(no subject)

[proximoception]

We saw the National Theatre's King Lear film tonight. Julie, new to it, says it's good but doesn't compare with Othello or Hamlet, her favorite.

I'd never seen this on stage or screen. I was struck by the cliff scene - I hadn't noticed before that because on stage the cliff would be imaginary anyway, Edgar has to let us know through an aside that he's making it up, that the imaginary cliff is an imaginary imaginary one.

I was also struck by all the Hamlet parallels, highlighted since I was seeing it on the same screen put on by the same production company two months after. Approximate length, mass dueling/stabbing/poisoning final scene, protagonist's best friend saying he'll kill himself, feigned madness, bewilderingly multiplied foils/doubles, idealized victim girl whose name ends in -elia, "Where did she die"/"Drowned! O, where?" question asked about said girl, family conflicts that veer bloody, general 'life sucks' theme. I actually agree with Julie that this one's not his greatest success, but it may have been, in part, an attempt to recreate or outdo the play that was. To outdo Hamlet! What other task could he have set himself next? Or perhaps it's when he felt he might have lost whatever he'd had there at his peak, wanted to reclaim it. I wonder if his relative failure at that could be ascribed to something like influence anxiety (maybe just because you've become your own precursor it doesn't make that relationship tidier). One of the hallmarks of influence anxiety, formal or structural elegance and balance - complexity that stays coherent - suffering while the intensity level of certain peak effects gets turned up even higher, might explain some of the play's explosiveness and redundancy, or at least why choosing a story given to those might have appealed to Shakespeare. He wanted something even more devastating. Which maybe it is. But did that come at a cost, some loss of what it could have been?

(And of course Edmund is a revision of Iago - and not an improvement on him, to my mind. Julie says Iago is the best character ever.)

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I saw it too. Was mildly disappointed. I thought what was really revelatory about this production were Goneril and Regan, though I'm not sure that they quite sustained it throughout. Edgar and Edmund were both a touch weak, though you wouldn't know it unless you saw really great versions of them. Cordelia like Ophelia is never given to a good enough actress. The Fool was an interesting experiment but in the end didn't quite work. Kent was good. Derek Jacobi was almost great, but certainly not transcendent. Since I love him, I was disappointed.

Did you read my Arcade entry on "where?" Where? Here. I don't think I was posting alerts about them yet when I wrote that one.

I think maybe that the NT was so good that you might not have seen how much better the play really is than they were. I would call it an impossible play to perform, except that there are transcendent screen versions. I think the best Lear on screen might be another video of a play performance: James Earl Jones in Central Park. You can stream it from Amazon. The DVD used to be affordable, but now it's not. That's a performance that changed me.

The NT Lear tried to do a couple of things that the James Earl Jones version did much better. I'm glad they tried, and I may post on it. I think the NT did those things decently. But not sublimely, though they had a bunch of great ideas. Lear should be played more like The Winter's Tale than like Hamlet, to see how great a play it really is. One obvious but amazing difference: Lear done outdoors is right. In a sense that's the whole point. Whereas Hamlet is an indoors play, until the end. But the Globe was open to the sky. And so is King Lear.

Yeah, okay, I will post on it.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Your post's what made me notice both lines - and yeah, something wasn't gelling about the production. Jacobi was good but a little too old, paradoxically: you probably need a younger actor to sustain the energy demands. And yes, the Edgar and Edmund were both quite interesting takes but not ones that served the purposes of the play. In general British Shakespeare actors play overemotionally, often screamily, to my taste - like they're passing kidney stones even when just on guard duty. McKee's Goneril didn't, she was quite interesting.