not Christian, it’s that he moves to a conclusion that is, at the very least, agnostic.

For me, it is centrally important that there is no sense of divine justice in this tragedy. I’m wondering whether any other writer during the Elizabethan age ever ventured to question whether or not the heavens might be empty? In the early scenes, as I said, Shakespeare’s play sets up the fundamental belief in his characters that human actions are overseen by the gods. Lear seems to believe that, like him, the gods are old men, that they are intelligent, and that they’re watching, and he clearly sees himself as in privileged contact with the gods. But as the play progresses, Shakespeare shows us more people praying for the intervention of the gods, to no avail. The battle at the climax of the story will determine whether or not the “good” will triumph. Gloucester is urged by Edgar to “Pray that the right may thrive.” He does. They don’t. Finally, as it’s realized that a death sentence is on both Lear and Cordelia, Albany leads all present in a final prayer as soldiers run to the prison—“The gods defend her!” The first word of the next line is “Howl.” Cordelia is dead. No intervention. The gods aren’t mentioned again.

So yes, I think Edmund is placed before us early on as evidence of a solitary, dangerous, atheistical intelligence. Then as Lear’s journey takes him increasingly toward challenging the behavior of the gods, arriving at his epiphany in the “unaccommodated man” speech, his more fundamental questions begin. “What is the cause of thunder?” “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” His questions now seem to be reaching toward Darwinian rather than divine explanations, and his belief in the gods begins to evaporate.

What about Edgar? He’s quite an actor, performing in different voices, isn’t he? He’s Poor Tom, but then after that, after the cliff fall, he’s the man on the beach and after that he’s the peasant with the accent who kills Oswald—why does Edgar have all these different languages and voices and play all these different roles? Why doesn’t he much sooner just say, “Look, Dad, I’m sorry. You should be sorry, you got the wrong son, I’m the good one. You’re blind, this is me …” So many opportunities in so many different roles … until he finally gets around to telling his father the truth, by which time he’s left it so late that all Gloucester can do is die of a heart attack.

Noble: I think he takes upon himself the sins of others, in particular the sins of the father, in order to redeem himself. It’s a profoundly religious, spiritual journey that Edgar goes on and a very tough regime that he imposes upon himself. The disguises, flagellation, and infliction of misery are all part of that. Through the course of the play he cleanses himself. He’s like a character out of a George Herbert poem.

Nunn: Edgar does say, at a crucial moment of the play, at the moment where he could cease to be the Tom o’Bedlam character at last, “I cannot daub it further,” and then in the very next instant, “And yet I must.” In this production we’ve tried to identify something specific about that change of mind. There are men on Gloucester’s orders scouring the country on the hunt to capture and kill Edgar if they find him. We have a troop of those soldiers passing at that point, so Edgar’s “yet I must” is clearly justified as self-preservation, and by association the preserving of his father.

But there’s a deeper explanation that Edgar himself also provides when he takes Gloucester, who is suicidally bent, to an imaginary cliff edge. Just before the death plunge moment, Edgar has an aside to the audience, “Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it.” This is fundamental in Edgar’s journey. He observes that his father is now only full of resentment and hatred for the world, of believing that there was never anything worth believing in. Edgar, still clinging to his belief in divine justice, cannot allow his misguided, misled father to die a bad death or an unredeemed death. Therefore he makes it his mission to bring his father beyond suicidal thoughts to a different, reconciled set of attitudes. The gods seem to be unwilling to back up that reconciliation and continue to rain down horror, but Edgar’s changes of identity are entirely to bring his father to a better spiritual place.

There’s something of a fairytale quality to the play, isn’t there? Goneril and Regan as the ugly sisters, Cordelia as a Cinderella with an unhappy ending. But, especially since Peter Brook’s famous production and film, there’s also an approach to the play that emphasizes Lear’s unreasonable rage, the chaos caused by his riotous knights, and the sense that his daughters, Goneril especially, aren’t villains through and through.

