Performing the Role of Lear Stanley Wells, in a Moment of Slight

1 “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”: Performing the Role of Lear Stanley Wells, in a moment of slight understatement, says this of King Lear, referring to the play but also specifically to the title role: “it has enhanced—and occasionally diminished—the reputations of innumerable actors.”1 Perhaps for this reason it has not always been a favorite among actors; Charles Lamb in the early 19th century stated that “the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted.”2 Shakespeare’s Lear could for quite a long time not be tolerated in its entirety—as we know, in the late 17th century Nahum Tate revised the play, cutting out the Fool and developing a love story between Edgar and Cordelia, who together restore Lear to the throne (and Cordelia, obviously, survives). King Lear never disappeared entirely from the stage, but even coming into the 20th century it was not among the most popular plays to be performed. But as Shakespeare’s full text was restored and theatre companies, actors, and directors began adjusting themselves to the play rather than trying to make it adjust to their interests, it regained popularity and, as I’m sure many of you are aware, its recent production history is very rich; in his review of the production currently running at the National, Michael Billington remarks that he has seen now 1 Wells 2 2 Lamb 123 2 three productions of Lear in the past seven months. The play perhaps reflected the zeitgeist of various decades throughout the latter half of the 20th century, and possibly even into the 21st. For actors, Lear himself looms not only over the play but also over the Shakespearean canon— Derek Jacobi says that “if you have ambitions to do the classics, you jump through the Hamlet hoop when you’re young. And then when you’re old you do the Lear hoop.”3 Jonathan Bate remarks, that the “problem with the part” is often “that by the time you are old enough to play it, you are too old to play it.” Laurence Olivier couldn’t strike the right balance: in 1946, still in his thirties, “he seemed to be impersonating a whimsical old tyrant rather than actually being one,” but in 1963 he was simply too feeble to express the rage we have come to associate with Lear. Richard Burbage, the key actor in Shakespeare’s company (and who apparently did not possess a bombastic style), played the part in the early 17th century, when he was just around the age of forty. Taking into consideration the changes in life expectancy since Shakespeare’s time, Bate and others suggest that the early fifties is now a suitable time for actors to take on the part.4 Simon Russell Beale is playing Lear at the National right now and is 53 years old. Note: Jonathan Bate was 3 Jacobi “Guardian” 4 Bate “National” 3 writing the program note for the National, so take that for what it is. But other notable Lears have not accepted the part in their early 50’s—the text suggests Lear is in his 80’s, and so some actors have preferred to be closer to this range: Derek Jacobi claims to have “always felt slightly young for the role” until he played it at 72, Nigel Hawthorne was 70, and Ian McKellan was 68. Playing Lear as an older man has not always been the norm, though. Garrick played the role when he was only twenty-four, but continued to do so until he was in his late 50’s. John Gielgud was also a young Lear, playing the role at the Old Vic in 1931 when he was twenty-six, and then again when he was 35. As I’ve said, Olivier, like Garrick, played the role as both a young and aged man. Just as Lear has been played by actors of various ages, so too have actors approached the role differently. For some, Lear is as close as Shakespeare comes to a Titan—a character whose stature and grandeur “ensures pre-eminence.”5 Many6 refer to the role as a treacherous and unforgiving mountain that must either be ascended or reached by parachute, as Oliver Ford Davies suggests, also saying that the part is “some sort of ultimate” – perhaps the ultimate “test, accolade, or exploration of the human 5 Brown 132 6 Davies, Jacobi, Hawthorne 4 condition,”7 whatever we may take that to mean. And then there is Olivier’s take on the role and on the figure of Lear: “No, Lear is easy. He’s like all of us, really: he’s just a stupid old fart.”8 “He’s like all of us, really.” Alexander Leggatt says this about theatre (but is, interestingly enough writing about the performance history of King Lear): “the theatre is the most immediately human of the arts” – not the most sublime, or even moving, but the most human, which seems to somehow be a wonderfully and effectively imprecise way of describing it– he continues, “[the theatre’s] essential medium is the actor, its fundamental dynamic the relation between the actor and audience.”9 Why I’m interested in highlighting these various quotations—and the one in the title of my paper, “who is it that can tell me who I am?”—is because I want to explore what kind of relationship exists between Lear as a character and the audience, and how this is an identity-shaping or reflecting relationship—if the figure of Lear is as Olivier suggests “like all of us, really,” then in what ways are we similar, how are we reflected in Lear or he in us? I’d like to suggest that at least one of the reasons Lear may have a unique relationship to its audience is because of the simplicity of its plot. For all the ways it removes itself even from Shakespeare’s time by being set 7 Davies 1 8 Olivier 137 9 Leggatt 2 5 in a pre-Christian and non-classical era, and for all the grandeur with which Lear is associated—A.C. Bradley believes the play belongs “with works like the Divine Comedy . with the greatest symphonies of Beethoven and the statues (by Michelangelo) in the Medici Chapel”10—despite all of this, it strikes me that the structure of the story, at least as it relates directly to Lear, is itself remarkably unadorned. Here’s Howard Brenton’s summary of the narrative of the play’s main figure: “you have a terrible family row and slam out of the house in the rain; you shout at the rain for a bit, and then think – right. What am I going to do now?”11 *Woody Allen reference (?) Of course this kind of plot summary is overly reductive, but on some level it’s also tellingly accurate and might help to address the simplicity of the narrative. And exploring the play’s simplicity can actually offer some inroads into discovering more about it subtleties. It is the simplicity of a plot from which such abject suffering arises that makes the play devastating and, for many, nearly unbearable. Wells says that “King Lear is so widely regarded as the most intensely serious and profoundly moving of Shakespeare’s plays . that going to see a performance is in danger of seeming like participating in a religious ritual.”12 If we can attempt to suspend our knowledge of the play and any pre- 10 Bradley and Wells “Introduction” 11 Davies 4 12 Davies 168 – Wells “Introduction” 6 conceived notions (Oliver Ford Davies recounts, albeit with some skepticism, the story of Peter Brook being approached by an audience member who complained that he was “not moved by the production.” Brook responded by asking, “Where is it printed on your ticket that you should be moved by King Lear?”) and if we can just think for a minute about what happens in the beginning and persists through at least the first half, perhaps we would sense that the play does not necessarily signal utter ruin from the beginning or even throughout but rather that its tragedy rises, perhaps even surprisingly, to levels of catastrophe at the end from the relatively mundane. Lear’s errors and the general drama of the first few scenes are perhaps underwhelming: he gets angry at Cordelia’s perceived slight or perhaps feels humiliated and thus banishes her and also banishes Kent for defending her. Eventually we find Lear arguing bitterly with his daughters over the size of his retinue of knights. I’m not suggesting at all that the play is boring or uninteresting but rather that there is nothing remarkable about the circumstances—that they do not themselves signal the onset of a horrific tragedy. One of the aspects of Lear that I am trying to touch upon, then, is a sense that it is perhaps uniquely tragic—that there is something about the way the drama unfolds that does not warrant the kind of ending the play 7 offers, and that this attribute is somewhat distinctive among Shakespeare’s tragedies; some of the other plays that spring to mind involve circumstances that drive the plot and are also far less easily resolved, thus signaling a disastrous end: Macbeth has killed Duncan and sets out to shed more blood, Hamlet’s father is dead and Hamlet has learned about his treacherous murder; revenge must follow; even Romeo and Juliet face more ostensibly ominous circumstances from early in the play than those that appear in the early portions of Lear.

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