King Lear
The Stratford Festival
The Globe and Mail

IT was Saturday, Nov. 2, the second last night of this year's Stratford Festival and the final performance of King Lear, with William Hutt in the leading role. It was Hutt's fourth Lear, and presumably his last, though of course you never know. Anyway, it was a momentous confrontation, on two levels. Canada's pre-eminent Shakespearean actor says a putative farewell to the greatest of tragic roles, and a 76-year-old performer stars in the most harrowing play ever written about old age.

During the interval I asked director Richard Monette if Hutt's performance that night differed at all from those earlier in the run. "He's never done heart attacks before," Monette replied.

The immaculately rendered incipient seizures with which Hutt punctuated his performance made it seem as if Lear's rages were pushing him physically as well as mentally over the edge. I would have assumed they were integral parts of the characterization, carefully plotted by actor and director throughout rehearsals. But it seems they were brilliant improvisation, though they fitted perfectly into the rhythm of the performance. This is the kind of inventive thing good actors do, though it takes special nerve and special inspiration to bring it off on this scale.

Lear is 80, one of the few Shakespearean characters whose age is known, so Hutt is a few years too young for the part. In another sense, he's remarkably old for it. Laurence Olivier played Lear on television when he was in his 70s, and John Gielgud celebrated his 90th birthday by doing it on the radio, but most stage Lears are actors in their 40s. The reasons are obvious. The part takes stamina. Lear, whether asserting his authority or suffering from the loss of it, is in a constant state of anger or insanity or both. Any credible Lear has to be capable of sustained shouting.

So, here was Lear being played by a genuinely old actor. I thought I knew what to expect. There would be a forgivable lack of voltage, but Lear's sufferings at the hands of his ungrateful daughters and his reconciliation with their all-loving and all-forgiving sister would break my heart.

I was wrong, on both counts. There was no special vulnerability about this king, and I have never known the reunion with Cordelia to be less moving. (Olivier, who hardly ever got to me emotionally, made me cry in this scene.) The imperious Lear, however, was present in force. If Hutt passed up a few outbursts, it was to save himself for others more powerful. In the first scene the fury with which he banished Cordelia and the equally faithful Kent was frightening, largely because it seemed to well up from nowhere. Up to that point he had seemed rather benign.

His initial entrance had been breathtakingly playful. Monette's production, in a 19th-century setting, made excellent use of significant furnishings, and there was a Christmas tree on stage when the play began.

Abdicating, dividing the kingdom and extorting declarations of affection were this year's party games in the Lear household.

Hutt strolled onto the stage with mischief in his eye and his walk: a man confident in his own outrageousness. And it was here, rather than in any authentic depiction of senility, that Hutt's own age came into play. This was a man who had been king for a very long time, far too long to take on a new career as a subject. While he still had the power, he greeted any challenge to it with incredulous fury.

After resigning it, he really tried. He still entered any house as if he owned it but he made elaborate attempts to understand his daughters' behaviour: so elaborate that they were liable to collapse into violent sarcasm. When he called down the curse of sterility on his eldest daughter -- "hear, Nature, hear, dear goddess, hear" -- he did it with terrifyingly calm assurance; he and Nature seemed to be on excellent terms. But he was being drained, and he knew it. "Oh let me not be mad," and "oh, fool, I shall go mad:" some of the most famous lines were so freshly timed that they took you by surprise. They also seemed inevitable, and those impromptu heart attacks were their physical equivalent.

Hutt is one of three actors in the 1996 Stratford troupe who were in the first company in 1953; the others are Douglas Rain, this season's excellent Shylock, and the splendidly reliable William Needles. Forty-three years is not that long ago (ah yes, I remember it well: the Coronation and Mount Everest), but such continuity in the modern theatre is still extraordinary. It certainly beats anything you'll find in Britain and the United States.

Hutt has been the exemplary Stratford actor, rising through the ranks with what you might call spectacular steadiness. He began in 1954, when he glorified the minute role of Master Froth in Measure for Measure , giving the character an invincible cheerfulness that clouded for a split second when his dead father was mentioned. (I trust the description of Robertson Davies who, in addition to his more trumpeted talents, was Canada's finest theatre critic.) Hutt is an actor of distinction, and I mean that rather specifically; he has always been a patrician player, in his bearing and especially in his sharply melancholy voice.

Whether he is a great actor, I don't know; What I have often found lacking in him, as in much Canadian acting, is temperament, volatility, urgency. And having written that, I remember two performances that confound me. One, years ago, was his Feste in Twelfth Night , a figure of wintry musical wisdom that governed the play. The other, only last year, was his amazingly honest and uncompromising account of James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey Into Night , a role in which he moved me as Olivier never did. Like Lear, Tyrone was a role he repeatedly returned to: a continual testing process that should be a normal part of a healthy theatre but today is very rare.

Was this last Lear in the same league? Not altogether. What it obviously had was the quality that the faithful Earl of Kent salutes in the old king: authority. I mean an actor's authority: the sense that he knew this play inside out and that we could trust him in it, whatever he did. It was the fruit of a life spent playing Shakespeare, of his previous encounters with King Lear, and of his detour playing the Fool to Peter Ustinov's Lear.

His relationship with his own Fool (the promising young Jordan Pettle) was rich; the two seemed to be moving in and out of one another's heads. Hutt's Lear was very funny in spots, and boldly macabre as well; when he came to the line "let them anatomize Regan, see what breeds about her heart," he mimed, with shocking force, the extraction of that organ from his daughter's body.

All this should have set him up for a probing examination of Lear's madness, of his denunciation of the injustices to which he had once acquiesced and of his sexual disgust. Certainly these themes were being well set up in the surrounding action. The lust-and-ambition triangle of the play's three villains was better done than I have ever seen it, with Goneril and Regan (Diane d'Aquila and Martha Burns) competitively slavering over Geordie Johnson's Edmund, who was outwardly demure as a candidate for the priesthood and doubly provocative because of it. (There are three women in the play, and two of them fall for him; that's not a bad average.)

The meeting of mad Lear and blind Gloucester is probably the most stupendous scene in the world of drama, and Hutt laid out its revolutionary insights tidily enough. But there was no sense that Lear was actually discovering them and reinventing himself as we listened; they came prepackaged. And Lear's penultimate scene with Cordelia ("come, let's away to prison") was played at face value as a sentimental idyll.

Still, it turned out the best was yet to come in Lear's final confrontation with the worst. Cordelia, on the brink of rescue, has been hanged; Lear is faced with the fact that she will never be restored -- those five "nevers" that make up the bleakest line of blank verse ever written. The selective literalness of Monette's staging helped again; Cordelia's corpse actually looked as if it had just been cut down from the gallows. We don't all have to confront tragedy in such a brutal way, but the basic fact of loss is always the same and Hutt's Lear met it for us. The actor's vocal powers were at their fullest stretch when Lear lamented his daughter's death, and his technique was like quicksilver as the king's mind wandered again, sure of nothing but that dead body. Watching the scene, watching him, you despaired of humanity, and you marvelled at it.

The curtain call was its own event. In an age of meaningless standing ovations we rose -- more or less spontaneously -- to offer one that was deserved. Monette strode down the centre aisle bearing a bouquet; then mounted the stage and presented the flowers to his star, blew a kiss to the rest of the cast and made a graceful, showman's exit. Hutt stood holding the roses and smiled. He seemed pleased, and justly so. We saluted a memorable performance and, I think, a tradition, its guardians, and hopefully its heirs.