King Lear (31 page)

Why did your Lear react so extremely to Cordelia’s refusal to play the game of quantifying her love in words (or perhaps of quantifying her love all too literally—if I marry, my father will have 50 percent of my love and my husband the other 50 percent)?

Noble:
In a way you have to go back a step from that to ask yourself why Lear loves Cordelia so much more than the other two girls. There are dozens of reasons why, and I think most families could find their own reason why one child is, or appears to be, more beloved than the other. If the character in question is an obsessive like Lear then it starts getting potentially dangerous. His little girl has grown up and defies him, and he can’t deal with that at all. He can’t deal with retiring, he can’t deal with getting old, he can’t deal with not being in control anymore. And as a consequence of all these things poor Cordelia gets it in the neck. And he regrets it almost immediately. Within a day he regrets it—probably within hours.

Warner:
My Lear was a spoilt Lear, a vain Lear—a man who wants to hear what he wants to hear. His foolish gung-ho confidence is to wrap and disguise his need—a desire for a public show of affection—in a party game. He makes light of something that is weighty and important to him so that nobody suspects his underlying vulnerability. He demands that his daughters play out in public something that is private, and he claims this right because the prizes are high and marvelous. However, he knows who will take which prize because the “game” is rigged—the parcels of land are already named, signed, and sealed by king and court. The whole extravagant business is a
contrivance to feed his vanity, to continue to make him feel that he holds the center even in old age. We are witnessing a grotesque public massage of ego. Lear is a man used to getting what he wants, but he gets badly burnt. He discovers that love is not a commodity, that it must be given freely. It may be that he has lost sight of what love is a long time before the play begins. He’s getting the answer he wants in two cases from the very daughters he did not treat well—if their behavior later in the piece is anything to go by—and seems to barely know the character of his favorite—Cordelia—whose reaction is a huge surprise to him. There is a lot we do not know about this mysterious man, but his short-sightedness is placed on the table at the very opening of the play. Here is a man who will need to travel far to begin to gain the gift of personal insight. His friend Gloucester will literally lose his sight: blind men both.

6.
Ian McKellen as Lear in Trevor Nunn’s 2007 production, in the opening scene with quasi-military “Ruritanian” regalia.

And why didn’t your Cordelia, or why couldn’t she, put her love into words?

Noble:
That’s a much more difficult question to answer. It’s a young person’s thing, whereby the spoken truth is more important than making your mum and dad happy. It’s the moment of leaving home. The domestic psychological detail is very precise in the play. In Lear’s household, Cordelia is at the point of leaving home to go and get married. That’s a huge moment in every family, although it’s very often not recognized. Some daughters never leave home. They are still at home, in the thrall of their parents, when they’re seventy. Cordelia leaves home and Lear can’t deal with that. But she knows she has to do it, especially with a father like him.

Warner:
Cordelia does not want to play this extravagant and obscene party game. She is young, she is shy, and she is about to be married, perhaps even the public nature of this serious business of land division is difficult for her. Anyhow, extravagant party game or not, it is the wrong moment for her to speak of her love to her father, and she certainly does not want to talk about such matters in public. When her sisters speak she is appalled by their preparedness to speak on cue, and especially so since she knows they are being dishonest. Cordelia wants to hold to her own truth. Horrified by what is happening
around her, she wants to stop the game, and that is just what she does. It goes horribly wrong because she won’t play, and she advertently or inadvertently humiliates her father in public. She is young and she believes with stern clarity in the virtues of honesty, truth, and love. She is earnest—some might say overearnest in this context, and she causes an atomic explosion.

7.
The opening scene in Deborah Warner’s 1990 production: a party game goes horribly wrong, with Brian Cox as Lear in wheelchair and paper crown.

Lear is both a king and a father. That often seems to be a choice that directors and actors have to make—are you going to give the primary emphasis to Lear’s journey as a king giving up his crown, or is the primary emphasis going to be on the family relationships? Or do you actually think that the essence of the play is that the two are inextricably intertwined?

Noble:
Without question they are entwined. I didn’t find that a choice. It isn’t a choice that I recognize.

Warner:
The father relationship is the most interesting, he is a father who happens to be a king; but since all fathers are kings then, yes, all is intertwined. There is a lot we don’t know about him, about his
reign—but we know that he owns the land of his country and chooses to divide that up in such a way that will benefit his retirement most comfortably. He is a king/father heading toward retirement, a dangerous time in all families and in all monarchies.

Nunn:
You won’t be surprised to hear that your “third way” alternative is the one this production goes for. Shakespeare is frighteningly brilliant at doing “family breakup.” He does it superbly—in
Hamlet
, for example. I would say he does it equally shockingly in
The Merchant of Venice
, and in
Macbeth
we watch a marriage coming apart at the seams. There are small insights in
King Lear
into how the king’s family has been pushed apart by events and attitudes. Lear is eighty years old. He has three daughters, and there is no Mrs. Lear. The older daughters are married to powerful men and live in their own palaces. The youngest daughter is only just of marriageable age. Hidden behind the play, is there a story that he was a king who had two wives?—the first wife producing two daughters, Goneril and Regan, and then after her death (as we can frequently see in modern complex family histories) there is the child of a second marriage, the late child (as far as that father is concerned) who then dominates the father’s affections. There’s sufficient evidence in the play to suggest that jealousies and rifts within the family derive from such a backstory.

