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Plummer stands heroic in 'Lear'
By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — The challenge posed by the
title role in King Lear boils down to a simple paradox: To play the
father of all Shakespearean tragic heroes, one must convey the ravages of
age and madness with the vitality of a guy in top physical and mental form.
I doubt that any living actor could manage
this task more deftly or movingly than Christopher Plummer does in the new
Lear (*** out of four) staged by Lincoln Center
Theater in association with the Stratford Festival of Canada. It opened Thursday
at Broadway's Vivian Beaumont Theatre.
Anyone who knows this stage and screen
veteran only from his dashing appearances in films such as The Sound of
Music and The Man Who Would Be King would scarcely recognize the
disheveled old geezer who appears to crawl out from under a garbage bag someone
tossed in the backstage alley. But in the three hours following that entrance,
Plummer invests his character with a ravaged elegance and a palpable, desperate
struggle for clarity that make his dissolution all the more shattering.
Of course, any successful production of
Lear requires more than a powerful leading man. Since
the king's tragically misguided interaction with his daughters plays a key
role in his undoing, the actresses playing these roles must be similarly
potent. Claire Jullien is especially affecting as Cordelia, lending Lear's
one true daughter an unaffected radiance that reinforces her noble spirit.
Domini Blythe and Lucy Peacock are, fittingly,
cooler and more abrasive as Goneril and Regan, so much so that their performances
threaten to become flat and shrill. Both settle into their parts, though,
and manage a winning wryness that adds welcome levity.
The rest of the cast, directed with wit
and grit by Jonathan Miller, is well up to par. Geraint Wyn Davies is duly
duplicitous as the Earl of Gloucester's scheming illegitimate son, Edmund,
while Brent Carver and Benedict Campbell are robust and touching as Gloucester's
more virtuous son, Edgar, and his ally, the Earl of Kent. James Blendick
winningly captures both Gloucester's credulity and his loyalty, and Barry
MacGregor makes a piquant fool.
In the end, though, the image from this
Lear that will stay with you long after the curtain falls
focuses on Plummer and an inanimate prop: the blanket that, we are told,
holds Cordelia's lifeless body. You don't have to be a defeated ruler, or
a grieving father, to feel the weight of this man's crushing fall.
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