Jonathan Miller has directed "King Lear" in a box, as it were - a small, dark one. The stage of Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre, where his production opened last night, is dominated by a tall wall and symmetrical wooden platforms. The lighting, frequently dim, never varies more than a few hues warmer or cooler than plain white. The actors are costumed with the austerity of Vermeer. They go about their business with tasteful restraint.
The domestic scale of Mr. Miller's "Lear," which originated at the Stratford Festival of Canada, comes as no surprise. He has been saying that he doesn't find anything "epic or mythic" about the play. "People get deluded into the cosmic quality of the play simply because there's a thunderstorm in it," he told Lincoln Center Theater Review.
Leave meteorology aside, and there's still something otherworldly about this play and its annihilations. It moves outward, ruthlessly, in concentric rings of destruction: Lear's sanity cracks, his body fails, his family crumbles, his court dissolves, the state collapses. The play is obsessed with the abyss. The word "nothing" is spoken more than 30 times. The bastard Edmund defends his treachery as a fulfillment, not a violation, of nature's laws. In the last scene, when Lear enters carrying his daughter's corpse, Kent invokes the apocalypse: "Is this the promised end?" Maybe Mr. Miller's right, and Shakespeare just thought that into each play some rain must fall. Or maybe the storm that blows across the heath is roaring through the hole he's punched in our notion of an advancing civilization, of order itself.
Mr. Miller has staged a good-in some ways, very good - "Lear," but one that doesn't have anything like the resonance a masterpiece should. (Even last year's seriously flawed revival of "Long Day's Journey Into Night" left me humming with its overtones.) In limiting the play's reach, he weakened its power. You brace for a blow that never arrives.
Though not an especially large man, Christopher Plummer is a rumbling, lumbering Lear. He wears age like a heavy net, always entangling his speech and action. His infirmity ap pears on his first line, "Attend the lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester." Mr. Miller has changed the text so Lear forgets Burgundy's name, and Kent has to remind him. He rolls his jaw as if teeth no longer sit comfortably there. His hands tremble.
Mr. Plummer's Lear is by no means a kindly king. When he divides his kingdom, asking each of his three daughters to proclaim their love for him, he keeps shooting looks to Cordelia. The whole business seems calculated to provoke her. As Regan and Goneril, the two scheming sisters, Lucy Peacock and Domini Blythe are chilly and calculating, though Ms. Peacock elicits the occasional dry laugh. To judge by their wonderful, improbable names, you'd think both actresses have stepped from the pages of Dickens. Claire Jullien's brittle, inadequate Cordelia, meanwhile, seems to have wandered out of Jane Austen.
Mr. Plummer's Lear doesn't seem like a soul in anguish on the heath, only a silly old whiner. Barry MacGregor gives the Fool a touch of the Old-Testament prophet and no excess of jollity, but when Lear begins to crack, "O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven," he regards the king with real concern. Watch Mr. Plummer closely when he tells the Fool "Nothing can be made out of nothing." The flash of pain that crosses his face suggests he's thinking back to the moment his trouble began, when he warned Cordelia, "Nothing will come of nothing." Mr. Plummer plays the recollection as the beginning of wisdom.
The secondary plot, the shadow story of Gloucester, his good son Edgar, and bastard son Edmund, is blessed with three fine actors. The superb Geraint Wyn Davies makes Edmund an agreeable villain. He doesn't cackle and rub hands together: There's an appealing matter-of-factness in his soliloquies about his plans to disinherit his brother and betray old Gloucester. Mr. Davies also knows how to work a room: When he wonders aloud which of Lear's daughters he should woo, several people in the audience offered suggestions.
Who speaks verse more beautifully than Brent Carver? His delivery is occasionally mannered here, but he provides the show with a minor revelation. In the opening scenes, his Edgar is a bookish, pliable dope. Mr. Carver uses the next three hours to trace Edgar's difficult path to maturity, first when he loses his old self and pretends to be mad Tom ("Edgar I nothing am,") then in the moving scenes with his blinded father (played with unfussy loyalty by James Blendick). By the time Edgar vanquishes Edmund at the finale, Mr. Carver has given him genuinely heroic stature.
Like noble Edgar, Mr. Plummer gets stronger as he goes. You could wish he had made plenty of different choices along the way, but when Lear reaches the end of his brutal ordeal, Mr. Plummer is extraordinary. "Pray you now, forget and forgive; I am old and foolish," he tells Cordelia at their affecting reunion. When he's led offstage by each arm, he stoops and hobbles like an ape.
Mr. Plummer plays the discovery of Cordelia's body with an aching delicacy. He does not boom, only moan and croak. It seems Mr. Plummer can't carry Ms. Jullien onstage: he and another actor slide her onstage in a kind of cocoon. He lifts and drops her hand, over and over. He leans close and coos, with new gentleness: "Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little. Ha?" His heartbreaking final lament for her, "Never, never, never, never, never," trails off into a whimper, a true dying fall.
For Lincoln Center, the mixed success of Mr. Miller's "King Lear" continues its season of good-news-bad-news Shakespeares. It's commendable that the theater has given "Lear," like "Henry IV," such a handsome production. But neither show reached its potential, and neither is likely to be produced again on such a scale anytime soon. One priority for the new head of the Public Theater should be restoring Joe Papp's deep commitment to Shakespeare. The city needs an active, living tradition of his plays, with more chances for a play like "Lear" to get the magnificent production it deserves. To borrow the language of another American institution that has seen better days, it's not enough to hit for batting average. When the opportunity presents itself, we need to be able to hit for power.