Lear's Daughters

Three Daughters Of King Lear by Gustav Pope

There were three sisters once upon a time:

   One sister was as brutal as a fact,

One sister spoke of law and dreamed of crime,

   And one had all the heart the others lacked.

There were three girls who served an angry fool:

   One kept the peace, one tried to be endearing,

One gave advice that hid her ridicule,

   And all three learned the trick of disappearing.

There were three daughters of a lonely queen:

   One was the softness that she had to hide,

One was the need that made her feel unclean,

   And one the hate that burned her up inside.

      Three princesses: one hard, one soft, one shrew;

      One warm, one cool, one sly—and all untrue.

 

Copyright 2014 Matthew J Wells

Nothing Will Come Of Nothing

 

Nothing will come of nothing.  So says Lear,

   And I have yet to see an actor do

That line like Scofield did it: he could hear

   Cordelia’s answer as he spoke, and knew

He’d done her wrong, knew that he’d been a fool.

   That’s what Lear’s madness is: a mind that’s rent

By the hard truth that consequences rule

   Our lives, no matter what our actions meant.

In Scofield’s recognition, all is done

   Of his descent except the going down,

Till nothing matters underneath the sun

   But glimpses of a girl in a French crown:

      Soft in his arms, saved from the old world’s wreck

       With nothing but a noose around her neck.

 

Copyright 2014 Matthew J Wells

 

Lear's Shadow

I saw the first public performance of the Public’s King Lear in Central Park last Tuesday, and the best I can say for it is that, like its lead actor, it has all the notes, but not the tune.  Only time will tell if that changes for the better, and the various parts become a whole here.  As of that first performance, what I saw reminded me of the old joke about how you could always rely on Shakespeare In The Park to give you 25 actors in 26 plays—the extra one being whatever the director intended to do, and didn’t.

This isn’t THAT bad.  Like I say, it’s just a reminder.  And I’m bending over backwards to factor in the first-audience-ever thing, even while I’m also reminded that I saw Much Ado on its fourth public performance, and it played like it had been running for months. 

 

So here are some thoughts on what worked, what didn’t work, and what needs to get better.

 

THE LENGTH.  It was advertised on the waiting line as two hours fifty, and by the ushers before the show as three hours fifteen.  It ended up being three hours twenty, with one intermission.  This is just painful. I can only assume that two hours fifty is the goal, and that running the show will speed things up.

 

One actor who really needs to straddle a Vespa and get to where he’s going is Chukwudi Iwuji , who plays Edgar and Mad Tom.  His Edgar was serviceable, but his Mad Tom was a scene hog.  Seriously: I felt like I had never heard so many of Mad Tom's lines before, because in all the other productions, the actor races through them, y'know, like a crazy person; as opposed to this production, where Iwuji took center and, knowing that nobody else could speak until he finished, took his sweet bloody time getting all the foul fiends and the Sah-sah-sah's out.  Listening to everyone else, and then listening to him, was like tooling along at the speed limit only to get stuck behind some alter-kocker in the slow lane. 

 

THE ACTING.  Jay O Sanders as Kent was the anchor of the show. His scenes with Lithgow were the best part of the play.  And Lithgow was in possession of the part, but not in command of it.  He will only get better at it as he does it.  The one thing he did that I hope doesn’t change is something that I really appreciated—he modulated his anger and rage throughout the play so that there was an actual rise to the storm scene.  So often a Lear will hit ten in the opening scene, which means that when he has to top it with his rage at Goneril, and then top that with the storm scene, he has nowhere to go and we don’t care.  Lithgow went somewhere and I cared.

 

As for the three sisters (heh), Jessica Collins’ Cordelia was as breathless as someone who had just run the Corporate Challenge, Jessica Hecht’s Regan was getting laughs by deliberately displaying the chasms between her casualness and callowness, and Annette Bening’s Goneril ran the gamut of A to B, from anger to outrage.

 

Bening was obviously still working on the lines, and did a professional’s job of making her pauses work for the character.  This will get better in time.  But she needs to loosen up (she totally blew Goneril’s best line:  “Oh, the difference of man and man!”) and she really really needs to stop roaming around the stage like someone looking for her camera marks.  This happened throughout the show, and because of it she was in serious danger of getting herself skewered during the final duel.  I swear that when Edmund moved over to her before the fight started and put a hand on her shoulder to comfort her, he was ad-libbing it so he could direct her to the stairs down to the pit, where she’d be safe.

 

(That duel was fabulous, by the way.  The two fighters go through a succession of swords, pikes, shields, maces, you name it, before it ends.)

 

General cast note: everyone was way too weepy.  Rule Number One About Tears: if an actor cries, an audience doesn’t.  Somebody needs to post that backstage.

