Lear By Way of Beckett

...Third Servant: If she [Regan] live long,/ And in the end meet the old course of death,/Women will all turn monsters...

...The vast central well from orchestra to ceiling clangorously muffles every speech and makes the performers sound as if they are trying to disgorge quantities of phlegm...

...The excuse offered by the architect and acoustical engineer— that the house was designed for musicals and ballet and "has the perfect reverberation time for music"—will not cut much ice with the 2,700 people who are nightly paying up to six dollars for a seat...

...But he gets full allegiance from his cast...

...Brook makes it work...

...The subsequent lines, in which the two servants show compassion for Gloucester, are also cut, and the opposition of the First Servant to Cornwall's brutality must now be viewed as a senseless fit of rebellion instead of the gallant flare of goodness Shakespeare seems to have meant by it...

...The story's movement swoops him from grandeur to unhinged vagrancy and back to dignity through an elemental trial on the heath by lire (lightning) and water (the storm...

...But Brook seems to be saying that in these days, when commercial theater strives for the bloated emotional reaction and the hoked-up moment, Shakespeare can be asked to provide a more finely prospected experience, and an audience can be asked to visit his work in a spirit of intellectual alertness...

...Many Shakespearean commentators have drawn attention to Lear's early arrogance, if not vindictiveness, and contrasted it with the moderation of Goneril's and Regan's speeches, especially in the first act...

...He has abolished the moral categories and established a rough parity between the characters...

...The great trap in Lear is to make melodies of the poetry...

...To Brook's revised conception Scofield brings three assets: a face not old but riven by heavy lines...

...Robbing Goneril of her villainy is almost like depriving a beach of its ocean...

...Not many actors of Scofield's stature would undertake a Lear who at his greatest is no more than an intricate mechanism and who dares to utter the line "Ay, every inch a king" with perfectly composed irony...

...Brook, following Kott's thesis, has not reversed the "good" and "evil" people...

...And the Cordelia of Diana Riggs is not a Cinderella but a prig, too vain or too obtuse to grant her father a little consolation...

...But as the play progresses in his version the harsh words the sisters have to speak strain against the daughterly demeanor that Brook has given them...

...The theater decor, with its brassy ceiling (of real gold, karat unspecified), its rhinestone lights and red velvet, may be summarized as Jewel-Box Provincial...

...The central meanings of Brook's production are resumed in two tableaux...

...In this light, Lear's curse on Goneril ("Into her womb convey sterility . . .") seems grotesquely unjustified...

...He makes a further sacrifice: allowing the native hue of his complexion to be sicklied o'er with a gray-green cosmetic that matches the scenery...

...The characters are objects manipulated by an oppressive heaven and confined to an abstract, boxed-in earth which is very like hell and painted pale gray-green, an apt color for damnation...

...When they speak their tributes to him they sound sincere...

...Brook thus forces his vision on the play, and sometimes it refuses to obey him...

...The brother-antagonists represent the two factions of the play and their fight describes the trajectory of the plot...

...the situations enlist him at all points...

...By the same token, Albany is played as an occasionally "milk-livered man" and Kent sometimes is a bully...

...Of the other performances, the one that equals Scofield's in understanding is Irene Worth's...

...This could have been another orthodox Lear, but if it had been, we would have seen in the play what we have seen many times before and will see many times again...

...Brook's staging does take us into many of the unexplored (because overlooked) corners of the text, and is so evidently thorough and thought-out that one can admire his and Kott's vision without entirely sharing it...

...he can suggest power without going to his limit...

...The conventional— one might say, hallowed—reading of the play presupposes a monarch truly more sinned against than sinning who, out of sudden pique, puts his kingdom into the wrong hands...

...And at the end of Act Three, after Gloucester's eyes have been put out, Brook omits altogether the closing remarks of the servants, which would directly contradict his portrayals of Cornwall and Regan: "Second Servant: I'll never care what wickedness I do,/If this man [Cornwall] come to good...

...Nevertheless, this King Lear presages what may prove to be a radically bold approach to Shakespeare's drama...

