King Lear
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

At Stratford there is a new production, dumbfoundingly exciting, of King Lear. It begins with a brief silent flash of Cordelia and the Fool, perched together on Lear’s throne, their necks joined playfully by a halter. Or threateningly by a noose.

‘And my poor fool is hanged’ a vexing line since when it is uttered the Fool has long disappeared from the play and it is Cordelia who has been strangled. Maybe Lear confuses them. He has good reason, since the Fool, who had much pined away since Cordelia went into France, replaced her as his conscience. This relationship between monarch and jester dominates the production, down to the curtain-call and the photographs in the programme. 

For much of the time Michael Gambon’s Lear plays unruly straight man to Antony Sher’s desperate pro—he has after all heard all the routines before and knows where to come in. Mr. Sher is a red-nosed tatterdemalion amalgam of all the tramp clowns of the twentieth century. He has a violin which he plays like Grock while singing like Formby: a discordant premonition of the stringed magic that finally, under Cordelia’s direction, restores Lear to sanity. His musical jabs enrage Lear, to the point where he has plaintively to remind him (‘Whoop, Jug, I love thee’) that this is all for his own good. He is literally the power behind the throne—that being his favourite crouching position—and he lets no knife go untwisted. 

This performance drives Adrian Noble’s production into superb comedy of the grotesque but also into Blakean grandeur. Smoke suffuses the health while king and fool actually stand atop the storm. The entry of Poor Tom is literally shattering; he comes up from the ground, splitting the floorboards and in one moment hurtling the king into madness; Lear’s ‘Hast thou given all to thy daughters’ has never sounded funnier or more terrible. 

Jonathan Hyde, playing Edgar, is intelligent enough to turn his insanity up a notch when his father appears; and the mock trial in the hovel has unexampled intensity and crazy logic. I really believed that Lear believed that Goneril was a joint-stool.

This of course only gets us to half-time; and Mr. Noble’s heavy investment in the Fool may be excessive. Theoretically he should hand over to Cordelia, but Alice Krige’s performance has insufficient moral and vocal strength. Then there is the small matter of Lear himself. Mr. Gambon’s performance is fuller of incipient violence than of actual authority, and lacking in any sense of mental adventure. (There is far more tangible progression David Waller’s Gloucester.)

Sometimes Mr. Gambon thrills and surprises, as with the curse on Goneril which is that much quicker, more detailed and more vindictive than one expects. He comes near greatness almost at the end, ‘let’s away to prison’ is so quietly sensible as to be heart-rending. 

I expected much of his death, and I think Mr. Noble may have let him down. He has cut Edmund’s repentance, thus depriving us of the momentary belief that Lear and Cordelia may survive. The rhythm—in possibly the most highly wrought scene in English—is disturbed, and Lear seems to have come on too early. Presumably Mr. Noble thinks he is making the play tougher. 

Now you can play the ending as bleak as you like—he does it very well with a bunched bewildered group of survivors—but it is crass to snuff out the momentary lights of hope before the author does. Hence perhaps the downplaying of Cordelia (the scene describing her ‘better way' is drowned out by the sound of the French fleet landing), Edgar’s dirty tactics in an admittedly rousing duel, and the behaviour of Cornwall’s servants who shove the blinded Gloucester while pretending to pity him. 

But what distinguishes the blinding from every other Jacobean horror scene is just this: somebody protests. This, perhaps, is why Edward Bond, whose own Lear is being done in Tandem at the Other Place, says that Shakespeare was out of date even in his own time. He has also said that the protesting servant could never have happened in a feudal society. But feudalism was not quite totalitarianism (his own speciality); it involved a human bond.