By JACQUES LE SOURD
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: March 5, 2004)

After an exchange of banter with his Fool, the elderly king suddenly feels the chill of his age and reflects, slowly and almost under his breath, "O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper. I would not be mad." Is there one among us who does not fear the madness of what we now call Alzheimer's disease, the specter of a long senility?

The universality of this fear is what makes director Jonathan Miller's "King Lear," which opened last night at Lincoln Center, such a moving theatrical experience.

The old king, irascible and enraged at what is happening to him, is played in a deliberately low key by the extraordinary actor Christopher Plummer, now 74.

This is not a "King Lear" of thrashing grandeur, with winds blowing on the heath in some fuzzy prehistoric time. Indeed, those who expect that kind of "Lear" may be dissappointed.

But listen carefully to this king — who is gradually being made irrelevant by his two elder daughters, and who will inevitably go mad though with odd moments of great lucidity — and you find that you are hearing yourself, or a parent, suddenly faced with the terrors of old age.

This is a "Lear" in close-up, and you don't have to have been a king to feel what he feels so deeply.

It bears mentioning that in an exceptionally dreary theater season, Lincoln Center has taken our breath away with not one but two great Shakespeare productions.

In the fall, we had "Henry IV," with Kevin Kline as a slightly melancholy but nevertheless amazing Falstaff. Now, as spring dawns, we get a "Lear" (which originated with the Stratford Festival of Canada in 2002) that caps the season with Plummer's quiet brilliance. These are Shakespeare's two most fully realized old men, and together they could be what sums up this theater season.

"King Lear" may be Shakespeare's greatest tragedy. It is what scholar Harold Bloom calls "the most powerful and inescapable of literary works." Bloom, and before him the critic Charles Lamb, have asserted that "Lear" is virtually impossible to stage, and that the play "ultimately baffles commentary."

Yet director Miller, who started out as a member of the "Beyond the Fringe" crew and has memorably directed operas like "Pelleas et Melisande," and Plummer, who has been living down his wonderful performance as Captain von Trapp in the movie "The Sound of Music" for 40 years, obviously refuse to be intimidated.

"The play takes place in a Christian world of the 17th century," Miller has said, dismissing stagings of it in "a traditional sort of pagan antiquity." The play, he says, is about homelessness, not the cosmos.

The production has a minimal but stately set by Ralph Funicello, who did the sets for "Henry IV," and very dark (perhaps too dark) lighting by Robert Thomson.

In a quickly drawn opening scene that is almost a play in itself, Lear calls in his three daughters and tells them he is going to carve up his kingdom in three pieces, "to shake all cares and business from our age, conferring them on younger strengths, while we unburdened crawl toward death."

Lear (who, in a telling moment, suddenly forgets the name of one of his daughters' suitors) merely asks for a protestation of love from each girl before he signs over her portion of land.

Famously, Goneril (Domini Blythe) and Regan (Lucy Peacock) do what is asked, without much sincerity. Cordelia (Claire Jullien), who really loves her father, fails to express it in words. Lear becomes terribly angry and banishes her.

At this point, Lear's disposition of his kingdom is an abstraction, and he thinks he can stay with one or the other daughter — together with his usual retinue of 100 rowdy men — with no problem.

Very quickly, however, Lear is faced with the loss of control that is so much more than an abstraction: The daughters, suddenly united against him, begin to cut down his entourage and discourage signs of his authority. "The best and soundest of his time hath been but rash," says Goneril, dismissively. She tells her servant Oswald (Brian Tree) to treat him with wounding disrespect.

Stung and furious, Lear heads for the heath, though Miller makes a small thing of the storm he finds there.

The point is that Lear has lost his power, and there is no getting it back.

There is a large parallel plot involving two brothers, the evil Edmund (Geraint Wyn Davies) and the good Edgar (Brent Carver), and their father, Gloucester (James Blendick), who falls prey to Edmund's elaborate scheming and winds up cruelly blinded.

Wyn Davies' Edmund fails to generate much evil (in the way that Plummer himself played a truly steamy Iago opposite James Earl Jones' Othello on Broadway), instead seemingly playing the agreeable musical-comedy version of Gloucester's bastard son. As Edgar, stripped to the waist and in a crown of thorns that makes him look unnervingly like Jesus, Carver is so slight that his final duel with Edgar is not persuasive. Carver also hurries his lines in such a way that they are not all heard properly.

Meanwhile, Plummer's Lear falls inexorably into the madness he feared too much at the beginning, ultimately wearing flowers in his hair and walking barefoot. Plummer makes every step of this journey riveting, because it is so close and intimate to our own fears.

When he is reunited with Cordelia, there is a temporary reawakening of his mind that is true and affecting. (Yes, Shakespeare was eerily aware of the vagaries of senility.) And Lear's offstage shriek of agony at Cordelia's death shatters our souls.

The ever-loyal Earl of Kent, extremely well-played by Benedict Campbell, has the final word on his king: "The wonder is he hath endured so long; he but usurped his life."

It is anything but a peaceful ending for this flawed, tormented king, who, in Miller's words, "quite clearly is someone who is not suited for the office."

But it is an ending that rings true for many of us, in its chilling and oddly beautiful portrait of greatness in decline.

This is a "King Lear" that must be seen.