King Lear

was performed by a cast of nine, with one musician playing gong, trumpet, snare and kettle drum. An all-purpose servant was added, while one sub-plot was cut (losing Albany, Cornwall, Oswald, and the French King).… The acting area was empty, except for a few props, like a rug and banners which unfurled when Lear appeared.… Scenes were set simply, using props and, as with the storm, music and lights, which at key moments in the production underscored the director’s point.… Lear was not seen as epic in terms of great public scenes of wide-open spaces peopled with a huge cast.… Its focus was on two families, in which the personal as well as the age differences played a more important part than is usually recognised.²⁸

In this powerful, intimate production, “the play as a whole became an intense study of private griefs of their two families, with Kent and the Fool both reduced to appalled outsiders, helplessly looking on.”²⁹

Described by critic Irving Wardle as “an all-too-familiar story of family life,”³⁰ Nicholas Hytner’s 1990 production also turned Lear into a tale of dysfunctional family neurosis. He encoded his very cerebral reading in the set design of David Fielding, creating an enclosed space for the staging of Lear that took the form of a cube:

Open on one side with its outer walls painted to look like heavy steel, the cube simply revolves and stops, to present a succession of interiors and exteriors. Sometimes it will stop with a corner pointing toward the audience so that actors can stand out of sight of each other while Shakespearian eavesdropping can take place. In the storm scene, it will revolve continuously—the idea being that, as a metaphor for the world of the play (as well as Lear’s mental world), it is spinning out of control.³¹

The effect of the cube was to reduce the scale of the play—something apparently deliberate in the director’s interpretation. Psychological and domestic, Lear’s world became both a mental ward and the interior of his mind, a controlled civilized space allowed to go mad through neglect and misjudgment. John Wood’s very human and neurotic Lear went on an inner and outer journey of physical suffering and mental awareness: “We are left with an interpretation which is as much medical as moral. The geriatric ward slugs it out with the psychiatric wing. There is little sense of hubris on the one hand, or of concentrated evil on the other.”³² The emphasis on Lear’s genuine insanity stemming from the family reflected the wider world of the play and the state of Britain. Michael Billington described it as “an exploration of the insane contradictions of a world where the gods are seen as both just and wantonly cruel, where Nature is both purifying and destructive.”³³

Fools and Madmen

Real and assumed madness play an essential part in the plot of King Lear. In a program note by Michael MacDonald, author of a historical study called Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety and Healing in Seventeenth Century England (1983), Adrian Noble’s 1993 production was contextualized by means of the suggestion that the audience

is presented with three kinds of madness: real in Lear himself, assumed in Tom/Edgar, and professional in the Fool. To its original audience, in a population largely uneducated, unable to distinguish between epilepsy, demonic possession and a skilful beggar on the make, the spectacle of an old man and a half-naked creature railing at the weather and babbling about demons would not have been especially unusual: like the unemployed and other vagrants the countryside teemed with, they were a fact of life.³⁴

Lear is very rarely played as being driven mad exclusively by the cruelty that is inflicted on him, but is often portrayed as being dangerously unhinged from the start. In Nicholas Hytner’s production,

the early household scenes are honeycombed with … micro-sequences, which take you inside Lear’s head, showing his hunger for affection, his need to play the strong man, his short attention span, and his helpless descents into blind rage. These are an embarrassment to the court and they give the sisters every pretext for saying something to keep the old man happy. But it is only when they try to draw the line that you really see what they have had to put up with. At the suggestion that he should shed a few knights, all hell breaks loose in the Albany dining room, with Lear emptying his gun into the ceiling, crushing Goneril to the ground like a blubbering child, clearing the space for carnage by hanging the Fool on a coat-hook: and finally vanishing into the night leaving his shaken hosts facing each other down a long table for their solitary dinner.³⁵

Very clearly a man with no control over his own emotions, John Wood’s Lear was also an emotional vandal to his daughters, and his influence could be seen in their learned behavior.