I think I need to preface my review of this by stating that this was the first version of King Lear I had ever seen, and that before seeing it, while I had read the play, I did not have a particularly strong interest in it. I had read it a long while previously, dismissed it as gruesome and depressing, and put it aside. Since seeing this movie several weeks ago, I have not left the house without a copy of King Lear in my bag, and I’ve re-read it a nauseating number of times.
How much this has to do with the quality of the production can be questioned. Certainly a large part of it is just the inherent power in the play, which I had somehow missed previously. But I think it’s safe to say that watching this was an emotionally harrowing experience. After finishing it, I think I sat in the chair I had watched it in for about another hour, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. There just really wasn’t any other way to respond. After finally coming back to reality enough to move, I got my copy of Lear and read the entire thing again before falling asleep. I re-watched it again the next day, and again the day after that.
Suffice to say, I liked this production quite a lot, though a portion of that may be due to the fact that it was this one that introduced me, finally, to the force of nature that is King Lear. My review is likely to be coloured by my natural attachment to the movie that provided such a revelation to me. However, there’s certainly a lot here to love, so I’ll start with the good and get to the criticisms later.
The costuming looked nineteenth century, but the movie as a whole didn’t appear to be set in any particular time at all. The fairly sparse sets, nineteenth century costumes and pagan religion combined to make a story set not quite in our world, and freed it from being judged on the basis of any historical context. I viewed that as an extremely good thing, since, if there’s any play that utterly transcends historical context, it’s Lear. The one misstep with the costumes was the way they chose to outfit Regan, Goneril and Cordelia. In the first scene Cordelia is wearing a virginal white gown, while the other two come in looking a little bit like Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. It felt too obvious, blunt and unnecessary. We all know Goneril and Regan aren’t particularly nice people; there’s no need to dress them up as witches.
Ian McKellen is a brilliant actor; I just love everything he’s done, and this is no exception. Lear is a character that the audience must love, and yet also a character who spends much of the play behaving in a way that makes him difficult to love. Ian McKellen makes it impossible not to love him, and therefore also impossible not to be struck to the very soul at his fall. In the beginning, he’s very much devoted to his rituals of state; the opening scene is entirely staged, to the point that he reads his speech off a card, and it doesn’t quite appear to have been written by him. He reads the “crawl towards death” line with surprise and chuckles a little afterwards. His anger at Cordelia seems to be almost as much at her refusal to follow the rules of the ceremony as at her refusal to profess her love. Cordelia hates the ceremony and her sisters’ willingness to comply with the public act her father insists on putting on, and Lear can’t bear to see his plan messed with. His physical and mental deterioration is incredibly real, despite the fact that McKellen is not in the least bit feeble of mind or body. Despite all the indignities he suffers, one never loses the feeling that this is a king, worthy of both respect and dignity. He seemed to hit each essential note perfectly: his rage at his daughters and at nature, his fading connection to reality, and at last, his dawning ability to “know himself” and recognize his flaws. His death is painful, but more so are the scenes where he meets Gloucester and Cordelia again, which are both almost too painful to watch and yet impossible to look away from.
Philip Winchester deserves special mention early on for his performance as Edmund. I’ve seen some people comment that his Edmund is too simplistically evil, but I don’t think that at all. Firstly, Edmund, as a character, is pretty much evil. What’s more is that he is aware of this, and even takes pride in the fact that he’s clever enough and ruthless enough to do what he does. His Edmund relished that fact, and yet was also, deeply, impossibly charming. It was almost impossible not to be taken with him, at the same time as you are repulsed. He was brilliantly clever, handsome and totally charming. His self-awareness of his own evil was constantly there, and his death scene worked because that awareness that he expresses didn’t seem a sudden occurrence, but the tipping of a scale that had been building for a while.
Francis Barber and Monica Dolan made a great pair as Goneril and Regan. They were entirely different characters, with Goneril the intelligent one, always a little bit disgusted by her stupider sister, and Regan with a glass of wine in her hand, trying desperately to keep up with Goneril’s machinations. Regan was not evil so much as too stupid to really empathize or understand. Goneril was evil straight through, but avoided caricature with a couple touching moments where the fact that she was human showed through. Her nearly breaking down after Lear first cursed her out and stormed away showed her capable of love and feeling, as did her genuine devotion to Edmund in the wake of his apathy and her (clearly forced) marriage to Albany.
