Hopkins as Lear, Florence Pugh as Cordelia
A few weeks ago we wrote about Anthony Hopkins‘s mesmerizing performance in a BBC production that squanders a lot of opportunities. We’ve been thinking about the play since.
So has the Wall Street Journal‘s Terry Teachout, who seems to be an expert on King Lear, at least from the number of recent productions he references in his article in Commentary magazine (thanks for the heads-up Frank Wilson). Glenda Jackson‘s performance of the role is coming to Broadway next April – according to him, that will be the third Broadway production of William Shakespeare‘s masterpiece in the last six decades. “Why were American versions of King Lear so uncommon for so long? Because it is to theater what Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge is to music, an all-encompassing super-drama fraught with complexities that pose challenges of understanding to the playgoer.” Regional performances have more than filled the gap, however, making it one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays.
Here’s where the BBC production with Hopkins comes in: “Too often, however, the quest for ‘relatability’ results in modern-dress stagings whose every element seems to have been determined in advance by an arbitrary concept superimposed on the text by the director rather than arising organically from it. Some, such as the Eyre/Hopkins TV Lear, work reasonably well on their own restrictive terms, but others have been unconvincing, on occasion even preposterous. The worst Lear I have ever reviewed, directed by Robert Falls at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2006, turned the play into a tale of Eastern European gangsters whose opening scene was set in a men’s room with a working urinal.” I would argue the same for the Eyre/Hopkins chop suey production, which mangles the text.
He argues “Shakespeare’s plays work best when performed without scene breaks in open-stage productions that employ a bare minimum of props and scenery” – a contention that was made by Prof. Peter Styron at the University of Michigan, during my own undergraduate days.
Is King Lear petty? Not in many of the performances: “He is a ruler of towering stature who makes the fatal mistake of supposing that power is more important than love, then discovers the world as it really is, cold and hostile to the vanity of human wishes. ‘Is man no more than this?’ Lear cries at the piteous spectacle of the half-naked Edgar trembling in the storm, and in an instant he is invaded and conquered by self-doubt. To ‘humanize’ such a titan by playing him naturalistically is to diminish the pathos of his brutal humiliation.”
He concludes:
“Even more disturbing is what happens next. Having passed through the refiner’s fire of suffering, Lear sees the error of his ways and embraces Cordelia, the only daughter who loves him. But his redemption comes too late to prevent her murder, a denouement so sickeningly unjust that even a critic as acute as Samuel Johnson could not accept it, just as he thought the blinding of Gloucester to be ‘an act too horrid to be endured in dramatic exhibition.’
“Those commentators who argue that Shakespeare is best understood as a Christian artist find it hard to grapple with King Lear, whose ‘message’ is more likely to strike today’s viewers as all but nihilistic. Yet it is in this very aspect that the play’s deepest appeal is to be found. For just as all of us fear that we will die with our minds occluded by senility, so are even the most steadfast of religious believers—Dr. Johnson among them—beset by periodic pangs of doubt. The genius of King Lear is that it stares down this doubt, even broaching the possibility that human life, far from being directed by what Shakespeare elsewhere calls ‘a divinity that shapes our ends,’ is in fact entirely meaningless. As John Simon has written of Lear: ‘The point of Shakespeare’s work is not that everyone is equally dreary and culpable but, clearly, that some are deserving and even noble, while others are bad and even vicious, yet in the short run the bad may actually have a better time of it. An awe-inspiring vision, startling for its—or any—time.’”
December 1st, 2018 at 4:56 pm
Thank you very much for this. Teachout’s comparison with Der Große Fuge is very apt. However, I don’t agree with what he says about the play as problematic for Christian readers. It is possible that in part Shakespeare, who in this play is very careful to provide an unusual setting of legendary pre-Christian Britain and dialogue that avoids references to the Christian God, provides us with the vision of a world devoid of Christianity. If such a reading has merit, then Shakespeare is in King Lear partly engaged in a thought experiment: what would our world be like without such fundamental Christian teachings as grace? Perhaps he anticipates what Dostoevsky and Nietzsche say: that without God anything is permitted, including the vicious brutality experienced by Gloucester in the play. Perhaps also he offers a prophetic glimpse into the post-Christian landscape of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.