But I don’t think exploration of a family feud is where Shakespeare wants matters to stop. It’s not where his focus is. Routinely at the start of rehearsals, I say we have to first uncover the
theme
of a Shakespeare play. If you’re a director, you must X-ray the play to find out what its bone structure is and where its vital organs are. A production shouldn’t work from the outside, it must proceed from a sense of what the
internal
structure is, and thereby discover how everything contained in the play is meaningful because it is contiguous to that thematic structure.

In the case of
Lear
, it being one of the greatest plays of Shakespeare’s maturity, the investigation is not going to be easy and the wellspring is not going to lie very close to the surface. Those who have written about
Lear
as Shakespeare’s study of Nature are, to my thinking, somewhere near the mark, in the sense that Shakespeare is
certainly inquiring into
human
nature in
Lear
, and he often uses the term “nature” to encompass human behavior and its contradictions. But let’s take that definition of a theme just a little bit further. I would say Shakespeare is wanting to look at the human being, both sublime and ridiculous; I think he is asking, “What is the human condition?” Why do humans say to themselves they are close to being angels, aspiring toward those qualities that are spiritual and godlike? And yet, why are they, in much of their action, so close to behaving like animals? Why, as it were anthropologically, do they have animal instincts that the species appears not to be able to get rid of?

I think it’s no surprise that in this play Shakespeare doesn’t define exactly who the god or gods are. There’s a shadowy Apollo or Jupiter, and the sun is sacred, but the largely anonymous gods are referred to, as a sort of necessity for human beings to believe in, so that somehow humans can feel their actions are predestined, or governed by forces above and beyond themselves. Everything is under the control or the will of the gods.

But then, close to the center of the play, there’s a young man who says: “Thou, nature, art my goddess: to thy law / My services are bound”—a young man who seems to be saying, “I don’t believe in the gods above, it’s human nature that I am influenced by.” At the end of that first soliloquy, Edmund says, I sense almost in mockery: “Now gods, stand up for bastards.” Well, he implies, you “gods” have supposedly stood up for everybody else, it’s high time you let bastards have a go. It’s an extremely dangerous bit of comedic dramaturgy, but atheistical Edmund, creating mayhem in his world, is placed in sharp contrast to the majority who genuinely beg the gods to intervene, at times almost obsessively. And I think Shakespeare makes it clear that “the gods” don’t. Repeatedly they are deaf or callous or nonexistent. They do nothing, even when their intervention would be an affirmation of “the good” in opposition to what is evil; they don’t utter, they don’t move a muscle. Are the heavens empty?

An actor who has played Lear has said that the real difficulty in playing the part is deciding how much to let rip how soon—if you give too much to the anger in the first half you’re too exhausted for the madness in the second half, but if you have too much control
to begin with, the transition into madness can seem too sudden and extreme to be convincing. Do you recognize that difficulty? And as a director, what can you do to help your Lear through it?

Noble:
I think that’s very true. Most Lears I’ve talked to find the second half much easier than the first half, because the first half requires such a level of energy and a very skillful control of your resources. The truth is, it’s almost unplayable—the pain is so great, the vocal demands so much. I’ve seen people cop out of it and say I’m going to do it quite quietly, but that’s complete crap. They are selling the part and the audience short. It gets actors down a lot actually, because it magnifies your failures. The same is true for directors. It’s like Everest, it’s an unforgiving mountain, and people die on the way up, or they get badly hurt. It is like singing Wagner, and not everybody can sing Wagner.

Warner:
You need all your energy and all your fight to play Lear, just as an opera singer needs theirs for Tristan, Wotan, or Siegfried. You cannot leave it too late. Brian Cox was forty-four when he played it for me. The first scene demands that the actor hit raw and engulfing fury within minutes. Throughout the opening scenes this anger is further released until it lets fly and the play climbs from there. You have to risk exhaustion to play it well. This play is not gentle on its lead actor, but where Shakespeare is brilliant and kind is in letting the evening be shared and there is, of course, the famous break at the start of the second half for a rest in the dressing room. Shakespeare always acts as helpful assistant to the director and he supports the actors by graphing and arcing their evening. Actors must follow him for their physical well-being, but they must follow what he asks for too. Real anger, real madness … or, no play.

How did your production deal with the part of the Fool and his disappearance halfway through the action?

Noble:
In the first production in 1982 with Michael Gambon and Tony Sher it became quite famous. We did an improvisation in rehearsal, and I said just hold that a fraction longer, and the net
result was that King Lear accidentally stabbed the Fool, and he died. I had teachers coming in to say “You have to write in your program that that is not what Shakespeare wrote!” Because it is completely logical. Just before this, there’s: “The little dogs and all, Trey, Blanch and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me” and there’s “lie here and rest awhile”; “draw the curtains.” And so we had the Fool using a cushion and Lear chasing him, and in stabbing the cushion he accidentally stabs the Fool. And then the little feathers became dogs. It was very beautiful and completely logical.