NEW YORK - The snowy-haired, white-bearded monarch acted by the peerless
Christopher Plummer enters laughing, with his ever-playful Fool. At first
it seems that this "King Lear" will be a merry old soul. But soon his volatile
temper changes, as he finds himself insufficiently praised by his beloved
youngest daughter Cordelia, and erupts into a shouting rage.
William Shakespeare's great, difficult tragedy of powerful, blinkered fathers
and their children, good and bad, abounds in angry invective, and the old
king's penchant for explosive abuse dominates the painstaking, brilliantly
modulated performance by Plummer. The Toronto native has brought his "Lear"
to the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center in company with players
from the Stratford Festival of Canada, where his great career began. As staged
by the masterly veteran English director Jonathan Miller, in Elizabethan
dress on a Globe-like stage, this is crystal-clear Shakespeare, in which
every role is fully developed and the themes advance themselves with resonant
lucidity.
Miller has split the two acts with keen intelligence, underlining a major
idea of the play: the schism between civilized society and wild anarchy,
a split expressed in comic terms in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Act I of
the production, which opened Thursday, ends with the king storming out of
the silken worlds of his older daughters, Goneril and Regan, as thunder rumbles
and wind and rain blow up a fierce crescendo. Act II begins on the barren
heath, as Lear, half-dressed and alone with his Fool, howls out his challenge
to the elements: "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks ..."
Thus the final fracturing of his divided realm begins. From this moment,
the foolish king whines over his encroaching madness, the Duke of Gloucester's
disowned son Edgar babbles as the half-nude Poor Tom, Gloucester himself
is blinded by Goneril's sadistic husband Albany, and war bloodies the land.
From Lear's foolish division of his kingdom between the fawning of Goneril
and Regan and his rejection of the honest Cordelia, nihilism reigns, lifting
the bastard plotter Edmund and banishing the loyal Earl of Kent. The marriages
of both Goneril and Regan founder, as Albany dies and the Duke of Cornwall
disdains Regan for her betrayal of her father. And the forces of the two
black-hearted queens do battle with the army of Cordelia, come from France.
Written after the death of Elizabeth I, at the start of the unstable kingship
of James I, "King Lear" scrutinizes the nature of monarchy with extreme skepticism.
Lear's understanding of the demands of ruling are as weak as his skills at
parenting. Small wonder that Goneril and Regan, two carefully and absurdly
coiffed poodles as embodied by an imperious, calculating Domini Blythe and
a prettier but no less vicious Lucy Peacock, eagerly take their revenge against
their father, stripping him of the last vestiges of his power.
As has so often been observed, "Lear" abounds in images of blindness (one
line that drew a big laugh at both the Beaumont and Yale Repertory Theatre
is Lear's "Get thee glass eyes/And, like a scurvy politician, seem/ To see
the things thou dost not."). Lear cannot see through the sycophantic paeans
from Goneril and Regan, and he also misapprehends the authenticity of Claire
Julien's radiant, appealing, ultimately dauntless Cordelia. In his demented
myopia, Lear also fails to recognize Benedict Campbell's doughty and devoted
Kent, even when the disguised Earl becomes his crucial supporter in the king's
virtual exile. James Blendick's robust and eloquent, then broken, Gloucester,
Lear's elderly counterpart, ultimately blinded with the compliance of his
bastard son, believes the lies of Geraint Wyn Davies' superbly duplicitous
Edmund, and thus turns against his true son, Brent Carver's credulous and
ultimately unhinged Edgar.
Both Davies, a rising Stratford star, and Carver, a Canadian who won a
Tony for his wrenching lead role in the musical "Kiss of the Spiderwoman,"
shape performances of impressive depth in a company that boasts many fine
American actors in small roles. Davies' Edmund initially makes the strongest
impression as an urbane villain - whom his father first apologizes for siring
- who takes pleasure in his machinations and proves an equally smooth seducer
of the wicked sisters. But Carver, first reticent and soft-headed, takes
Edgar through poetic, crazed wordplay as Poor Tom to final heroism, in a
deftly staged duel that leaves his miscreant half-brother sprawled on a step
of Ralph Funicello's plain, unvarnished wooden O stage.
Barry MacGregor's Cockney Fool, with a ragged coat and silly feathered
hat provided by costume designer Clare Mitchell in contrast to the ruffed
nobility, makes a boon companion and fearlessly jocular critic of his king.
And Brian Tree makes much of the creepy, craven Oswald, Goneril's contemptible
steward, in an opposite depiction of servitude.
The exchanges between Lear and his Fool, some of the wittiest dialogue
in all of the canon, display the more clear-sighted side of the king. But
Plummer takes the king through all of an old man's flare-ups and follies
and failings. This is a once-feckless ruler who carelessly surrenders his
claim to greatness, then gallops, staggers and finally totters to a piercing
self-recognition over the corpse of his discarded favorite. It is an entirely
regal performance whose utterances are sometimes richly commanding, sometimes
appallingly headstrong, always profoundly human. Reading the play over days
later, Plummer's voice resounds in silence. Let us hope this "Lear" will
be preserved for televising, however inadequately, for those who cannot witness
Lincoln Center's second great production of Shakeapeare, after its splendid
American "Henry IV."