 

What else?  This version of the script sticks mostly to the Quarto over the Folio (no to the Merlin speech, yes to the mock trial, no to Kent talking about Cordelia to the Gentleman, and Albany gives the final lines).  The Fool’s disappearance at the end of III, 6 is given a visual explanation.  And the intermission, for some reason, takes place before the storm scene, if I remember correctly, which makes the second half of the evening just as long as the first half.  This is my fourth Lear so far this year, and probably my (twelfth? fifteenth? twentieth?) Lear overall, and if that memory is correct, then it’s the only time I’ve ever seen an intermission occur so early in the flow of the play.

 

There's a part of me that's more than a little interested in checking the show out later in its run, just to see if it’s speeded up a little, never mind changed for the better.  There's another part of me that wants to see it again, just so I can write a valid review about a show that is giving a performance as opposed to the quasi-run-through that I saw.  But there's a way bigger part of me which says that life is short, and Lears are long.  So if you have seen this in the last week, or see it later in its run, let me know what you think, and how different it is (or isn’t) from what I’ve just described.

 

Me, I’ll just be finalizing my notes for an even longer post about all the Lears I’ve seen so far in 2014, taken both as a unit and as individual productions.  And ponder whether I want to take the plunge and see the Globe production which will be playing Skirball Center in September.  (Who am I kidding?  I am so there.) (And I am laying a ton of money that this one will come in at two hours fifteen with intermission.)

 

9 out of every 10 King Lears

Saw Ian McKellen in King Lear last Thursday night (opening night, actually) at BAM. A very brisk production, with a very long (two hour) stretch before intermission, ending with the Fool's prophecy (which is in the Folio but not the Quarto) and then inexplicably cutting the joke at the end ("This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time."). But then, given the bleak way the end of this scene is staged, that's not really a surprise. In this production, you're not shocked when Lear says "And my poor Fool is hanged" in V,iii.

How was it? Engrossing and moving. Excellently acted. Best Regan I've ever seen (Monica Dolan). Fantastic duel scene at the end--a thrillingly-staged saber-on-saber fight scene that roams all over the stage. The two weakest parts (Edmund and Cordelia) were played by actors who are debuting with the National Shakespeare Company as of this production, but all you have to do is picture what a hash two Juilliard grads would make of the roles to realize how much better even the untested British actor is than his or her American counterpart.

And McKellen was fabulous. He has the Peter O'Toole trick of spouting seven or eight sentences together as if they're a single run-on line, and like O'Toole he makes it work brilliantly. There were moments when I wanted more from him (when the Fool gets him to repeat the words "Nothing will come of nothing," there was not a hint of recognition, certainly not Paul Scofield's halting moment in mid-sentence that still haunts me from the Peter Brook movie) (and why isn't that out on DVD, huh?) but there were also moments where I saw and heard things for the first time (the storm scene, the scene with Gloucester) and realized that, like Hamlet, the time that the title character spends offstage is the most important thirty minutes of the play.

So yes, it was very good indeed. Which puts this King Lear squarely in the minority of stage versions that I (or for that matter, you) will ever see. And worlds away from the worst, which remains the '96 New York Shakespeare Festival production with F. Murray Abraham, directed by Adrian Hall. After watching that one, I was moved to write a poem, which I have here revised so that it will be a little less particular in its libels and thus hopefully more universal in its appeal. It is a poem which is perfectly suited to every bad King Lear you are ever likely to see; and for those of you who felt like a fly to the gods in their sport during that '96 production, please fill in all the appropriate blanks.

9 Out Of Every 10 King Lears

King Lear, say scholars in the know,
Is Shakespeare’s most demanding show
And if you to [theatre name] go,
You’ll nod at this report
And feel like flies that small boys Mace
Because the gods who rule this place
Have offered up a mental case
To bore us for their sport.

The stage design is seventh grade;
That lighting person? Overpaid,
Because the actors stand in shade
And we sit in the light;
As for direction, it’s so small
There’s very little there at all --
It’s like a late-night men’s room brawl
Staged by a troglodyte.

The pacing’s wrong, the volume’s loud;
The Fool is dull and unendowed;
Cordelia yells like we’re a crowd
And she’s up on the terrace.
Thematically, it’s work-for-hire --
There’s very little to admire
When Lear’s eternal wheel of fire
Feels like a Wheel of Ferris.

Except for Regan, Goneril
And [male part], all the cast looks ill
As if this play was some horse pill
To purge them quick and dirty.
And [insert actor name] plays Lear
Like some demented auctioneer
Who has to meet a financier
For dinner at 10:30.

I know the play’s a field of mines
But this one’s full of moans and whines
From actors who shout out their lines
Like workers on construction --
They stomp across the ugly stage
Avoiding, in their mannered rage,
The depths you’ll find upon the page
But not in this production.

With all the play’s life dead or drained,
We sit there puzzled, bored or pained,
All sentenced to be entertained
Without a hope of pardon
By what should be some live grenades
But feel more like the blunted blades
Of skaters in the Lear Capades
At Madison Square Garden.

And in the end the actors weep
To prove that what they feel is deep;
But we have all been fast asleep
Since Tom O’ Bedlam’s song --
For we that were young when we walked in
Have taken it upon the chin
And by the end of all this din
Have never lived so long.