Screen:
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN ROYAL TREATMENT BENNETT'S 'KING GEORGE' There is much to praise in The Madness of King George. Adapting his own play, Alan Bennett hasn' t attempted in-depth characterization but instead...
...Second, a certain diffidence of Bennett's in regard to the nature of madness somewhat confuses our responses to the king's illness as a personal affliction...
...When George laments to his wife that he must spill the obscene words that have lodged themselves in his brain, doesn't that suggest a psychological invasion, an overthrow of George's real personality...
...The smallest part is executed not just with technical competence but with flair, as if each player knew that an entire play could be written about his/her character...
...And when he attacks a handsome lady-in-waiting whom he's long eyed but (being a faithful husband) never before harassed, isn't this an enactment of frustrated desire...
...Indeed, when George tells Doctor Willis that the king is not "here" (that is, inside his body) and "the king is somewhere else," doesn't that suggest an estrangement from his true nature rather than a monstrous enlargement of it...
...Apart from the bard's genius, it was his Elizabethan ignorance of clinical explanations of insanity that made him confident enough to achieve coherence and poetry...
...He professes no memory of it...
...Bennett holds the king's repulsiveness and pathos in such tactful equipoise that the splendid Nigel Hawthorne is free to create a man in extremis rather than a walking, talking disease...
...The battle of wills between King George and Doctor Willis becomes, in close-up, a battle of eyes...
...As I initially stated, Bennett's aim is not primarily psychological but panoramic...
...not exactly cold but dissatisfied, as if I had gone to a four-star restaurant, been served a course of succulent appetizers, and then been informed that the main course had been canceled...
...First, a glaze of cynicism coats the political events in this story, trivializing the meaning of George's madness as a public catastrophe...
...Much is made of this threat as the picture races toward its climax...
...The afflicted king is mad yet sane enough to be an appalled observer of his madness...
...He's a dramatist, not a doctor...
...RICHARD ALLEVAed...
...On the other hand, doesn't the fact that Doctor Willis's methods, which are as brutally punitive as those of an old-fashioned schoolmaster disciplining a ruffian child, do indeed work (at least for a while) suggest that the king's grossness actually reflects his desires and that the insanity simply unloosed the id from the royal superego's control...
...But when he is called to enter Parliament, Hawthorne sets his face into a red, angry mask and grits out the word, "Right...
...But, as the madness takes hold, and George charges onto a cricket field, roughly pushing aside children to show them how to bat, or takes over an orchestra to show them how to really play Handel, the king seems like a John Bull gone crazy...
...Is madness the horrible exaggeration of one's real personality or is it an invasion, an undermining, a sabotaging of the personality...
...He and director Hytner give Nigel Hawthorne a wonderful moment in the opening credits sequence that the actor executes to perfection...
...Maybe...
...The playwright's adroitness must be admired...
...and the various flutterings and confusions felt in the ranks of equerries, ladies-in-waiting, and manservants...
...Well, perhaps not...
...In fact, the entire cast is splendid...
...Dressing for an appearance before Parliament, George is shown talking affectionately to his wife, comforting a tearful toddler daughter, and bullying his foppish son...
...Anyway, why shouldn't the mind be teased upon occasion rather than satisfied...
...Is the personality a social manifestation of something real inside us or is it a flimsy construction that insanity can sweep away...
...The takeover of the king's chambers by Willis's orderlies is choreographed with frightening brilliance as a miniature palace coup...
...the machinations of the prince, driven by a sense of his own uselessness to subvert his father...
...RICHARD ALLEVA...
...We may desire that George not be deposed because we think him a kind man, but why should we care if the king's Tory party is toppled...
...But, since the political wars of that era carry little weight as presented here, the viewer must finally be moved by psychology-the presentation of the king' s pathetic state...
...Every insight achieved by contemporary science uncovers a new area of uncertainty...
...As to the depiction of the madness itself, any criticism of Bennett's handling of it must be tempered by the fact that the very subject of madness is now more difficult for dramatists and novelists to explore than at any time in the history of drama...
...the desperation of Queen Henrietta to stay in touch with her husband as the phalanxes of physicians and politicians form about him...
...Has he blocked out the memory of sexual violence or has he really no memory of a deed he committed when he was literally not himself...
...But by shifting from one notion of madness to another, he teases the mind without satisfying it...
...Postscript: I've just seen Madness a second time and, although I stand by what I've written above, the film has so much to stimulate the mind and please the eye that it proved more fascinating at this viewing than at the first...
...I can come up with two reasons for my reaction...
...Maybe...
...When Shakespeare dealt with madness in King Lear, he presumed that it was both a punishment for Lear's shortsightedness and injustice to Cordelia and a frenzied accession of wisdom that opens the tyrant's eyes to the suffering of all humanity...
...the rivalry of the doctors, each cosseting and advancing his own theory...
...He keeps all the narrative threads firmly in hand, never lets them get tangled: the political duel of Prime Minister Pitt with opposition leader Charles Fox...
...I'm not faulting Alan Bennett for not diagnosing King George...
...The British repertory system here has its usual triumph...
...Novelists and playwrights should be wary of entering this emotional territory...
...between his teeth, as if he would like to chew all the politicians up and spit them out...
...Bennett knows, among other things, that a disease called por-phyria, by chemically affecting the nervous system, may have caused George's condition...
...Best of all, Bennett never lets the audience forget that a suffering human being is the center of all the whirligig politicking and scheming...
...But after such knowledge, what insights...
...The film's set designer, Ken Adam, wonderfully abets Hytner by creating a palace world both immense and cramped: the hallways down which bowing ministers retreat seem endless, but the royal pages sleep three in a wardrobe, as if they were just so many toys tossed into a box at the end of the day...
...It's not a change from but an aggravation of his bluff, John-Bullish self...
...Nevertheless, this movie left me...
...Bennett is much concerned with the reality and possible unreality of the personality...
...Bennett begins his questioning brilliantly...
...After his madness abates, he questions Lady Pembroke as to whether he attacked her or not...
...As a dramatist, Bennett insists on attaching a political urgency to George's restoration to power, yet nothing in the way he portrays the king's friends and enemies supports that urgency...
...So the madness of King George is indeed a horrible exaggeration of George's real self-right...
...But a truly stirring, poetic account of physically caused madness is nowadays achievable, perhaps, only by imaginative clinical writers such as Oliver Sacks...
...Adapting his own play, Alan Bennett hasn' t attempted in-depth characterization but instead gives us a panoramic view of how England's politics and court life were affected by George Ill's derangement...
...And the various outbursts by the king and the court reactions to them are expertly modulated: they skirt black comedy without ever dehumanizing a suffering man or his embarrassed attendants...
...They lack Shakespeare's splendid ignorance...
...If Pitt is a cold-fish keeper of balance sheets and the Whig leader is an unctuous schemer, what is our choice...
...He is a bluff, gruff, commonsensical, almost exaggeratedly sane man, the "Farmer George" that his people love...
...Nicholas Hytner, the virtuoso stage director (Miss Saigon, Carousel, and the stage version of King George) whose first film this is, takes charge of his new realm without fuss or timidity...
...And on this level there is enough piteousness- the king's separation from his family, his physical agony-to move the viewer in isolated, short-lived moments...
...But no audience, at least no non-British audience, has an emotional stake in the struggle of Pitt against Fox, Tory against Whig...
...On the political level, the king's madness nearly results in his deposal in favor of his son, which would entail Pitt's replacement as prime minister by the Whig, Fox...
Vol. 122 • March 1995 • No. 5
