///
home | art & architecture | books & cds | dance | destinations | film | opera | television | theater | archives
///
home
| art & architecture | books & cds | dance
| destinations | film | opera | television | theater
| archives
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
|
Filmed in 1998, this adroit
BBC/WGBH-Boston production of William Shakespeare’s King Lear is of particular note for preserving
Ian Holm’s celebrated stage performance in the title role. Stellar interpreters of
Lear haven’t always been so fortunate. Laurence Olivier was frail and in ill health
by the time he was brought before the cameras for a 1984
television adaptation. Paul Scofield was in prime form for the 1971 film version, but
his powerful acting was undermined by Peter Brook’s dreary stylized direction. Orson
Welles fell victim to television’s infancy in 1953 when he played Lear in an absurdly
truncated 73-minute teleplay—complete with boom-mike shadows and wobbly cardboard
sets—coincidentally directed by a much younger Peter Brook. When asked about the
severely chopped-down script, Welles replied at the time: “The central story will
still be there. That’s all people remember anyhow.”
Ian Holm’s King Lear is significantly trimmed, too, but at
two-and-a-half hours the play’s structure and thematic threads remain clearly
delineated. More importantly, the director (Richard Eyre) and the strong supporting cast
are retained from the 1997 Royal National Theatre stage production. While not “opened
up” in the full cinematic sense, stagebound claustrophobia is minimized by the use of
expressionistic studio sets and fluid editing. Early scenes inside Lear’s castle are
torch-lit and have a sepulchral eeriness that seems keyed to the King’s line, “I
think the world’s asleep.” Walls, floors, and sheet-draped furniture are all
bathed in a lurid orange hue. We feel ourselves submerged in a kind of pagan
no-man’s-land from which reason and sanity have departed.
Scholars have speculated about the play’s desolate worldview and
brutal pessimism. Is King Lear simply
reflective of Jacobean fatalism or is Shakespeare revealing something of his own personal
despair in the chilling poetry of “pent-up guilts” and “climbing
sorrow”? What has never been in dispute is the universality of Lear’s profoundly
crippled and cross-wired relationship with his three daughters. His vain misreading of
Regan and Goneril’s condescension is matched only by his blindness to Cordelia’s
respect. “Things must change or cease,” we’re told by a passing gentleman
on the heath, where Lear soon encounters his own elemental truth. Change finally comes to
the old King’s heart, although his sweetest speech to Cordelia is delivered as the
two of them are led away to prison. Reconciliations are grievously delayed or undercut by
misery and violence throughout King Lear. Awash
in corpses, the play ends with slim differentiation between “to change” and
“to cease.”
A controversial aspect of
Holm’s performance was the decision to strip naked during the storm scene. The
gesture is implicit in the text: “Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here.”
In fact, it’s remarkable that no Lear before Holm felt compelled to give us a
Shakespearean full monty. If the moment was startling on stage, the teleplay is too
carefully restrained. While not exactly censored, the nudity is all but unnoticeable from
a distance in dim light, heavy rain, and the skittish lens of a handheld camera. Worse,
the thunderous sound effects drown out much of the dialogue. (Seasoned “Masterpiece
Theatre” fans may wish to have a copy of the play at hand; the storm can be found in
Act III, Scene IV.)
As he has shown in his movie
roles, Ian Holm is the purest of conduits for the behaviors and motivations of the
characters he plays. Whether portraying button-down negligence attorney Mitchell Stephens
in The Sweet Hereafter,
or Greenwich Village gadfly Joe Gould in Joe Gould’s Secret,
Holm disappears into his roles with thorough self-effacement. His Lear is naturalistic and
devoid of theatrical cant. We’re reminded that Shakespeare’s language
needn’t be forcibly gnawed to work its effects. In scenes where Holm is matched with
a similarly unfussy performer, such as Victoria Hamilton playing Cordelia, the results can
be extraordinary. A highlight of the production is Lear awakening (Act IV, Scene VII) and
saying, “Do not laugh at me;/ For, as I am a man, I think this lady/ To be my child
Cordelia.” His daughter’s response—“And so I am, I am”—is a
rare moment of lucid beauty in an angry landscape. Holm and Hamilton bring a breathtaking
poignancy to the scene.
The Fool in King Lear is a gnomic and often misunderstood
presence. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, shortened versions of the play
omitted the character altogether. Although the role has been reduced for this production,
it has also been daringly reconfigured. Rather than a manic young whippersnapper—as
the character is commonly acted—Michael Bryant plays the Fool as a decrepit hanger-on
as ancient and tired as Lear himself. Bryant is like a dyspeptic vaudevillian gamely
firing zingers from the dais at a Friars Club roast. It’s an inspired idea and hints
that Lear and his Fool have accompanied one another into a bitter late-life. Lear asks,
“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” When the Fool responds, “Lear’s
shadow,” we suspect that the Fool has known Lear long enough to mourn the King’s
ignoble decline.
Shakespeare crafted one of
literature’s great parallel narratives in the story of Gloucester and his two sons,
the calculating bastard Edmund and the steadfast Edgar. The subplot mirrors and enlarges
the drama of Lear’s clash with his daughters. Actor Paul Rhys interprets Edgar as
callow and disengaged during the play’s opening scenes, which is effective in two
ways: it makes Edgar a believably easy mark for the duplicitous Edmund, and it allows room
for Edgar’s transformation in his dark-night-of-the-soul on the heath. Edmund is
played with sleek menace by the aptly named Finbar Lynch, who also brings a rapacious
eroticism to his scenes with Goneril (Barbara Flynn) and Regan (Amanda Redman). Anyone
familiar with King Lear will want to know how
the production handles the blinding of Gloucester (Timothy West) by the barbarous Cornwall
(Michael Simkins). It’s gruesome stuff and suggests that PBS operates under the same
double standard as commercial television: Gloucester’s punctured eye sockets oozing
blood are apparently more acceptable viewing than Lear’s blessed nakedness.
- Bob Wake
