King Lear (32 page)

8.
“The oldest hath borne most”: Robert Stephens (right) as Lear and David Bradley as Gloucester, finding a human bond in their anguish, in Adrian Noble’s 1993 production.

The Fool’s function in life is entirely tied up with the king. He’s like a soldier’s batman. There’s no logic for him to exist once the master’s dead, or mad.

Warner:
My National Theatre Fool (David Bradley) died during the interval of exhaustion and cold. He went to sleep in a wheelbarrow
somewhere in the dark interior of the hovel and never woke again. A sad and quiet death that went practically unnoticed. In my Kick Theatre production the actress Hilary Townley played both Cordelia and the Fool (a doubling I am sure Shakespeare intended), which solves so many issues so very easily. For example, “my poor fool is hanged” draws effortless and painful meaning from such casting.

9.
Michael Gambon as Lear and Antony Sher as the Fool, with mask, in Adrian Noble’s 1982 production.

One striking feature of Shakespeare’s reworking of the old anonymous
Leir
play is his removal of its Christian frame of reference (that was one of the reasons why Tolstoy perversely said he preferred the old play!). The characters are always appealing to the gods but not getting the response they want. And then there is Edmund appealing to “Nature” as his goddess. What was your thinking about religion in the play?

Noble:
The first time I did it I quite consciously sought a godless universe. I was very influenced by Brecht and Beckett. I sought a godless universe and a quite vengeful, spiteful universe. I made heavy cuts at the end of the play to highlight that fact.

The second time I imagined a universe that was not godless, but in which the gods sat back and refused to interfere. The choice is as much to do with the director or interpreter as the writing.

Warner:
The removal of any uniting Christian frame makes this text all the more available to us now. The characters are struggling away as we are all struggling away, and have ever been struggling away for centuries. From the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, Shakespeare allows us no simple answers, and that is why productions should beware of giving them.

Nunn:
Remember, in the old
Leir
play, the king is restored to his throne and Cordelia lives. By changing the ending, Shakespeare deliberately violates a seemingly fundamental rule of drama, namely that plays serve as a moral or cautionary influence on their audience, because they show, regardless of trial and vicissitude, that the good will triumph in the end. In
King Lear
we’re surely expecting just that, but Shakespeare won’t allow it. I think this is proof positive that Shakespeare’s intentions were very different from those of the old play. Shakespeare’s investigation of the extremes of human behavior, into the nature of man the species, concludes that life
isn’t
like a morality play. When everything in our religious and cultural history requires us to believe that ultimately the gods will intervene on the side of virtue, Shakespeare says emphatically that they don’t. It’s more than the conclusion that his play is not Christian, it’s that he moves to a conclusion that is, at the very least, agnostic.

For me, it is centrally important that there is no sense of divine justice in this tragedy. I’m wondering whether any other writer during the Elizabethan age ever ventured to question whether or not the heavens might be empty? In the early scenes, as I said, Shakespeare’s play sets up the fundamental belief in his characters that human actions are overseen by the gods. Lear seems to believe that, like him, the gods are old men, that they are intelligent, and that they’re watching, and he clearly sees himself as in privileged contact with the gods. But as the play progresses, Shakespeare shows us more people praying for the intervention of the gods, to no avail. The battle at the climax of the story will determine whether or not the “good” will triumph. Gloucester is urged by Edgar to “Pray that
the right may thrive.” He does. They don’t. Finally, as it’s realized that a death sentence is on both Lear and Cordelia, Albany leads all present in a final prayer as soldiers run to the prison—“The gods defend her!” The first word of the next line is “Howl.” Cordelia is dead. No intervention. The gods aren’t mentioned again.

So yes, I think Edmund is placed before us early on as evidence of a solitary, dangerous, atheistical intelligence. Then as Lear’s journey takes him increasingly toward challenging the behavior of the gods, arriving at his epiphany in the “unaccommodated man” speech, his more fundamental questions begin. “What is the
cause
of thunder?” “Is there any
cause
in nature that makes these hard hearts?” His questions now seem to be reaching toward Darwinian rather than divine explanations, and his belief in the gods begins to evaporate.

What about Edgar? He’s quite an actor, performing in different voices, isn’t he? He’s Poor Tom, but then after that, after the cliff fall, he’s the man on the beach and after that he’s the peasant with the accent who kills Oswald—why does Edgar have all these different languages and voices and play all these different roles? Why doesn’t he much sooner just say, “Look, Dad, I’m sorry. You should be sorry, you got the wrong son, I’m the good one. You’re blind, this is me …” So many opportunities in so many different roles … until he finally gets around to telling his father the truth, by which time he’s left it so late that all Gloucester can do is die of a heart attack.

Noble:
I think he takes upon himself the sins of others, in particular the sins of the father, in order to redeem himself. It’s a profoundly religious, spiritual journey that Edgar goes on and a very tough regime that he imposes upon himself. The disguises, flagellation, and infliction of misery are all part of that. Through the course of the play he cleanses himself. He’s like a character out of a George Herbert poem.

