Authors: William Shakespeare
In this bleak vision,
Noble’s most original stroke is to suggest that the cruelty unleashed by Lear’s folly spreads to even the conventionally
good characters. The chief beneficiary is Simon Russell Beale’s extraordinary Edgar who starts as goody-two shoes and who is turned by the horrors he has witnessed into a symbol of revenge. In this production he doesn’t just kill Oswald; he batters his face with a staff as if in retaliation for the blinding of his father. The most unplayable major role in Shakespeare suddenly acquires a specific identity: a man forever tainted by the contagion of violence.
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In his final battle with Edmund, Russell Beale as Edgar tried “to rip out the dying Edmund’s eyes in reprisal.”
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Similarly, Bill Alexander’s 2004 production included “chilling touches that alert you afresh to the barbarism of its world. For example, in the climactic duel between Edmund and Edgar, it’s only chance that stops the virtuous brother from exacting primitive ’eye for an eye’ justice”
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—“In order to force Edmund to drop his arms, [Edgar] grabbed him by either side of his face and pushed his thumbs into his eyes. This reference to the blinding of Gloucester was eerily resonant.”
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Our opinion of Edgar will determine how we consider the end of the play. His spiritual journey, which echoes Lear’s, provides him with a unique understanding of humanity and the preciousness of life. But he is also a very human avenger who has to set the world right and provide hope for the future. To overbalance his character with deliberate malicious and violent action furthers a nihilistic vision of the play by removing the certainty of redemption for a lost and barbaric world. Adrian Noble in 1982 stressed this element of unredeemed cruelty. The
Guardian
critic Michael Billington explains:
Edgar slays Oswald by breaking his back with a staff, and the fraternal duel between Edgar and Edmund is a bare-chested, bloody, unchivalric combat that ends with Edmund’s head being dumped in water. Even at the last the characters look out into the future in a spirit of skeptical uncertainty.
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In Peter Brook’s vision of the play chaos was part of the natural order. His production emphasized the inhumanity and disinterestedness of the forces that annihilate Lear. There was no moral structure
beneath the surface of civilization: “Everywhere one looks, one sees only the facades and emblems of a world and, ironically, as characters acquire sight, it enables them to see only into a void.”
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Brook removed key moments of redemption and humanity: the servants did not tend Gloucester after he has been blinded but callously bumped into him as they cleared away the stage. Edmund’s attempt to redeem himself and stop the order that will see the death of Cordelia was cut. As Lear died, his final words “Look there” were spoken as he stared ahead into nothingness. We were not left with the usual tableau of survivors grieving over Lear and Cordelia. The cast left, carrying out their dead bodies, leaving Edgar and the dead Edmund on stage alone. Edgar moved center-stage, and then went to his brother. As he dragged his brother’s corpse up toward the back of the stage a distant rumble of thunder sounded in the background, leaving the audience with the impression that worse was to follow. “[W]e that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long” took on a genuinely apocalyptic meaning. This was an image of the horror of “the promised end” of the world.
Where Brook’s production succeeded was in making the audience grieve for humanity, or more specifically for the absence of humanity. It seemed a fitting statement for its time, and it is one that still touches us today. Lear’s speech in the hovel is central to Brook’s vision—it is not by chance that he used this quote in the program for the production’s world tour: “Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” Corin Redgrave, who played King Lear in 2004, also took this line:
The play investigates how, in a dying or decaying world, we can live better and be better toward one another. It can’t produce any conclusions to that because the world as Shakespeare saw it at that time was dying, just as our world as we see it is dying. Shakespeare was writing in a world which he sees going to hell on wheels and writing a text book in case the world should ever recover. So it is the most bleak of plays, but it is a very salutary play, a very necessary play … you could not possibly lose
King Lear
without impoverishing ourselves terribly.
