This is now the third King Lear I’ve reviewed, and like my last Macbeth review, a lot of my judgment of it is based on comparison with the previous two. Most of my thoughts on it don’t exist in a vacuum, but in comparison between this production and the other two.
Most of this TV-movie Lear was good, but very little of it was brilliant. What was most striking was the real lack of imagination, both in direction and performance. It all worked, but I didn’t find anything in it to be very exciting or innovative. I suppose doing the straightest production you can isn’t necessarily an issue, but I think it’s got to be really engaging in other ways. Great acting is certainly a must (not that it isn’t also in more innovative productions). The acting here wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t good enough to make such a conventional production exciting. In terms of energy, design and acting, I prefer Nunn’s King Lear, but that doesn’t mean that this was bad: it just wasn’t as good.
The sets and costumes were both designed to look like Iron Age Britain which director Michael Elliot described as “ a primeval time, a world of mists and fogs.” There certainly weren’t any mists or fogs, but I suppose the costumes looked a little Iron Age. However, they didn’t manage to achieve a high enough level of realism: as with the Davenall King Lear it looked costumey and fake. The extreme fakeness of the world the movie was set in made it hard to get totally wrapped up in it because you kept on being jerked back to reality by cheap-looking costumes and unrealistic sets. In my opinion, if you don’t have the budget to make a setting like this look gorgeous, I’d rather see it done in t-shirts and jeans than in costumey robes and plastic crowns with the cheap Renaissance Faire vibe. Even looking beyond the low-quality sets and costumes, I didn’t get very much of a “primeval” vibe from the setting. It looked sort of non-descriptively old, and the Stonehenge replica was more silly than primeval. I love the idea of creating a Lear set in “ a primeval time, a world of mists and fogs,” but that’s just not what we got here.
In addition to cheap-looking costuming, there were also a couple of other technical issues. Primarily, there were a lot of sudden and jolting cuts, or times when I felt like the camera was paying attention to a character that it should have left alone for that scene. A couple of times, one character talked while the camera focused on the expressionless face of another. The second technical issue was the soundtrack. Most of the movie had no music, but it would occasionally include short periods of music at odd moments. Most of the time, it was distractingly bad, and I would rather it had been omitted altogether.
Laurence Olivier was the clear center of this production, and I got the sense that the movie was made in no small part because he was nearing the end of his career and he needed to do a Lear. He’d performed the part once before in 1946, when he was thirty-nine. Apparently it wasn’t much good, and I’d imagine that having a Lear in the prime of his life certainly would have been a problem. There was no issue with that here, as Olivier was seventy-five and very ill with cancer. He lived six years beyond this production, but he was clearly quite old when it was made, and a lot of his age in this was not acting. His age definitely contributed to the image of Lear as the aging, benevolent, white-haired patriarch he can be.
However, the benevolent patriarch portrayal really only became dominant in the last part of the film. For most of the first half, he seemed like an overgrown petulant child, insisting on throwing a fit because things aren’t going exactly his way. There was a certain whine in his voice during the first scene that called to mind a childish temper-tantrum. The movie also showed how unreasonable it was for him to expect his daughters to host him and his one hundred knights. When he arrived they stormed in and wrestled, drank, stuffed their faces and ran about making a proper mess of things. His horrified reaction to being told to dismiss them made you more likely than ever to dislike him because expecting a relative to put up with that seemed quite ridiculous.
Not only was this Lear remarkably immature, he was vain and demanding. During Goneril’s speech about her love for him, she started merely kneeling, and he cut her off after a few words, motioning for her to prostrate herself and kiss the ground before him. He sat on a tall throne at the center of “Stonehenge” with everyone else standing in a respectful semicircle far away from him. When he arrived in Goneril’s palace, he was riding a horse that was being led by a servant, while everyone else was on foot.
This literal and hierarchical distance from everyone else made him a hard-to-like character at first, mainly because there was nothing about this vainglorious man-child to like. That’s not necessarily a problem, and based on his behavior in the beginning of the play, it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that Lear shouldn’t be likeable. It’s my personal feeling that Lear should be loveable but not likeable, but I don’t think an unappealing Lear is a problem, just not to my personal taste. However, one needs to feel that he is deserving of dignity, and that some wrong is being done when he is brought down so low. Though I certainly pitied him, I never got the sense that this was a dignified man to begin with, mainly due to his childish behavior and borderline-silly demand for reverence. You can portray Lear as throwing a tantrum in the first scene, and you can make him wildly unlikeable, but you have to find a dignity for him somewhere in that, and I didn’t get it from Olivier’s performance.
