King Lear

5. “What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes”: the bleakness of Peter Brook’s 1962 production with Paul Scofield (left) as Lear and Alan Webb as the blinded Gloucester.

chronicles the process by which suffering turns self-pity and self-love into outward versions of themselves. In practice this means that Lear learns to identify with the poor and downtrodden, classes never far from the drab, pockmarked, nineteenth century face of this production. Indeed, the three-man directorate of Trevor Nunn, John Barton and Barry Kyle … do all they can to bring period penury to our attention, gratuitously introducing a troupe of vagrants to trot round the stage between scenes, and transforming Michael Williams’s Fool into a bald scrofulous relic, a seedily eccentric song-and-dance man who might have stumbled out of Bleak House … determined to stress that Lear is a social as well as an elemental play.²¹

The setting for the 2004 production directed by Bill Alexander was of a postwar world in which the country was in a flux of insecurity, distinctly modern in feel but without reference to a specific time:

This Lear appears at times to be set in a crumbling mental home, backed by the scaffolding and half-destroyed brick walls of Tom Piper’s bleak setting. It suggests that a nuclear bomb has already fallen on Lear’s kingdom and the survivors are left wandering about trying to work out—post-Apocalypse—who they are and what has happened and above all where the hell they are supposed to be going next.… There is a bizarre timelessness here—so that in a post-Victorian world, when the old King comes on dressed like a mad deserter from the First World War, there is no real surprise, just the feeling that Alexander and his cast have had yet another disturbing thought about the many insights into madness and identity-crisis offered in the play.²²

Of the setting, designer Tom Piper explained:

Bill [Alexander] felt very strongly that you can’t set this play in one particular place, it has to be an invented world, so we’re aiming to create parallel worlds: the Victorian married with strange bits of technology.… I wanted to include a broken element, to convey a sense of a world that could be in decay or on the edge of industrialisation.²³

Corin Redgrave, a noted left-wing campaigner as well as a member of a distinguished acting dynasty, played Lear in this production. He saw the play as “modern, topical and relevant because it so vividly portrays a country divided by an almost impassable fault-line between those who have enough and those who don’t. Any attempt I make to build up an idea of Lear the man, Lear the ruler, is still very strongly influenced by that thinking.”²⁴

Again, although not overtly political in the actors’ focus, Adrian Noble’s 1993 production infused the political implication of Lear’s decision into the setting:

This production turned the map into paper flooring whose divisions the Fool (a gag over his mouth emphasizing his obvious outrage) was made to mark with red paint. It was then gradually reduced to tatters until the ground beneath, which was covered with a great blood-red stain, was wholly revealed.²⁵

There are numerous references in King Lear to the stars, gods, and the fates. Setting the play in a non-Christian era endows the play with an adaptable metaphysical stance that has international appeal. In 1999, Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa of the Sainokuni Shakespeare Company undertook a joint production with the RSC. This production focused on the elemental nature of the play, the dark forces of nature that emerge from the void created by Lear’s misjudgments:

This is a hauntingly but savagely beautiful production. Yukio Horio’s set is dominated by a huge black wooden walkway sloping gently toward you and widening into an immense platform. At the back the walkway seems to disappear into black darkness, whence the actors emerge like mythological figures, both real and remote. All this suggests the structure of the classical Noh stage, where the curtained entrance also leads somewhere indeterminate: a primeval darkness that holds no moral secrets … this reinforces the uncomfortable Shakespearian vision of a world where you are left without the consolation or guidance of a moral order.²⁶

The handling of the storm scene was particularly controversial. Boulders of various sizes were choreographed to drop onto the stage as Lear raged against the storm. Most audience members and reviewers were more concerned about the safety of the actors than the director’s vision, which “conjures a world in which Nature’s moulds are cracked.”²⁷

The breakdown in family relationships is, of course, central to King Lear and modern directors have often used this as an accessible focal point in productions. Initially produced as a touring production for schools, Buzz Goodbody’s small cast chamberpiece version of Lear in 1974