King Lear

Warner: My Lear was a spoilt Lear, a vain Lear—a man who wants to hear what he wants to hear. His foolish gung-ho confidence is to wrap and disguise his need—a desire for a public show of affection—in a party game. He makes light of something that is weighty and important to him so that nobody suspects his underlying vulnerability. He demands that his daughters play out in public something that is private, and he claims this right because the prizes are high and marvelous. However, he knows who will take which prize because the “game” is rigged—the parcels of land are already named, signed, and sealed by king and court. The whole extravagant business is a contrivance to feed his vanity, to continue to make him feel that he holds the center even in old age. We are witnessing a grotesque public massage of ego. Lear is a man used to getting what he wants, but he gets badly burnt. He discovers that love is not a commodity, that it must be given freely. It may be that he has lost sight of what love is a long time before the play begins. He’s getting the answer he wants in two cases from the very daughters he did not treat well—if their behavior later in the piece is anything to go by—and seems to barely know the character of his favorite—Cordelia—whose reaction is a huge surprise to him. There is a lot we do not know about this mysterious man, but his short-sightedness is placed on the table at the very opening of the play. Here is a man who will need to travel far to begin to gain the gift of personal insight. His friend Gloucester will literally lose his sight: blind men both.

6. Ian McKellen as Lear in Trevor Nunn’s 2007 production, in the opening scene with quasi-military “Ruritanian” regalia.

And why didn’t your Cordelia, or why couldn’t she, put her love into words?

Noble: That’s a much more difficult question to answer. It’s a young person’s thing, whereby the spoken truth is more important than making your mum and dad happy. It’s the moment of leaving home. The domestic psychological detail is very precise in the play. In Lear’s household, Cordelia is at the point of leaving home to go and get married. That’s a huge moment in every family, although it’s very often not recognized. Some daughters never leave home. They are still at home, in the thrall of their parents, when they’re seventy. Cordelia leaves home and Lear can’t deal with that. But she knows she has to do it, especially with a father like him.

Warner: Cordelia does not want to play this extravagant and obscene party game. She is young, she is shy, and she is about to be married, perhaps even the public nature of this serious business of land division is difficult for her. Anyhow, extravagant party game or not, it is the wrong moment for her to speak of her love to her father, and she certainly does not want to talk about such matters in public. When her sisters speak she is appalled by their preparedness to speak on cue, and especially so since she knows they are being dishonest. Cordelia wants to hold to her own truth. Horrified by what is happening around her, she wants to stop the game, and that is just what she does. It goes horribly wrong because she won’t play, and she advertently or inadvertently humiliates her father in public. She is young and she believes with stern clarity in the virtues of honesty, truth, and love. She is earnest—some might say overearnest in this context, and she causes an atomic explosion.

7. The opening scene in Deborah Warner’s 1990 production: a party game goes horribly wrong, with Brian Cox as Lear in wheelchair and paper crown.

Lear is both a king and a father. That often seems to be a choice that directors and actors have to make—are you going to give the primary emphasis to Lear’s journey as a king giving up his crown, or is the primary emphasis going to be on the family relationships? Or do you actually think that the essence of the play is that the two are inextricably intertwined?

Noble: Without question they are entwined. I didn’t find that a choice. It isn’t a choice that I recognize.

Warner: The father relationship is the most interesting, he is a father who happens to be a king; but since all fathers are kings then, yes, all is intertwined. There is a lot we don’t know about him, about his reign—but we know that he owns the land of his country and chooses to divide that up in such a way that will benefit his retirement most comfortably. He is a king/father heading toward retirement, a dangerous time in all families and in all monarchies.