However, as it went on, Lear developed from the immature child he was in the beginning to the “unaccomodated man” of nature, innocent, tender and without vanity. One of the major ways Elliot did this was with a silent scene in which he washes his clothes in a river, eats some meat from a rabbit raw and seems very much like an idealized, simple rustic. In the beginning he comes in with furs, robes and jewelry, as well as a massive crown, and over the course of the movie he sheds all his outer trappings to become the idealized “man of nature”. In a way he became “purified” after being taken in by Cordelia, and he wakes dressed in all white, stretched out on a bed looking almost saintly or Christ-like. He became the benevolent father-figure, and for a moment it almost felt like everything was going to be okay. Unlike the Nunn Lear where this scene was staged on a battle field with disaster hanging in the air, Elliot chose a domestic setting for this scene, making it feel much more like a brief respite from the never ending string of horror. There was some feeling of normalcy to it, which made what happened afterwards all the more heartbreaking.
Though a lot of his lines were cut, John Hurt’s Fool was decent, and particularly shone in his relationship to Lear. It was mainly a matter of contrasts between Lear’s treatment of him and Lear’s treatment of everyone else: though there wasn’t much tenderness in their relationship, he was the only person Lear ever smiled at or allowed any informality from. He was one of the few who reached out to help Lear in any way more than a purely practical one. His scene with Lear after they are driven out of Goneril’s house was especially good as he tried in vain to make his beloved master laugh, and Lear tried just as hard in return to bring himself to laugh at the jokes. The contrast between Lear’s treatment of him and Lear’s treatment of everyone else made Lear’s relationship with him seem like something very special and interesting, even though Hurt gave a fairly standard and slightly too foolish portrayal of the Fool.
While Dorothy Tutin and Anna Calder-Marshall were both mediocre as Goneril and Cordelia, Diana Rigg really stood out as Regan. She had a strength of personality that was sorely lacking in the other two, and her chemistry with Robert Lindsay’s Edmund was very real. Unlike in the Nunn production where Regan was played as an idiot, this Regan was very clever and completely cold. After putting out Gloucester’s eyes, Cornwall fell to the ground wounded, crying out for her help, and she looked on mercilessly. As he died before her eyes, she smiled faintly. She was not a woman to be messed with, and unlike Dorothy Tutin’s Goneril, Diana Rigg had enough presence on screen to be frightening.
In contrast to Regan’s sadism, Jeremy Kemp’s Cornwall wasn’t sadistic or evil, just a dumb bully. Geoffrey Bateman as Oswald gave off a similar vibe, with his constant grinning as he followed Goneril’s orders. However, as with a lot of the cast here, I didn’t get a strong sense of who they were right away. In Nunn’s King Lear each actor had an energy and force of personality that made even minor characters like Oswald stand out, but here, even more major characters like Goneril just blended into the background.
Robert Lindsay made a good Edmund, clever and bitter in private, and entirely sweet when talking to other people. Something about his big eyes and gentle demeanor made it almost impossible to think badly of him, until he transformed into a bitter, hateful man when he was alone. Unlike Phillip Winchester’s Edmund in the Nunn Lear, he came off as sweet instead of charming in his interactions with other characters, and I thought the sweetness worked well. However, I didn’t think he had quite the depth of nihilistic power that Edmund needs to have; he never seemed like anything else than a bitter man lashing out. Edmund should be extraordinarily powerful, both as a character within the play and as a theatrical representation, and I didn’t get that sense of power from him in this production.
David Threlfall’s Edgar was acceptable, but like in the other two Lears I’ve reviewed, his second and third soliloquies were cut or no discernable reason. I said it before, but I think these soliloquies very important to understanding his character and his evolving understanding of the nature of suffering. Without them, the scene where he meets his blind father doesn’t have the proper set-up, and his sanity is called into question when the soliloquies would reveal that he’s perfectly sane. The second soliloquy is easier to justify cutting because it was excluded from the Folio Lear, but they weren’t strictly following the Folio text for this movie. The third soliloquy is included in both the Folio and the Quarto versions of Lear, and I think is especially important in framing his later interactions wit his father. Because of that soliloquy, Edgar’s special gift of empathy comes through much more clearly, because the greatest suffering that he endures is seeing his father suffer. Edgar is so central a character, and I think cutting his chances to express himself alone is a big mistake.
However, with what he was given to work with, Threlfall did a decent job, especially, I thought, in the scene where he tricks his father into believing he is jumping off a cliff. That scene worked especially well because of the way it was framed: until the “jump” it was shot all in up-close views of their faces, so it wasn’t until the “jump” that the camera zoomed out and it became clear what Edgar was doing. Even though I knew what was going to happen, the added suspense of not seeing what was in front of them made that scene really stand out.
No comments:
Post a Comment