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Adrian Noble
, born in 1950, arrived at the RSC from the Bristol Old Vic, where he had directed several future stars in productions of classic plays. His first production on the main stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford was the acclaimed 1982
Lear
, discussed here, with Michael Gambon as the king and Antony Sher as an extraordinarily powerful Fool. Two years later his
Henry V
sowed the seed for Kenneth Branagh’s film. Among his other major productions during his two decades at the RSC were
Hamlet
, again with Branagh in the title role,
The Plantagenets
, based on the
Henry VI/Richard III
tetralogy, and the two parts of
Henry IV
, with Robert Stephens as Falstaff. Stephens returned in 1993 to play Lear in a second production of the tragedy, also discussed here. Noble’s 1994
Midsummer Night’s Dream
was made into a film. He was artistic director from 1991 to 2003, since when he has been a freelance director. His production style is characterized by strong use of colors and objects (such as umbrellas), and fluid scenic structure.
Deborah Warner
, born in 1959, trained in stage management at the Central School of Speech and Drama. At the age of twenty-one she formed her own “fringe” company, Kick Theatre, imaginatively staging stripped-down productions of the classics, including
King Lear
(1985, discussed here), at the Edinburgh Festival. In 1987 she made her RSC debut with a rigorously simple but deeply moving
Titus Andronicus
, starring Brian Cox, on the intimate stages of the Swan at Stratford and The Pit at London’s Barbican. A
King John
in a similar style followed the next year and in 1990 she directed
King Lear
, again with Brian Cox, on the proscenium Lyttelton stage of the National Theatre in London (also discussed here). She has subsequently specialized in Samuel Beckett and opera, but has returned to Shakespeare with a
Richard II
at the National, featuring her collaborator Fiona Shaw cross-dressed in the title role, and a large-scale
Julius Caesar
at the Barbican.
Sir Trevor Nunn
is the most successful and one of the most highly regarded of modern British theater directors. Born in 1940,
he was a brilliant student at Cambridge, strongly influenced by the literary close reading of Dr. F. R. Leavis. At the age of just twenty-eight he succeeded Peter Hall as artistic director of the RSC, where he remained until 1978. He greatly expanded the range of the company’s work and its ambition in terms of venues and touring. He also achieved huge success in musical theater and subsequently became artistic director of the National Theatre in London. His productions are always full of textual insights, while being clean and elegant in design. Among his most admired Shakespearean work has been a series of tragedies with Ian McKellen in leading roles:
Macbeth
(1976, with Judi Dench, in the dark, intimate space of The Other Place),
Othello
(1989, with McKellen as Iago and Imogen Stubbs as Desdemona), and
King Lear
(2007, in the Stratford Complete Works Festival, on world tour, and then in London).
One of the first questions one always wonders about with King Lear is: What do you decide on as a setting for the play? We’ve seen everything from a Stonehenge-like world to contemporaneity by way of Samurai Japan. So what kind of a world did you and your designer seek to create?
Noble:
There are two or three driving forces in relation to the setting. First of all there is the need to create a series of credible family units, because the dynamic of the play emanates from damaged families; in particular Lear’s and Gloucester’s two parallel families. So one needs to be able to create a domesticity and parallel familial worlds. The second thing one needs to be able to explore is an epic quality, by which I mean the fact that the reality we live in fractures and splinters as the reality inside Lear’s head fractures and splinters. Shakespeare quite deliberately expresses the horrors and the madness that are happening inside the human being through the physicality of it.
In both productions I sought for a setting and a world that could fragment and start behaving in an almost independent way. With both productions the walls started splitting and almost exploded apart. In 1993 with Robert Stephens as Lear I found an image at the very end of the first act which I felt was rather telling: the moon
started bleeding sand. That seemed to me an exquisitely painful image, with the moon’s very strong connection with the eye. The milk of human kindness had completely disappeared.
I found myself eschewing a completely modern, contemporary world, because it seemed to me that would quite swiftly become a highway to nowhere. In a similar way I eschewed the old Stonehenge version which seemed to me as silly as setting it in Wapping. So we found a world that probably related to Europe a hundred and fifty years ago, with greatcoats, where people still hunted, where the motor vehicle hadn’t taken over our world. Neither myself, Bob Crowley, who designed the first, or Anthony Ward, who designed the second, would I think be able to place it within fifty years of a particular date.