Noble: It’s hard to really admire anybody in the play actually. You can like them all a lot, and you can feel for them a lot, but it is hard to admire anybody. You can admire Gloucester, and probably Edgar’s morality. As for the sisters, Shakespeare always writes what is needed. It can be very frustrating, especially for actresses, because it often happens with the female parts, that Shakespeare sees no point in showing you the bits of the iceberg under the water. He thinks that is a complete waste of scenes. It doesn’t mean that the bit that is revealed does not have a complete world of which it is a part. Exactly the same thing applies to Gertrude and Lady Macbeth, whereby when the function ceases to have a crucial element or a driving force, Shakespeare just stops. Lady Macbeth and Gertrude just stop. Actresses tend to think there must be a missing or lost scene, but there isn’t. Like the Fool in the second half of the play, it isn’t there because there’s no need for it. It doesn’t mean you can’t make it completely real, but you have to come at it from his time, not like a movie. The actor may have a backstory, but you can only show so much because you don’t need anymore.

Nunn: I think it would be wholly wrong for a production to suggest that Goneril and Regan are of evil disposition at the beginning of the play; but there is a degree of ambition in their behavior, and there is a degree of competition between them, and possibly there is that element of hidden resentment of how their much-the-younger sister has become the favorite of their old father.

Traditionally, late-nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century versions of Lear did indeed go very strongly for the interpretation that Lear himself was always to be seen as kind and gentle and white-haired and frail. And therefore a delightful old man goaded intolerably by two wicked sisters. When Peter Brook did his production in 1962, there was a sense that an extraordinary revolution had taken place because Brook, absolutely honest to the text, said: “Lear is behaving entirely unjustifiably, now he’s behaving appallingly, and now he’s behaving absolutely beyond the limit to the point where no father can expect to get away with that.” It was a production that tried explicitly to exonerate the sisters. I remember that, at that time, the impact of revealing Lear’s behavior as frequently unacceptable hit home very strongly. Now, of course, any production trying to propose that Lear is a close relative of Father Christmas would be laughed off the stage. The Brook view has become the standard view.

However, we do still have to explain how Goneril and Regan get to a condition of alarming ruthlessness in the second half of the play. All I will say is—especially if anybody hasn’t seen the play before—watch out for the moment when Lear utters his curse on Goneril, and particularly his curse on Goneril’s womb—a curse more bloodcurdling than I hope any lady in the audience will ever hear in her life. We all know that when dreadful things are said in rage, those words can never be unsaid. This is a major turning point of the play and causes Goneril to become vengeful, regardless of consequence.

The blinding of Gloucester is perhaps the most horrific moment in all Shakespeare. How did you stage that and did it have contemporary resonances for you? In Trevor Nunn’s 2007 production Regan behaves with sadistic glee that’s also a kind of fear—it inevitably conjured up the American soldiers in Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. Torture in times of war is something that just doesn’t go away …

Noble: Yes, it had resonances in the sense that it confronts you with the most shocking things that humanity can do to humanity, but I almost never make references to contemporary events, because in my view it’s a blind alley. Scenes like that talk directly to the audience and their souls and hearts. You don’t need people coming on in flak jackets and dressed as Iraqis.

It is a dangerous scene for a number of reasons. It’s dangerous because the blinding is done to an old man, and secondly, it’s completely plugged in to this extraordinarily dangerous sexual relationship between Cornwall and Regan. It’s plugged in to the scheme of the play in terms of the breakdown of order and the dawn of chaos. It’s a wild, very, very unpleasant scene.

Warner: The theater is a very safe place to explore the taboo and the pornographic. That safe place of examination may be the very point of theater. As a theater director, if you have to do a blinding you want to make it as ghoulish as you can. The audience is then left working it through in the safety of the evening, and a live and engaged audience will inevitably draw contemporary parallels. All great plays have the power to do this and the greater the performances the greater that power to prompt connection. This brings us back to what I said about these plays flowing through our imaginations. Few of us experience directly something like the horror of Abu Ghraib, but the theater allows us to imagine such a reality, to process it, and to question it from every angle. The Greek theater was a public debate where the audience tested their response to the barbaric and nudged toward a legal system and the founding of modern democracy. Shakespeare’s theater took this debate into the newfound world of the seventeenth century and put up onstage every single human emotion, so that we could have a place to go where we might discuss ourselves. Sometimes one can view Shakespeare’s legacy as the complete human emotional encyclopedia. A place to go to study each and every human experience—to map ourselves in the safety of the theater.