I wasn’t quite sure about Romola Garai’s Cordelia in the beginning. The first time I saw it, her reactions to things in the first scene seemed very strange. Seeing it again though, what she was getting at becomes more clear. As a viewer, we know what is going on better than she does at in the first scene. We know what will happen, and she has no idea. When she first decides to say “Nothing, my lord,” she doesn’t expect much to come of it: it’s just a slightly childish refusal to play the same game her sisters are. As the disaster unfolds she’s caught off guard, unwilling to backtrack and without a clue where she is headed. When he first starts raging, she gives a disbelieving smile, only to realize a few lines later how dreadfully serious this has become. However, it wasn’t until later that her performance really shined. In the scene where she met her father again she was spectacular. She seemed to touch every note perfectly: her horror at seeing her father this degraded, her love, her forgiveness, her fury at her sisters. I’m going to be perfectly honest at say that at her “No cause, no cause,” line, I burst into tears each time I saw this.
William Gaunt as Gloucester I thought was good throughout, but not especially remarkable either. His most remarkable feat was that the scene where he “jumps” off the cliff was not in the least bit funny, whereas in the hands of a lesser actor, that could have caused at least a small giggle. William Gaunt’s jump didn’t have the slightest trace of humor in it. However, most of his performance got mostly swept under the rug by the other more remarkable ones happening around him. Jonathan Hyde’s Kent also was less interesting than many of the rest. I never quite felt like I indentified with him enough for his story to be as poignant as it should have been. He had an irritating tendency to move his eyebrows constantly when he spoke, and I wasn’t quite sure that that was actually conveying anything of importance. However, his one standout scene was his attack on Oswald and Cornwall, one of the few truly funny moments in the play. He was hilarious, outrageous and thoroughly righteous.
John Heffernan made the most of his relatively small part as Oswald; he was deliciously slimy, but never a caricature. Guy Williams also put in a great performance as the Duke of Cornwall. From the moment the camera first showed his face, something menacingly creepy came through. Unlike Edmund, he’s both sadistic and stupid, and there was definitely nothing charming about him. Julian Harries was a decent Albany, though there’s not much for Albany to do except stand around looking hapless and confused. He was just a decent, ordinary fellow, as much out of his league with Goneril as he was with Gloucester and Lear.
Sylvester McCoy made a good Fool, though I would have enjoyed him being even more strange and uncanny than he was. The Fool is just such a bizarre character, not even quite real at times, and I think even more could be made of that. McCoy’s ability to change tone in an instant added quite a lot to his performance, especially his “I would rather be any kind of thing than a fool” line. His fool was never quite funny, which I think is exactly how he’s supposed to be. He’s just speaking far too much sense to be laughable. However, I didn’t appreciate the scene in which the Fool was hanged. Some might view it as a problem with the play that the Fool vanishes with no explanation or further mention. I however, lack the hubris to announce that Shakespeare made a mistake, and I feel confident that there must have been a very good reason why Shakespeare made his decision to have the Fool vanish at the end of act three. Because of my confidence in the soundness of Shakespeare’s omission, Nunn’s decision to give the fool a dreamt up ending feels wrong to me, however well it was done. McCoy’s delivery of his eerie, uncanny prophecy was decent, but that didn’t fix a scene whose entire existence I felt to be a mistake.
Most readers may have noticed that I have not yet discussed Edgar in any detail, because this is where I get into my discussion of how the text was edited, and also where things turn downhill. In general, I hate it when text is cut in any way. With Shakespeare I think any cuts are a loss for the play as a whole, so while I understand the need to keep performances to an acceptable length, cutting needs to be done with the utmost care. Unfortunately, a lot was cut from this. No scenes were entirely gone, but almost every scene had huge chunks of dialogue razed, speeches shortened and important statements left unsaid. The two characters that suffered the most here were Edmund and Edgar, especially the later.
