Updating King Lear

King Lear
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

In staging King Lear (the final production of the year at Stratford) the Royal Shakespeare Company has done three things that may at first appear perverse.

First, it has divided the play between three directors; and if the play teaches anything, it is that to split a property three ways is to invite disaster. Second, it has set - and more noticeably clothed - the action in the nineteenth century. Third, it has given the title role to Donald Sinden, our best classical comedian junior to John Gielgud, but with no particular reputation in tragedy.

These decisions seemed interdependent. Trevor Nunn is given top billing among the directing triumvirate, but it is with one of his colleagues, John Barton (Barry Kyle is the other), that one associates Victorian Shakespeare; he has utilized the period to great effect in Othello and Much Ado About Nothing. Those are both plays to which naturalistic detail seems appropriate, but Lear has generally been considered above such things. It used to be set in the vicinity of Stonehenge; nowadays it is usually done on a bare stage, all very grand and vague and icy. To put Lear into a recognizable context is to take him down a peg, perhaps to accommodate Mr Sinden.

Those at least were the current suspicions; and most unworthy they have been proved. Mr Sinden’s performance may gain some flavour and particularity from its setting, but he is plainly an actor big enough to play Lear in any environment. As for the updating, it does the play more good than harm - for as long that is, as it can be maintained. Halfway through the evening the text bursts out of its new time-lock. 

In part, perhaps, this is a consequence of the size of the play asserting itself. But is has more to do with the actual location of the action. The first half of Lear is domestic, set in the king’s house, or his daughters’, or Gloucester’s. But the second half goes out of doors, and a stormy heath or a cliff looks much the same at one period as another. A madman’s rags are similarly indifferent to fashion. But the wrench in style dissipates much of the production’s effect; this is the only Lear I have seen that begins better than it finishes.

It is very bracing to be reminded that Lear is at base about a family, and to be given insights into what that family might be like. Lear’s renunciation is staged without fanfare; the king makes a brisk entrance, somewhere between a stride and a shamble; all epaulettes and medals, he might be Hindenburg or Franz Josef. While he lolls on his throne, his daughters face him in high-backed chairs; the declaration of their love is an ordeal they have expected, and dreaded, for years.

Goneril (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) speaks weightily and carefully, determined to get it right and win a major prize. Regan (Judi Dench) stammers, so that her father has to force her back on to the rails; she is willing to flatter but self-conscious and afraid, and her fear will eventually make her the crueller and less balanced of the two. Cordelia (Marilyn Taylerson) has a similar difficulty governing her feelings; her virtue comes out colder than she might wish, but her temperament denies her the alternative.

One can see the extent (considerable but not complete) of the father’s responsibility for his children; the play’s morality is given a chance to prove itself rather than having the situation righted in its favour from the off. (Here, as I much else, Mr Nunn quite rightly follows Peter Brook.) Lear is avid for every flattering word: he cannot believe it when Cordelia breaks out of the system he has created. ‘Better thou hadst not been born,’ he says, and the words are coat enough to be accompanied by a puff of his cigar. He behaves as an absolute monarch should: he does not rage, he merely expunges; he does not kill, he merely denies life.

Mr Sinden, who two years ago effectively brought Ibsen’s Enemy of the People within his accustomed range by demonstrating how lovably absurd the man was, never tempts our laughter here. 

There is a new gravity in him; when he talks at the outset of ‘our darker purpose,’ it sounds dizzyingly deep. His old urbanity only surfaces at the onset of insanity (the approach has been finely navigated); when he inquires of the naked Poor Tom, ‘didst though give all to thy daughters,’ he sounds crisply witty rather than distraught, and this note - which lends an unexpected meaning to his subsequent claim ‘here’s three on’s are sophisticated’ - recurs to mar his madness. Nor does he command the sexual disgust of the Dover scene.

But there are many other moments when Mr Sinden sounds tones that he has never commanded before, when the stage resounds with the joy of an actor re-discovering himself in discovering his role, when you look and there is Lear in front of you. It is in fact Lear’s own discoveries that are most memorable; his redemption begins when he first expresses concern, marvellously broad and deep, for his storm-soaked Fool. Here, and in the wondering dawn of sympathy for his ‘poor naked wretches’ of subjects, he is immensely moving,

He has a very fine Fool in Michael Williams, an old and uncomfortably honest Northern professional, the ancestor of one of Trevor Griffith’s comedians. Good, too, are Tony Church’s Gloucester, Robin Ellis’s Edmund (a Thackeray cad) and John Woodvine’s Cornwall. The ending is poorly orchestrated; Shakespeare has the nerve to keep telling us how painful it is, but the commentators here are not enough involved with the tragedy to justify their own words. The production is obviously ripe for re-working, and Mr Nunn may well decide (as with his peerless Macbeth) to purify and prune it. I rather hope, for once, that he opts for greater elaboration, making the second half of a piece with the first, and as fascinating.