Nunn:
Edgar does say, at a crucial moment of the play, at the moment where he could cease to be the Tom o’Bedlam character at last, “I cannot daub it further,” and then in the very next instant, “And yet I must.” In this production we’ve tried to identify something
specific about that change of mind. There are men on Gloucester’s orders scouring the country on the hunt to capture and kill Edgar if they find him. We have a troop of those soldiers passing at that point, so Edgar’s “yet I must” is clearly justified as self-preservation, and by association the preserving of his father.

But there’s a deeper explanation that Edgar himself also provides when he takes Gloucester, who is suicidally bent, to an imaginary cliff edge. Just before the death plunge moment, Edgar has an aside to the audience, “Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it.” This is fundamental in Edgar’s journey. He observes that his father is now only full of resentment and hatred for the world, of believing that there was never anything worth believing in. Edgar, still clinging to his belief in divine justice, cannot allow his misguided, misled father to die a bad death or an unredeemed death. Therefore he makes it his mission to bring his father beyond suicidal thoughts to a different, reconciled set of attitudes. The gods seem to be unwilling to back up that reconciliation and continue to rain down horror, but Edgar’s changes of identity are entirely to bring his father to a better spiritual place.

There’s something of a fairytale quality to the play, isn’t there? Goneril and Regan as the ugly sisters, Cordelia as a Cinderella with an unhappy ending. But, especially since Peter Brook’s famous production and film, there’s also an approach to the play that emphasizes Lear’s unreasonable rage, the chaos caused by his riotous knights, and the sense that his daughters, Goneril especially, aren’t villains through and through.

Noble:
It’s hard to really admire anybody in the play actually. You can like them all a lot, and you can feel for them a lot, but it is hard to admire anybody. You can admire Gloucester, and probably Edgar’s morality. As for the sisters, Shakespeare always writes what is needed. It can be very frustrating, especially for actresses, because it often happens with the female parts, that Shakespeare sees no point in showing you the bits of the iceberg under the water. He thinks that is a complete waste of scenes. It doesn’t mean that the bit that is revealed does not have a complete world of which it is a part. Exactly
the same thing applies to Gertrude and Lady Macbeth, whereby when the function ceases to have a crucial element or a driving force, Shakespeare just stops. Lady Macbeth and Gertrude just stop. Actresses tend to think there must be a missing or lost scene, but there isn’t. Like the Fool in the second half of the play, it isn’t there because there’s no need for it. It doesn’t mean you can’t make it completely real, but you have to come at it from his time, not like a movie. The actor may have a backstory, but you can only show so much because you don’t need anymore.

Nunn:
I think it would be wholly wrong for a production to suggest that Goneril and Regan are of evil disposition at the beginning of the play; but there is a degree of ambition in their behavior, and there is a degree of competition between them, and possibly there is that element of hidden resentment of how their much-the-younger sister has become the favorite of their old father.

Traditionally, late-nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century versions of
Lear
did indeed go very strongly for the interpretation that Lear himself was always to be seen as kind and gentle and white-haired and frail. And therefore a delightful old man goaded intolerably by two wicked sisters. When Peter Brook did his production in 1962, there was a sense that an extraordinary revolution had taken place because Brook, absolutely honest to the text, said: “Lear is behaving entirely unjustifiably, now he’s behaving appallingly, and now he’s behaving absolutely beyond the limit to the point where no father can expect to get away with that.” It was a production that tried explicitly to exonerate the sisters. I remember that, at that time, the impact of revealing Lear’s behavior as frequently unacceptable hit home very strongly. Now, of course, any production trying to propose that Lear is a close relative of Father Christmas would be laughed off the stage. The Brook view has become the standard view.

However, we do still have to explain how Goneril and Regan get to a condition of alarming ruthlessness in the second half of the play. All I will say is—especially if anybody hasn’t seen the play before—watch out for the moment when Lear utters his curse on Goneril, and particularly his curse on Goneril’s womb—a curse more bloodcurdling than I hope any lady in the audience will ever hear in her
life. We all know that when dreadful things are said in rage, those words can never be unsaid. This is a major turning point of the play and causes Goneril to become vengeful, regardless of consequence.

The blinding of Gloucester is perhaps the most horrific moment in all Shakespeare. How did you stage that and did it have contemporary resonances for you? In Trevor Nunn’s 2007 production Regan behaves with sadistic glee that’s also a kind of fear—it inevitably conjured up the American soldiers in Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. Torture in times of war is something that just doesn’t go away …

Noble:
Yes, it had resonances in the sense that it confronts you with the most shocking things that humanity can do to humanity, but I almost never make references to contemporary events, because in my view it’s a blind alley. Scenes like that talk directly to the audience and their souls and hearts. You don’t need people coming on in flak jackets and dressed as Iraqis.

It is a dangerous scene for a number of reasons. It’s dangerous because the blinding is done to an old man, and secondly, it’s completely plugged in to this extraordinarily dangerous sexual relationship between Cornwall and Regan. It’s plugged in to the scheme of the play in terms of the breakdown of order and the dawn of chaos. It’s a wild, very, very unpleasant scene.