King Lear

In Peter Brook’s vision of the play chaos was part of the natural order. His production emphasized the inhumanity and disinterestedness of the forces that annihilate Lear. There was no moral structure beneath the surface of civilization: “Everywhere one looks, one sees only the facades and emblems of a world and, ironically, as characters acquire sight, it enables them to see only into a void.”⁵⁸

Brook removed key moments of redemption and humanity: the servants did not tend Gloucester after he has been blinded but callously bumped into him as they cleared away the stage. Edmund’s attempt to redeem himself and stop the order that will see the death of Cordelia was cut. As Lear died, his final words “Look there” were spoken as he stared ahead into nothingness. We were not left with the usual tableau of survivors grieving over Lear and Cordelia. The cast left, carrying out their dead bodies, leaving Edgar and the dead Edmund on stage alone. Edgar moved center-stage, and then went to his brother. As he dragged his brother’s corpse up toward the back of the stage a distant rumble of thunder sounded in the background, leaving the audience with the impression that worse was to follow. “[W]e that are young / Shall never see so much nor live so long” took on a genuinely apocalyptic meaning. This was an image of the horror of “the promised end” of the world.

Where Brook’s production succeeded was in making the audience grieve for humanity, or more specifically for the absence of humanity. It seemed a fitting statement for its time, and it is one that still touches us today. Lear’s speech in the hovel is central to Brook’s vision—it is not by chance that he used this quote in the program for the production’s world tour: “Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” Corin Redgrave, who played King Lear in 2004, also took this line:

The play investigates how, in a dying or decaying world, we can live better and be better toward one another. It can’t produce any conclusions to that because the world as Shakespeare saw it at that time was dying, just as our world as we see it is dying. Shakespeare was writing in a world which he sees going to hell on wheels and writing a text book in case the world should ever recover. So it is the most bleak of plays, but it is a very salutary play, a very necessary play … you could not possibly lose King Lear without impoverishing ourselves terribly.⁵⁹

THE DIRECTOR’S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH ADRIAN NOBLE, DEBORAH WARNER, AND TREVOR NUNN

Adrian Noble, born in 1950, arrived at the RSC from the Bristol Old Vic, where he had directed several future stars in productions of classic plays. His first production on the main stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford was the acclaimed 1982 Lear, discussed here, with Michael Gambon as the king and Antony Sher as an extraordinarily powerful Fool. Two years later his Henry V sowed the seed for Kenneth Branagh’s film. Among his other major productions during his two decades at the RSC were Hamlet, again with Branagh in the title role, The Plantagenets, based on the Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy, and the two parts of Henry IV, with Robert Stephens as Falstaff. Stephens returned in 1993 to play Lear in a second production of the tragedy, also discussed here. Noble’s 1994 Midsummer Night’s Dream was made into a film. He was artistic director from 1991 to 2003, since when he has been a freelance director. His production style is characterized by strong use of colors and objects (such as umbrellas), and fluid scenic structure.

Deborah Warner, born in 1959, trained in stage management at the Central School of Speech and Drama. At the age of twenty-one she formed her own “fringe” company, Kick Theatre, imaginatively staging stripped-down productions of the classics, including King Lear (1985, discussed here), at the Edinburgh Festival. In 1987 she made her RSC debut with a rigorously simple but deeply moving Titus Andronicus, starring Brian Cox, on the intimate stages of the Swan at Stratford and The Pit at London’s Barbican. A King John in a similar style followed the next year and in 1990 she directed King Lear, again with Brian Cox, on the proscenium Lyttelton stage of the National Theatre in London (also discussed here). She has subsequently specialized in Samuel Beckett and opera, but has returned to Shakespeare with a Richard II at the National, featuring her collaborator Fiona Shaw cross-dressed in the title role, and a large-scale Julius Caesar at the Barbican.