So, since I just posted a review of King Lear, I decided following it up with a second would be a good idea, so I could compare the two with the first fresh in mind. I decided to watch a version from 1974, directed by Tony Davenall. I chose this version because it was the other one I happened to have on DVD around my house (never say I’m not methodical!).
This was a made for TV movie, on a very low budget, and it shows through. Had they chosen to stretch their funds less, it could have looked better, but instead they invested in very showy, fancy looking costumes, that, above all else, looked “costumey”. None of it looked like actual clothes worn by real people, but more like Halloween costume dresses and armor. The props also looked incredibly fake, most notably and hilariously, the swords. I can’t even count the number of times a character grabbed a sword by the blade, with seemingly no damage at all to their hands. The artificiality of the swords wasn’t helped by the most terrible swordfight choreography I’ve ever seen. I could spend a paragraph describing just how bewilderingly bad it was, but I think I’ll just say that I laughed out loud straight through Edmund and Edgar’s fight. I don’t generally care about the budget of a production; I almost always feel that with good actors, an empty stage is just as convincing as a lavish set. However, the fakeness of the costumes and props here meant the actors would have to be good enough to compensate for it and make the audience believe in the reality of what was going on.
Unfortunately, they were not up to the task. I was left feeling strangely apathetic about the whole movie. Though there was certainly some power in it (it is still King Lear, after all), I felt vaguely disconnected from everything. Certainly the acting was much patchier than in the 2009 Trevor Nunn Lear, but that alone couldn’t account for my apathy. Even in the scenes where the actors were delivering at their best, something felt off, and it took me a while to figure out what it was. It hit me during 3.2, when Lear and the Fool are out in the storm alone. Patrick Magee puts in some decent raging, and the Fool* puts in some pitiful groveling and yet the scene feels entirely disconnected and strange.
Suddenly, I realized why. The actors each say their lines, and sometimes they say them well, but that’s all they’re doing: saying their lines. When it is not their turn to speak, they are waiting until it is, not listening or reacting, and when they do speak, they are just saying the next block of words set down for them, not really reacting to what has just been said by the other actor. This strange disconnectedness between the characters seems to be nearly universal; they all, even the best of them, do this. They might as well each have been doing solo performances with no knowledge of what the others around them were doing. This basically means that there were essentially no meaningful relationships that came across on screen. There didn’t seem to be any relationships at all, just a lot of people talking at and around each other. In a play so intensely focused on interpersonal relationships, it’s really an unforgiveable flaw.
Many of the most touching moments in King Lear can come off as silly if not done well, something I had not realized the extent of before seeing this movie. Edgar’s fake madness, Lear’s real madness, Gloucester’s “jump”, the interactions between the Fool and Lear, every fight scene and every death can come across as laughable if not done well. Here, the overall effect was silliness. The characters weren’t given enough dignity or reality for us to feel anything for them them, because none of them seemed to really feel anything for each other. It was impossible to empathize with the talking heads, so the scenes that should have been touching were instead, silly. Edgar made faces, jumped around and cackled, but instead of feeling that he was utterly pitiful and dejected, he was just half embarrassing and half amusing. Lear raged and ranted, and yet, I could never escape the feeling that he was just a doddering old fool talking nonsense. Gloucester’s “jump” was laughable, not only because Gloucester was entirely calm and conscious throughout the scene, but also because Edgar stood by watching with a wry, amused look on his face. The Fool lost all his lines that make him an interesting character or a foil to Lear. Perhaps they were trying to have him there as comic relief, or perhaps they just hadn’t thought out what the point of him would be if he didn’t have anything meaningful to say. Either way, the interactions, robbed of their significance, felt deeply pointless. The deaths were also poorly played. Dying is very hard to do on screen convincingly. I’ve seen some deaths done very well, but most of the time, I just don’t buy it. Every death here was pretty ridiculous, especially because they didn’t seem to have enough money to invest in fake blood so that Oswald and Edmund would have wounds to die of. The silliness was perpetuated by the fact that most scenes had a large number of incredibly bored looking guards who stood stock still, not reacting and staring into space no matter what unfolded in front of them. The entire royal court was basically butchered before their eyes and not a single guard even raised his head or changed his expression from one of utter boredom. Think last period of the day math class kind of boredom.
