King Lear
A role pushing actors to the brink
‘Lear?” blithely opined Michael Gambon, when Anthony Hopkins asked for tips on tackling the role in the Eighties. “Piece of cake. Stand centre-stage, shake a bit, shout your words and don’t take your eyes off the bloody Fool for a moment.”
The great Gambon’s nonchalant throwaway advice, following on from his triumph in the part at the RSC in 1982, stands somewhat at odds with the trials and tribulations that have habitually attended King Lear – a play so noticeably prevalent at the moment that 2018 might as well be dubbed the Year of Lear.
Already, we have had Antony Sher taking on the role at the RSC in Stratford. In July, Ian Mckellen takes to the stage in the West End to reprise a performance that won rave reviews in Chichester last year. And, on Monday, Hopkins, who first played the role at the National Theatre in 1986, revisits the “mad king” in an adaptation for BBC Two, alongside Emma Thompson, Emily Watson and Florence Pugh.
Shakespeare’s epic voyage of punishing discovery for a man who starts with everything and winds up with nothing but a kind of terminal, grief-stricken wisdom is seen as the ultimate test and often the final big staging-post of a major classical actor’s career. But it’s also viewed as indomitably complex. The critic Charles Lamb, circa 1811, thought it should only be read; to put it on stage was to reduce it to “what is painful and disgusting”. When Peter Brook embarked on his 1962 production with Paul Scofield as the self-deposing king – a post-war benchmark – he likened it to “a mountain whose summit had never been reached” – on the way up lay the bodies of other climbers strewn on every side.
The mountaineering comparison came in handy when Hopkins contemplated his own, as he saw it, disastrous attempt. Though some critics were full of praise for his interpretation at the National, he was damning of his efforts. “To have to go out there night after night to resurrect what I saw as a complete washout was my version of hell,” he confessed. “At the end of it all, all I was really able to say was, ‘I’ve had a go at it – I’ve climbed a bit of the way up to the mountain. But it was still hell.”
Something in him kicked against the killing monotony of repeat performances, and he acquired a Lear-like waywardness. In a superb survey by Jonathan Croall of modern Lears (from Gielgud onwards), he’s described by one director as just giving up if the scene wasn’t going well: “If he wasn’t happy he just mumbled fast, and then walked off smirking.” It was such an unpleasant experience that within a few years Hopkins had renounced the stage.
Now, more than 30 years on, the 80-year-old is making a high-profile return to this granddaddy of tragic roles. It is expected to be a televisual tour de force. During the filming of one scene, at a Stevenage shopping centre, a woman on a mobility scooter stopped to direct Hopkins to the nearest hostel, so persuasive was his transformation into a “down and out”.
The drama’s director, Richard Eyre, believes that age and experience can improve the way an actor plays Lear. Hopkins, he says, was now “at an age when he truly understood the play”. Lear is “fourscore”; and so now is Eyre’s leading man. “It’s a role that demands the actor cover every area of the emotional spectrum,” he explains. “Tony can go from the psychotic bullying of the first scene to the extreme gentleness of the end where Lear and Cordelia [Florence Pugh] are captured and he says they will talk about “the mystery of things”.
“The most daunting thing with Lear,” the playwright David Hare – who directed Hopkins in the NT production – succinctly summarised “is that there is no other play with 11 epic, major, complex scenes. There are no ‘unimportant’ scenes, so there is no relaxation.” Though not without gruelling demands in terms of shoots, the television version – which trims the action to two hours – was “as nothing to the rigour of having to do that in a theatre night after night,” Eyre affirms.
That rigour – as emotional as it is physical – has pushed many an actor to the brink, though interestingly Glenda Jackson, who returned to acting aged 80 as a gender-blind Lear in 2016, has described it as rejuvenating. In 2015 in Guildford, Brian Blessed collapsed on stage, came back to finish his performance but was then forced to abandon the run because of a detected heart condition. Brian Cox, who took his lauded National Theatre performance on tour in 1990, also experienced chest pains and found Lear’s torment – “the realisation that his life has been a mistake”– so tough as he faced his own offstage crises that he had “a sort of mini-breakdown” and lost his voice “through the stress of it all”. In his recently published diary about playing Lear for the RSC (“Year of the Mad King”), Sher, 68, who likens the challenge to running a marathon, records becoming alarmed at intermittent bouts of deafness – diagnosed by one doctor as psychosomatic, brought on by the stress of the job. Playing the role has since been discounted as the cause of Sher’s malady, but it’s symptomatic of how intense it’s known to be that suspicion should alight on it. For Sher, unforgettably making his entrance on high, carried aloft in a glass cabinet, the first major respite only comes in the third act, at the end of the storm scene.
“That’s an incredibly tough call for an actor – essentially you’ve got a man arguing with a storm. It has been made harder by staging it with Lear high up on a platform, which is physically quite alarming. I can tell
‘The role demands every area of the actor’s emotional spectrum – from psychotic bullying to extreme gentleness’
you that every night when that scene is over, Graham Turner – who plays the Fool – and I always whisper to ourselves, ‘The storm is over’, marking to ourselves that the worst is over.”
That’s just one of numerous potential pitfalls the play presents – Oliver Ford Davies, who has not only been a Lear (for the Almeida) but written a book on the subject, argues that it’s a cluster of conundrums, some of them barely solvable: “Part of me thinks that Shakespeare didn’t really know what he was doing – just followed some sort of instinct.” The most famous solution in recent times to that notoriously tough storm scene – and a firm antidote to bellowing – came from Michael Grandage’s Donmar production of 2010, which placed the action in a white-box space, and had Derek Jacobi whispering, internalising the tempest. The ongoing quest for that level of close-up intimacy is found in the Mckellen Lear – the Duke of York’s will be reconfigured to let the “conversational” nature of the production thrive.
At root, says Eyre, Lear “is about what it means to be human”. Its smallest details are often its most telling. “Do not laugh at me,” the chastened old man pleads when he’s restored to his wits, barely cognisant of his surroundings, or who he is. There must have been tears when Richard Burbage first uttered that line at the original Globe theatre sometime around 1605. Will there be tears among those watching Hopkins on Monday, more than 400 years later? I’d stake my life on it.
King Lear is on BBC Two on Monday at 9.30pm; King Lear runs at the RSC Stratford (01789 403493) until June 9; King Lear runs at the Duke of York’s Theatre (020 8544 7469), July 11-Nov 3; NT Live broadcast Sept 27