...Above all, "that stupendous third act," as Bradley called it, is no longer a heartening portrait of Lear as Man thundering back at the skies, but man in lower case, demeaned, spun by the wind, drenched and shivering, the unpitied victim of weather, circumstance, and the gods...

...On the other hand, Irene Worth's Goneril and Pauline Jameson's Regan are anything but the Ugly Sisters...

...instead of slapping blades and leaping about, they press their swords together, with Edmund at first gaining the advantage and at last having to give way...

...To his daughters he appears a boor as he klaxons out his commands or incites his retinue of soldiers to play raucous tricks on Goneril and her servants...

...Holinshed says that "Leir the son of Baldud was admitted ruler over the Britains in the year of the world 3105 [656 B.C.], at what time Joas reigned in Judah," and this date, if correct, would make Lear historically older than Aeschylus's Prometheus and Sophocles's Oedipus, a fact of which Brook may be aware...

...For what he is doing in this production (incidentally, perhaps) is to update Lear and also to antedate Seneca, whose convulsive, morally conceived plays set the pattern for Elizabethan tragedy and melodrama...

...In the second, Edgar's duel with Edmund is not the usual fencing-school ballet but a silent, murderous test of strength...

...they do all they can to mitigate Lear's unwisdom and to placate him...

...Does this effort to accommodate Shakespeare's world to Beckett's come off...

...Scofield doesn't go near this trap...

...John Laurie makes a briskstepping Gloucester who declines slowly into lassitude and finally stasis as he is pulled into the wings, his heels dragging, a thing in place of a personage...

...he is "moved...

...The attraction of this role is its opportunities for ranting and extremes of passion...

...The third act...

...and a conviction that gives his words impact and sense rather than sugary sound...

...A word about the New York State Theater: After opening night Brook himself complained about the acoustics of this $19.3 million structure...

...The balance of the play is thus changed...

...In other words, it may be time to leave the job of moving people to the transit authorities...

...he feels Gloucester's blind helplessness...

...Lear is no longer the unhappy but fundamentally decent old man hounded from one home to another...

...As was evident in A Man for All Seasons, he can play varied effects in a small compass...

...The tempo suffers, much of the color is leached out, and in places the continuity fails...

...This is the modern anti-hero, but it is also the ancient blighted hero of Greek tragedy...

...By no means...

...Brook himself designed the stark, prehistoric sets, an analogue of Stonehenge, into which three brown leather rectangles and two fence-like shapes reluctantly descend...

...The spectator's heart and tear ducts are wrung dry...

...Not only is the spectator shut off from the stage by its bleak look and lighting, which are what one has come to expect in a production of Brecht or Beckett...

...one feels all the time that he has impressive reserves to call on...

...In the first, Gloucester squats eyeless and unmoving in the center of the empty stage like Hamm's truncated parent lifted out of his ashcan in Endgame while the roaring of an invisible battle echoes about him...

...during which Lear's fortunes are at their lowest, then becomes the high point of the tragedy...

...Gloucester, his dim reflection, is as much the "filthy traitor" that Regan names him (for conspiring to encourage the King of France to invade England) as he is a "credulous father" to Edmund...

...I mentioned that the dialogue supports this novel interpretation, and so it does up to a point...

...Peter Brook's direction of the Royal Shakespeare Company (at the New York State Theater in Lincoln Center) takes another tack, which seems to be sheer invention but is actually charted from a line of clues in the text discovered by the Polish critic Jan Kott in an essay that compares King Lear with the "grotesque" recent theater of Ionesco and, even more closely, Beckett...

...he is also disaffiliated by the acting...

...a booming voice tinged here with a rustic Sussex accent, but free of that West End-Old Vic barrel organ grumble...

...He undergoes Lear's fall and recovery...

...But Miss Worth dares to indulge in some grandiose, at times downright stagey, gestures that brighten the production's resolutely unhysterical tone...

...Paul Scofield's Lear is a severe presence for whom it is not reasonable to find sympathy...