Nunn: As you know, this is not a production that is trying to say “Here we are in the Middle East in the twenty-first century.” But it is hoping that all the things that are part of our experience now will be brought to bear on a contemporary audience watching and receiving the play.

Shakespeare’s play was almost certainly heavily censored when it was first performed. It was probably first performed at court and so it is likely that quite a number of cuts were applied to the text because statements were being made that would not be acceptable to a royal ear, and possibly shouldn’t be heard by anybody. There are a host of things that Lear says about human institutions, “justice”—“which is the justice, which is the thief?”; “authority” as in the police or governmental authority—“a dog’s obeyed in office”—getting its power from name or uniform, but not by standards of behavior. He talks about “politicians”—“Get thee glass eyes, / And like a scurvy politician seem / To see the things thou dost not.” Lear goes through a list of modern and, to our ears, highly recognizable contemporary institutions and says so many of them are corrupt and therefore worthless. But Shakespeare had the perfect reply to the censors. The man saying these terrible things is mad. Who knows, if he had not had that defense, Shakespeare might have done a spell in jail.

Over previous generations the blinding scene has been cut down or merely “suggested,” as something taking place in the dark. Such bowdlerization of Shakespeare is based on the judgment that these things are not for civilized people to watch, or hear. In the twentieth century, believing that Shakespeare should be very much like Samuel Beckett (who was so obviously greatly influenced by the play), the blinding scene became increasingly essential to the play. As we watch, Shakespeare is saying, “Face up to the fact that human beings are capable of unspeakably animal behavior toward each other.” These days, as we read of torture, of the callousness of the suicide bomber who blows up children, we ask how any group of people can say they are justified by any cause whatsoever in doing such things to another group of people? But Shakespeare tells us that it is in us. We humans do it. We do it as a species, and we must face the truth that it’s in human nature to be inhuman.

Academics get very exercised about the variants between the Quarto and Folio texts of the play—the fact that Lear has different dying words in each version, that a different person inherits the gored state at the end of each version (Albany speaks the final lines in Quarto, Edgar in Folio), and so on. Did you concern yourself with these textual matters or do you feel that the director is free to pick and mix, cut and paste, his or her own version of the play?

Noble: I think the director is free to do what he wants to do, but he must also be answerable for what he does. I’ve never been very interested in the textual variations. What I did, particularly in the first production, was skin the last three hundred or four hundred lines—I was absolutely brutal with the cuts there. And the impact of it was that, at the very moment of repentance, it was too late. There was no time to save Lear and Cordelia’s lives, because the people on stage had been chatting, talking all the time. That was all very much to do with the fact that it was a godless universe. The truth is on both occasions I created a world that seemed to me to be logical from all the different versions. I would then be responsible for that and I would stand by that.

Nunn: I don’t think that in 1968 when I first directed the play anybody was yet saying, “The Quarto and the Folio are two quite different plays.” I remember at the time consulting John Barton and arriving at a “best of both worlds” conflated text. That text became the basis of the text I used in 1976 with Donald Sinden, but then when I started out this time with Ian McKellen I did read a number of scholars who were telling me that I should be making a choice between Quarto and Folio. Alas, I found myself unwilling to lose rich and evocative material from either version, and so I worked with a slightly different conflation, but a conflation nonetheless. For me, the more important change since I first directed the play is not in scholarship, but in the simple fact that I am thirty years older now. Shakespeare’s engagement with ultimate questions about mortality, what we construct for ourselves to explain or to accept our mortality, of course speaks more potently to me now. The play, as I have said, is very hard on organized human society and institutions of every kind. There is very little Lear and Gloucester have left to believe in, before they must endure their going hence. Edgar is left to conclude the play, and I think deliberately, it is a conclusion of a man who has nothing really to say. He offers no positive, no beliefs, no journey to a better future. He is by then almost the only character left standing, and in the bleakest of all Shakespeare’s endings, he seems to know that all we can determine on is to “endure.”