Thoughts on Shakespeare: Peter Ustinov
obituary
The National Post

As artistic director of the Stratford Festival from 1975 to 1980, Robin Phillips' most successful tragedy, beyond a doubt, was King Lear, mounted in 1979 and '80 as a vehicle -- there really is no other word -- for Peter Ustinov. From one point of view this was a throwback to the days of Frederick Valk as Shylock: a star journeying to Stratford to play a single role. From another, it could not have been more different. Valk was a titanic actor recreating a role that he had already made his own. Ustinov was a charmingly informal performer essaying not only Lear but Shakespeare for the very first time.

His classical credentials, in fact, were slightly more impressive than that might suggest. In the 1950s he had played a memorable Peer Gynt -- live, uncut, spread over two evenings and in a rhyming translation -- for BBC Television, and Peer in his old age contains strong intimations of Lear. (In his youth he recalls Hamlet and in his middle years Falstaff. It must be the best part ever written.) One of Ustinov's own early plays, The Moment of Truth, was about a senile military head of state modelled about equally on Marshal Petain and Shakespeare's king, and Ustinov's original title for it had been “King Lear's Photographer”. He had been obsessed with Lear for years.

Ustinov believed the play to be about senility. This was the cause of Lear's capricious behaviour toward his daughters in the first scene; this was the real diagnosis of his madness in the central scenes. When he claimed he would do such things, what they were yet he knew not, but they would be the terrors of the Earth, the reason he didn't know was that he'd forgotten.

Vocally, of course, the terrors of the Earth were beyond Ustinov's range. Some critics complained of his failure to release the full power of the verse, as if this were some kind of wilful omission on his part, but the obvious truth is that he didn't because he couldn't. He made no attempt to outroar the storm or to create it with his voice. "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks," he modestly suggested, and left the winds to get on with it.

He made no bones about Lear's impossible behaviour, but he was funny (as Lear certainly should be) and charming and pitiable: too easily pitiable, perhaps, to be truly moving. There seemed, really, to be nothing for Cordelia to forgive. It was understandable that Kent and the others should want to look after him, less so that they should revere him. Could he, for example, ever have been a great warrior? Then again, we were dealing here with a man, not a monolith.

In 1959 Charles Laughton, once Ustinov's colleague in corpulence in Spartacus, played King Lear at Stratford- upon-Avon and, despite some sublimely moving moments, failed. One reason was that he offered a small-scale performance in a traditionally scaled production: the kind that Phillips, preparing his own staging, referred to as a "Stonehenge" version.

Stonehenge can work -- it worked for Olivier's television performance -- but it would not have worked for Ustinov. Phillips cushioned him with a detailed realistic production set in his favoured 19th century. This was not an unprecedented idea: Trevor Nunn, three years earlier, had used the same period for a Lear starring Donald Sinden, another actor whom many people thought of primarily as a light comedian.

Phillips' production was more crammed than Nunn's with realistic and domestic detail: This was an epauletted, cigar-smoking Lear, addressing family and friends from his favourite armchair. It helped that these pictures were framed within the Avon proscenium: It is difficult to imagine Ustinov's Lear commanding the Festival stage.

He had sympathetic support from Douglas Rain's Gloucester and Jim McQueen's Kent, and steely opposition from Richard Monette's Edmund and (in the second season) the Goneril and Regan of Martha Henry and Patricia Connolly. Above all he had William Hutt, pausing halfway through his own parade of Lears to offer a Fool whose stinging jokes were tempered by the sense that he knew -- in this case from experience -- exactly what the old boy was going through. Those who never saw Ustinov's Lear cannot quite believe that he brought it off. But plainly he did.