King Lear
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

Christopher Plummer's first entrance as King Lear is preceded by the sound of offstage cackling. The king then strolls on, arm-in-arm with his Fool, with whom he has apparently been sharing a joke, and pretty much ignoring the rest of the court assembled to hear his pleasure. His last entrance, with the dead Cordelia, is preceded by the sound of offstage crying, a transfixing feral moan that gradually resolves into the four most devastating monosyllables in Shakespeare. Between these two inarticulate extremes -- between "heh, heh, heh, heh" and "howl, howl, howl, howl" -- lies a magnificent performance.

It resonates with the quality of "authority" that the Earl of Kent famously salutes in his royal master, and that here translates as "bluff off-handedness." Plummer's is a humorous, weather-beaten Lear who brooks no nonsense but whose idea of nonsense is anything he doesn't want to hear. Lear is the only one of Shakespeare's tragic heroes who speaks not a line of soliloquy. He sees no need to search his own soul and, since he has had years of absolute power, he feels there is nothing he cannot say in public. This feeling survives his abdication. He goes on expressing his feelings, whatever the cost, and eventually the expression takes the form of what the world calls madness.

Plummer can still the theatre, either with quietness or with rage. He treats the loyalty oaths of the opening scene as a pre- arranged routine, barely looking at Goneril and Regan as they pour out their rote protestations but keeping his head buried in the map of his kingdom. So when he explodes at Cordelia ("better thou hadst not been born" is memorably ironclad) and at Kent, the effect is titanic. Similarly, he plays the first quarrel with Goneril as a domestic row, outsize but prosaic, until he gets to the curse of sterility ("Hear, Nature, hear"), which comes terrifyingly out of nowhere.

Miller does the play few favours by pausing just before the storm scene. Actors and audience have to start the ascent all over again, and Plummer seems initially to be going through the motions. But maybe there is a point to it; this Lear seems to be enjoying the elements. What pushes him over the brink is the arrival of Poor Tom, "unaccommodated man." This scene is a revelation, to Lear and to us. Usually it's apocalyptic rhetoric, but Plummer takes it as a logical, irrefutable demonstration. Edward Bond called Lear "the greatest of all social critics," and that has never seemed nearer the truth. The apocalyptic is a mode that Plummer, maybe at the bidding of his director, shuns throughout, even in the great misogynist speeches at Dover.

The staging is consistently understated, sometimes to great effect. Gloucester's blinding, for example, is presented with the victim's back to us, leaving us to imagine the worst. At other times, it seems perverse. Lear's entry "fantastically decked with flowers" is made from one of the downstage gangways, allowing nobody a clear picture. He makes his last entrance not carrying Cordelia's body, but dragging it behind him.

This doesn't stop Lear's own death from being moving, but it is less so than it could be, and less so than Plummer -- who is here at his uncanny, conversational best -- is clearly capable of making it. To be honest, Cordelia (Sarah McVie), earnest but unyielding, is not much more help to him in life than in death. The reconciliation is a one-sided affair, so the final terrible parting doesn't hit nearly as hard as it should.

Plummer's return to Stratford Shakespeare, after an absence of 35 years, was bound to be a great event. One's fear was it would be no more than that, that we would only see a star going through his paces. We don't. What we get is, in the best sense, a modest performance. You feel that the actor has parked his ego at the stage- door, so that we respond not to Plummer but to Lear. (At least until the curtain call, by which point he has earned his ovation.)

And the Lear we respond to, though not realizing every possibility in the role -- which would be impossible -- is very complete in himself, a vain, deluded but fundamentally honest man, bewildered into new experience and running with it.

The Festival stage is as naked and unaccommodated as Poor Tom himself. A table and chair are initially permitted; later on, we are denied even the joint-stool the text prescribes for the mock trial in the hovel. (This is a loss; the scene, sometimes the heart of the play, is unduly hurried and huddled.) The program doesn't even list a set-designer, though Clare Mitchell is credited with the costumes, which are sober, early 17th-century -- the play's own period -- and very helpful.

Indeed, the greatest strength of Miller's direction, other than its line-by-line intelligence, is the sense of time, place and society that these clothes impart. We are in a theoretically ordered world in which great houses are surrounded by wasteland ("for many worlds around there's scarce a bush"), a world in which there are pieties to be transgressed and in which Bedlam beggars are the merest documentary realism, in which Kent's jovial reference to "Lipsbury pinfold" signifies an actual place.

Domini Blythe's Goneril and Lucy Peacock's Regan, both imposingly wigged, are especially fascinating in this context, socially and emotionally. Tradition (which I am just old enough to remember) played these two as outright transparent monsters. A later mode, inaugurated by Peter Brook's famous production, presented them as reasonable women, sensibly averse to having their households disrupted. Blythe and Peacock take a middle way: They are born schemers, putting plausible grievances to malevolent use.

There is good work from Benedict Campbell as Kent, especially fine and firm at his king's death, and from James Blendick as Gloucester, another whose clothes help fix his courtliness. Maurice Godin's Edmund is a cynical charmer, ironically poured into a Puritan suit, and Evan Buliung a persuasive Edgar, in and out of disguise.

Stephen Russell's Cornwall is a sadistic snake rather than the "hot duke" described in the script, but Ian Deakin makes a fine Albany, whose pedantic decency flares into outraged moral indignation, a development fatally underestimated by his wife.

Barry MacGregor's superannuated cockney Fool is excellent in its own right, but seems somewhat got at by his get-up, especially the floppy hat. He is also asked to bear more weight than the play affords him. Bringing him on in the first scene merely dissipates the effect of his first scripted appearance later on, and I remain sceptical of Miller's conviction -- reiterated now through at least four productions -- that the Fool should be as old as his master. (He is also, in this production, notably less funny than his master.)

Brian Tree is a superbly supercilious Oswald, a spaniel to his marrow, and collectors of tiny Shakespearean re- creations should note the brittle edge that Gary Folka brings to the virtually invisible role of Curan.