A Monarch Divided as He Seems to mend

king lear
the stratford festival
the national post

There was a medieval theory known as the King's Two Bodies, that distinguished between the monarch as a mortal man and as the repository of an ongoing and imperishable tradition. Playing King Lear in this year's opening production at Stratford, Brian Bedford seems to be offering us the King's Two Voices.

He comes before us in a husk in rich robes, leaning for support on his favourite daughter's arm, and his first line is delivered so feebly that the audience has to strain to hear it. One wonders if the actor, who hasn't played heavyweight tragedy in a long time, may have bitten off more than he can chew. So it goes until his authority is challenged, first by Cordelia, then by Kent, at which point it reasserts itself. The voice crackles, swells, and even roars, while the tottering old man turns into a tyrant fully capable of lifting a sword and, if not prevented, doing serious damage with it.

At one level, Bedford is playing games with us. But then, so is Lear. He adopts a senescent pose to justify taking what I can best describe as a spiritually early retirement, and it's impossible to tell whether he's doing it to fool his courtiers or to fool himself. He oscillates throughout that opening scene between wheedling weakness and imperious strength.

Ironically, when he has given away his temporal power, he seems more vigorous than ever, a bluff squire devoting himself to hunting, riding, eating and drinking hard. His mind -- this may be his real undoing--is fully alert too; he may not be wise, but he's smart. Bedford is not, I think, an actor to whom madness comes easily, but he is superb at presenting baffled logic.

He's also great at making connections; the curse of sterility that he places on Goneril arises directly out of his conviction that she has broken the bond between the generations. His sudden pity for the poor arises from his consciousness of his own vulnerability. I have known Lears who were more searching and more terrible in the storm (which the production places after the interval), but I have never seen one who got on such intimate quizzing terms with the mock-madman Poor Tom. Bedford makes the keyword "nothing" echo through the play.

The quiescent Lear only reappears, for real this time, after he has been through the purgation on the heath and the searing insights at Dover. The reconciliation with Cordelia, after he's been nursed back to some kind of health, is disappointing. Where he is great is in the scene where they are dragged to prison. His gentle insistence on the happiness they're about to share, and his amused contempt for the fools around them, come from a deep place, and are profoundly moving.

So too is his death, in which the two voices seem to be sounding as one, and which is illuminated by at least one stunning innovation: When this Lear thinks he sees Cordelia's breath stirring, he isn't looking at her body but straight ahead, at some phantom in his own imagination. I never imagined before that Bedford could bring me to tears. But then I've never seen him before in a part that required him to.

With this production of Lear, Bedford pulls off, in fact, a double surprise. He succeeds in the foolhardy task of directing the play while starring in it. His is a conventional production, done in Elizabethan costumes (which, designed by Ann Curtis, supply a helpful courtly atmosphere) and on a stage bare except for a huge golden throne at the beginning. There is at least one major cut: We lose the mock-trial of Goneril and Regan. True, it's only in the Quarto text, not the later Folio. But if, as some scholars think, this shows Shakespeare having second thoughts, then Shakespeare got it wrong. It's a vital stage on Lear's journey, and without it Bedford's performance seems incomplete. So does the role of the Fool, whom we never see again. It hurts more, as both roles are extremely well played. Bernard Hopkins' Fool is an ageing comic, anxious for his master, not for himself.

Kent cannot be much of a stretch for Peter Donaldson, but he's a tower of strength, especially at the end where his sorrow helps cue our own. The revelatory supporting performance, though, is Scott Wentworth's Gloucester, a bustling man of the world whose enforced awakening is at least as powerful as Lear's own.

The production makes no fashionable bones about its Ugly Sisters: Goneril (Wenna Shaw) and Regan (Wendy Robie) are forceful twin studies in self-justifying malevolence, differing only in stature and hairstyle. If they are allowed to be refreshingly bad, then Cordelia (Sara Topham) is permitted to be good though, running against the temper of the times, she works too hard at it. The editing means that she's down to just one suitor, the King of France (Tim MacDonald) who, scooping lines from his absent rival, emerges far more strongly than usual.

Dion Johnstone's Edmund makes little impression beyond his first flash soliloquy; Gareth Potter has the usual trouble establishing the virtuous Edgar but as Poor Tom he's excellent. The ducal husbands are Wayne Best, a Cornwall whose asperity crosses easily into brutality, and Graham Harley who, in moving Albany from milquetoast to avenger, shows Lear's own ability to turn on a dime.

One last subtlety:When Lear at the end says "and my poor fool is hanged," audiences have always taken for granted that he means the Fool, while the unsentimental insist that he means Cordelia. Bedford has it both ways. His Lear is confused; he thinks that he means the Fool, then you can see him jerked back to reality as he remembers that the actual victim, there dead beside him, is someone ever more precious. "Break heart, I prithee break" says Kent; and it does. So, I think, will yours