Every Inch, a King
King Lear
Granada Television
The Observer
Laurence Olivier as King Lear (Channel 4, last Sunday) made me cry. I did not expect this. In theory, Lear is the most moving play every written, but recent stage productions, trying to be tough, have paid more attention to terror than pity. So, in my memory, has Olivier, about whom I, like many people under 40, have something of a block. Unlike Gielgud and Richardson, he has always needed to impersonate. The necessity apparently wrecked his stage Lear of 1946.
Well, he was a young man then. His position now, a heroic theatre actor confined to films and television, parallels Lear’s after his abdication. A mischievous awareness of this informed his whole performance. The division of the kingdom was an impressive charade; he took delight in appearing a little plaintive, less the magnificent monarch than we or his court had expected. The protestations of his elder daughters fed his humour hugely; when Cordelia refused to play, he took it at first as another stage in the game. ‘Nothing will come of nothing’ was—as surely it must be—a joke.
Sometimes he was too arch, employing the clipped, mincing tones that have been part of his armoury, I suppose, since Richard III. Some lines came out equipped with three separate cesuras; and some, including his first, just came out wrong. (The errors don’t matter; the attendant unease does.) And yet once the crown was laid down, and there was no more profit to Lear in playing the dodderer, the bewilderment at his false position was very powerful.
He seemed on more intimate terms with this drama than with any other in which I have seen him. Unusually you can feel him quizzically teasing a text, to see if it will bear his weight. This one he seemed confident in. ‘Let me not be mad’ brought him up short and terrified, with no forcing of the point; he could creep up on the curse to Goneril, as if he too was surprised by it. (She was devastated).
The storm scenes suffered, as such always do on television, from sheer lack of volume, though Olivier avoided the usual attempted solution of tense muttering. It was the scene on Dover cliffs with the bling Gloucester that woke him to magnificence. His mind almost visibly wandered, but each cruel paradox it seized on (‘Handy-Dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief’) was brilliantly lucid. He would begin small (‘Behold, yon simp’ring dame’) and would never rant at a climax, but by the time he reached it (‘There’s damnation’), you, like Gloucester, were seeing with his eyes.
And he was every inch a king; Leo McKern as Gloucester shuffled towards him with the duty that a very fine actor pays to a great one. Their duet was, literally, breathtaking. The weeping began in the reconciliation with Cordelia, gently played from beneath a Blakean expanse of white flowing hair. As for the last scene over Cordelia’s corpse, ‘How, how, how, how’ was in the great line of Olivier cries; ‘Pray you, undo this button’ was as moving, as unexpected, as we have always been told it should be. It was the promised end.
I cannot hold Olivier solely accountable for my tears. Chief accessory was Anna Calder-Marshall, who, as Cordelia, made us see the reconciliation through her streaming eyes. (She was beautifully supported by Paul Curran as the Doctor; so tiny a role can seldom have been so feelingly played.) Casting Miss Calder-Marshall, an actress who seems to believe in goodness and is capable of embedding it, was an earnest of Michael Elliott’s intentions as director. Most productions are self-conscious about Cordelia, or try to play her as an aurorean chip off the old block.
Witness, too, Mr. Elliott's emphasis on Edmund’s last-minute (and quite unavailing) repentance, and his treatment fo the servant who protests at the blinding of Gloucester. This heartening intervention cannot be cut, since it is vital to the plot, but most directors obviously wish it wasn’t there, and hurry it into oblivion. Mr. Elliott lingered over the man’s challenge to his master Cornwall, and over his own death at the hands of Regan: we watched her slowly walk up to him and stab him in the back.
The production was far from perfect. It was nearly sabotaged by obtrusive and old-fashioned music (a distant echo of the Walton scores for Olivier’s films) telling us what was meant to be sinister and what was meant to be sad. But even this turned out to have a negative virtue; when Shakespeare's own music arrived—I don’t mean the poetry, I mean the accompanying he calls for in Cordelia’s tent—it sounded positively healing. (It is, texturally, what the doctor ordered.)
Again, setting the opening in the middle of Stonehenge seemed to throw us back to the days of Donald Wolfit; it was odd of Lear to give his kingdom away in so uncomfortable a place. But when we returned there for the last scene, we did feel—again as demanded—that the wheel had come full circle. In the quieter of the intervening scenes there was a rewarding and appropriate stress of the natural world, vegetable and animal; Lear rode a horse and, in his madness, skinned a rabbit. It provided a basis for the production’s final ascent into symbolism—a long fight between Edgar in white and Edmund in black—which the vigorous performances of David Threlfall and Robert Lindsay kept from appearing merely misty.
Indeed the star cast justified their employment. If they were there in tribute to Olivier, the feeling showed, most of all, in Colin Blakely’s Kent, the only one I have seen to suggest that the disguised ex-nobleman does not much enjoy standing around in the mud being insulted, and one of the few to justify his promotion to chorus at the end: his ‘break heart, I prithee break’ had the force of the whole play behind it. The Fool (John Hurt) made less impact than usual—there seems a determined effort not to let him steal the show—but Geoffrey Bateman’s Oswald was oily insolence personified.
There was both union and contrast in the neurotic villainy of Dorothy Tutin’s Goneril and the bold amorality of Diana Rigg’s Regan, as too in their husbands: Jeremy Kemp’s Cornwall, goaded to compete with his wife in brutality, and Robert Lang an Albany who went from ineffectual—padding through the opening scene as if he feared he had come to the wrong ancient monument—to regal, with a gladdening moment when he recognised in Edgar the true avenger.
I asked myself when I had last been made so potently aware of the metaphysical in Shakespeare, and thought back to the eight lovers responding to the trumpet call of Hymen at the end of Mr. Elliott’s As You Like It: the Vanessa Redgrave one. That, beautifully recaptured on television, was originally a stage production; and by so much more complete.
Though there were occasional pieces of technical virtuosity this time—the interpolated arrest of Gloucester and the camera’s approach to the outhouse through a hole in the roof—TV can never be a wholly satisfying medium for Shakespeare. But it can sometimes point a way for stage production: An Age of Kings did it 20 years ago, and Mr. Elliott’s direction did it here. It made recent theatre endeavours—including some I have applauded myself—seem cynical, stupid, whiz-kidding.