Edmund’s character had two important cuts, one of a single line at the end of his second soliloquy and the other his entire last soliloquy in 5.2, starting “To both these sisters I have sworn my love.” Despite the fact that the latter is a whole speech and the first a single line, I think the latter was a more acceptable cut. It spells out clearly his designs against Albany and his antipathy towards both sisters. However, both of those things were clear without the speech being done, so, while I would have enjoyed seeing it, the loss of it didn’t feel like a disaster. The first line of his that was cut seemed much more important to me. At the end of his second soliloquy where he denounces astrology as “the excellent foppery of the world,” he states “I should be that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.” This seems like such an important statement to me, because it outlines several important aspects of his character. Not only does he utterly reject mysticism and astrology, he insists, quite clearly that they have absolutely no effect on him. He takes what he views as his nature to be both an inherent part of himself, as well as entirely of his own making. He’s also aware of what he is, he knows he is a nasty person, and not only does he not apologize for this, he owns it.
Neither of those large cuts could even compete with the butchering they did to Edgar’s role. Edgar has three soliloquies, and only one of them remained in the play. His other two, where he contemplates the nature of suffering (3.6 and 4.1) were entirely cut. Not only were those two cut, but almost all of his asides in both those scenes were gone as well. Since Edgar is arguably the second most important character after Lear, excising huge sections of his character would seem like a bad idea, especially since, at the end, Edgar is the one point of identification for the audience left alive. Both those soliloquies also contain important thematic content as well as essential character development. The one at the beginning of 4.3 seems to be especially important for understanding that scene and his character. In it he embraces his own suffering with an almost wild abandon, feeling confident that he is now at the worst and lowest a man possibly can be, and is therefore incapable of losing anything again. As soon as he says this though, his father, blinded, is lead on stage and his illusion of having nowhere lower to go is shattered. In an (also eliminated) aside he repudiates the soliloquy from just moments before: “O gods, who is’t can say “I am the worst?” I am worse than e’ere I was.” Perhaps more materially than the loss of character and thematic developments, it also ends up portraying Edgar as essentially a complete lunatic for a large portion of the middle of the play. Since we have no soliloquies or asides with which to understand his sanity, all we see is his Tom O’Bedlam act that he puts on, and the natural assumption is therefore that he actually has gone totally out of his mind. However, when reading the full text, it’s quite obvious that while definitely masochistic and self-hating, Edgar is not insane in the slightest. His soliloquies demonstrate that clearly, but, if that were not enough, he also has numerous asides about how he’s struggling to maintain his act because his grief at the states of Lear and Gloucester threatens to overwhelm him. Cutting every line that establishes his sanity is either careless or dishonest to the text, and it significantly weakened the movie for me.
However, despite the little he was given to work with, Ben Meyjes did a decent job, giving what hints he could that Edgar was sane, especially in his scene where he encounters his blinded father. He starts off the play meek and slightly ineffectual but grows through his (largely self-inflicted) suffering to become his father’s avenging angel by the end. Meyjes did a decent job with what he was given, and was especially good at communicating through facial expression and posture, better in fact, than he was at conveying emotion through words. The depth of his empathy came across impressively well, given that most of his lines expressing it were gone. He willingly chooses and embraces his own suffering, but is nearly overcome by seeing his father’s pain. His two fights at the end also worked for me, as he managed to simultaneously convey physical weakness and internal strength. He was not a very good swordsman, and he was physically destroyed, but his acquired internal strength let him win. The right amount of emphasis seemed to be placed on the fights too; too much emphasis on the dramatic swordfight (Branagh’s Hamlet) or too little (McKellen’s Macbeth) both detract from the play, but here the right level of importance was placed on the fight.
The end, for me, hit the perfect note. King Lear seems to end just when a single minute more would be too painful to endure. Edgar’s survival, broken as he is, offers no consolation. And yet, I don’t think the proper emotion to feel at the end is depression, but something else, a more complex feeling that there isn’t quite a word for. It’s somewhere in between transcendence and a feeling of being purged clean by being rubbed so raw. Whatever the word is, I think that’s the proper feeling to be invoked at the end of most of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and it’s precisely how I felt after seeing this. Despite the flaws, it delivers grandly in the end.
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