Part of the problem seemed to be that the emotional level was never high enough. If emotions can be ranked from one to ten, ten being the most emotionally charged and one being the least, most of the characters except for Edmund spend most of the time between a six and ten, and Lear himself probably averages around a nine. It’s a play where emotions are almost constantly running high. Now, that doesn’t mean that theatrics are necessary. Understatement can be very effective, provided the emotions are still there, clearly, underneath the surface. Much of this version however, felt totally lifeless. I’ll use the first scene as an example. If you were to play the first scene on mute, (which I did, to test this theory) you would see a normal court scene: the King talks to some people, some people stand up and talk to him, a few come and a few go. Normal, typical day. Again, you’ve got the bored-looking courtiers and guards standing by, but even the main characters didn’t seem to be particularly emotional or surprised about all this. Lear came across as slightly peeved, Kent could have been reading a phonebook for all the outrage he expressed and Cordelia acted like nothing at all had happened.
In fact, Wendy Allnutt, playing Cordelia, showed a remarkable skill at never changing facial expression for the entire play. I noticed her remarkable neutrality in the first scene and looked for it in all her subsequent ones, and indeed, her face never changed, not once. Most of the other characters were not quite so extreme in their non-expression, but in general, scenes packed with emotional charge were played as boring, every day events. In fact, few of the characters seemed to be feeling much at any point in the production. Edgar, upon seeing his father blinded said he was “worse than e’ere I was,” and then acted like he was going for a nice walk through the woods with his Dad on a pleasant day. He actually grinned momentarily when telling Gloucester to jump off the “cliff”, as if this was all a little bit of a joke to him. Gloucester, after having his eyes put out, recited his lines as though he, at most, had a mild stomach ache: he didn’t appear to be in any pain in the slightest. Patrick Magee was entirely expressionless until 3.2 when he raged against the storm, but even then, his rage, on a scale of one to ten, might have hit a six, when it should have hit an eleven. However, it felt like an incredible outburst of emotion since it was the first time we saw any emotions from him in the entire play up to that point. One of the few truly touching moments came when Beth Harris, as Goneril, broke down crying after Edmund was wounded, because even if she was a horrible scheming bitch, it was at least a genuine emotion.
Patrick Mower as Edmund deserves some special mention, because he was far and above the best of them. He was scheming, yet rational, a womanizer, quite clever and not wincingly bad even once. However, his accomplishment loses some of its luster when I think of it in the context of Trevor Nunn’s 2009 King Lear: he would have easily been the weakest member of the cast in that production, by a long shot. Compared to Philip Winchester’s Edmund, he was less everything: less charming, less clever, less wicked and less likeable. However, here, he was a welcome diversion from the rest of the cast, despite not having very much to say due to the editing of the text.
I know I waxed furious at the cuts to the play in my last review, but that was nothing in comparison to this. Edmund’s speeches were mostly gone, as were Edgar’s. Edgar’s aside explaining what he’s doing when he tricks Gloucester about the cliff is gone, so I’m certain that if I didn’t already know what was happening, I would have been entirely confused. Gloucester’s line about living his life out until the natural end is gone as well, so Edgar’s trick doesn’t seem to accomplish much of anything. Most appallingly, Edgar’s final speech about his father’s death was missing. Gloucester’s disappearance was entirely unexplained, and if he did indeed die, Edgar appeared little bothered by it. The Fool’s part was cut to the point that I think he would have been better left out entirely. He had pretty much nothing to say, and most of the lines left for him were ones of little significance. Gone is his line about not wanting to be a fool, his song where he calls the King a fool, and most of the rest of his lines. The battle, and references to it, seemed strangely missing. It took me a minute to realize that the battle had already happened during the scene where Lear and Cordelia are sent off to prison. How they got captured is anybody’s guess. I can’t discuss every line that was missing, but it was almost an hour shorter even than Nunn’s heavily cut version.
The one thing to be said for this is that clear diction is used throughout. If you find yourself struggling to understand the words being said in Shakespeare, perhaps that’s a good thing. However, I think this version was actually far, far harder to understand than the much less clearly spoken Trevor Nunn Lear. Why? When the emotions and the cause of the emotions are made clear, actions make sense. Even if you miss a line or two, the purpose comes through much more clearly. Robbed of the emotions to flesh out the characters, actions and reactions seemed much more arbitrary and strange, even though each word they said was easier to decipher.
Overall, unless you’re trying to see every King Lear ever made, or focused on clear diction above all else, don't bother seeing this. There’s not much here that hasn’t been done better by someone else.
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