Warner:
My interest in both my productions was to release the characters through their language and their relationships. What the play does is to take the audience into the interior of themselves. It is a mirror of the desolation of the human spirit, how lost it is, how far we fall in families and how hard sought are the conditions that prompt personal change. That’s why the setting of any given production has little connection to the key that may unlock the scenes and acts. The play has to flow through our imaginations and then it has to lodge, and that is why I used such a pared-down aesthetic so that the space is clear for that to happen. All great plays do this but each must be met in their particular. With Kick Theatre in 1985 we were in a church hall in Edinburgh with three ladders and a bucket of water for the heath scene. With the NT [National Theatre] we were on the wide open stage of the Lyttelton Theatre where different aesthetic choices needed to be made before we began. Hildegard Bechtler’s set was poetic and beautiful but bare, and the “world” was not precisely named by it. It was not the “Stone Age
Lear,”
or the “Third Reich
Lear”
but the Brian Cox, David Bradley, Ian McKellen, Susie Engel, and Clare Higgins
Lear
. It was actor led and actor inspired and I still believe that that is a very good way with Shakespeare. Belief in casting and the group creation of the world is what matters.
Nunn:
Shakespeare says that King Lear is the king of Ancient Britain. On the other hand, Shakespeare includes scenes involving dueling
with swords, there are references to a graced palace, to women wearing gorgeous clothes that scarcely keep them warm, and Gloucester refers to wearing spectacles. Shakespeare is making clear that he doesn’t mind breaking the rules as far as historical accuracy goes. It’s very likely that
King Lear
was performed at the Globe, or indeed at court performances, with the actors wearing a mixture of contemporary Elizabethan/Jacobean clothing, with some additional elements of cloak and robe that would indicate an earlier period.
I think Shakespeare was interested in the idea that a history play should apply acutely and precisely to the age that the
audience
lives in, so he was keen to have it both ways. I’ve seen Stonehenge-based productions of
King Lear
, and frankly it does seem very odd that Lear should make such a fuss about being out on a heath in a storm when his normal domestic condition appears to be open to the elements.
Shakespeare is presenting the huge contrast between a man who has been encouraged to believe that he is the closest thing to a god in human terms, and the man who comes to perceive he is like a beggar “no more but this.” Lear is a conduit of the gods and he’s in totally autocratic authority. His smallest whisper is converted into law, and nobody, such as Kent, can question him. So, in this production, I have elected to set the play in a seemingly nineteenth-century environment with resonances of the tsarist order in Russia and/or the Austrian autocracy of Franz Joseph. The intention is to stress that Lear’s power is total and dictatorial like a tsar or an emperor, in all matters, political and social, and that it derives from god with whom he communicates. This, I think, allows us to encompass the requirements of the social structure of the play and, what’s more, the anachronisms make complete sense. Lear’s journey takes him from that autocratic power to somebody who, in the storm, asks himself for the first time, “How do wretches survive in conditions like these, if they cannot keep warm because they have no proper clothing?” And then, wanting to embrace that houseless situation, he meets Tom o’Bedlam (who happens to be a man going through the same crisis, another man who’s been used to comfort and is now, in order to survive, turning himself into a crazed beggar), and as he studies the beggar’s naked exposure, Lear urgently wants to place himself in that condition, so he can experience being the “forked animal” for himself.
Shakespeare had long been fascinated with the philosophical idea that a king can journey through the guts of a beggar. He has used the notion of king to beggar on a number of previous occasions, but in
Lear
he takes it to the extreme. I think
Richard II
is almost a sketch for
King Lear;
here we have a godlike king who in the end is sobbing, “I need friends and since I am ordinary like you—how can you say I am a king?” Shakespeare takes that king to a small prison cell, and then, alone and the lord of nothing, he grants him extraordinary self-knowledge. But in
King Lear
, the journey of the king is to a yet more extreme destination.