He who would be king

Asked who was the greatest French poet AndrZ Gide famously replied, ‘Victor Hugo, hZlas!’

I confess to having had similar feelings about King Lear. Of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies I find it the bleakest and least sympathetic, with the most exasperating protagonist and the most preposterous sub-plot. The naivety and perverse behaviour of young Edgar are hard to credit. Wrongfully estranged from his father Gloucester through a blatant trick played by his bastard brother – something a moment’s explanation could have put right – he hastily flees and takes on the disguise of a garrulous, mud-caked lunatic. Gloucester’s later on-stage blinding often cited by defenders of video nasties – ‘Shakespeare got there first, you know!’ – is for me artistically ill-judged. If too realistically performed it dwarfs Lear’s own agony; if too feebly carried out it comes near to absurdity – like clumsy minor eye surgery.

And yet, all frivolity laid aside, the play’s emotional depth, its language, either staggeringly rich in imagery or heart-rendingly simple, the subjects treated – old age, insanity, family feuds, the gradual acquiring of wisdom through suffering – these amount to a tragedy more profound than any other that Shakespeare wrote.

My reappraisal of the play has been prompted by Oliver Ford Davies’s Playing Lear. The author played the part at the Almeida Theatre last year and has now written most interestingly about the experience. The book combines a potted history of the play as performed over 400-odd years with a rigorous study of the text, a survey of the problems faced by a modern actor playing Shakespeare and a rehearsal diary leading up to the finished production as seen by audiences, followed by its subsequent, mainly excellent, notices.

As an actor I am always fascinated by other players’ approaches to their work.