Is King Lear a mountain or molehill? How to play the tragic monarch and ‘stupid old fart’
Kenneth Branagh is set to play, and direct, King Lear and doubtless we shall hear the usual critical cliches about his attempt to scale a theatrical Everest. But is the role of Lear that difficult? The 19th-century American actor Edwin Forrest said: “I play Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth but by heaven, sir, I am Lear.” Olivier concurred, claiming: “Frankly Lear is an easy part … He’s like all of us really: he’s just a stupid old fart.” And when I asked Tom Courtenay recently how he coped with Lear, he said: “I had a much jollier time with it than playing Hamlet. The only problem was doing two shows in one day.”
Looking back over the 40 or more Lears I have seen, I am struck by the fact that only two were less than a success and for similar reasons. I saw
Charles Laughton play King Lear at Stratford in 1959 and, although it was a performance of profound pathos, it lacked vocal heft: Michael Blakemore, who was one of Lear’s knights, wrote that Laughton wasn’t up to the big rhetorical passages because “he didn’t have the machinery”. Much the same was true of Nigel Hawthorne when he essayed the role in a production by
Yukio Ninagawa in 1999. As I wrote at the time, “his well-modulated drysherry voice is unable to encompass Lear’s titanic rages”.
But more actors succeed as Lear than not and, rather than itemise them, I have picked out those who have enriched our understanding of the play: acting, at best, is a form of practical criticism and teaches you more than the textbooks ever could. The stock image of Lear when I started going to the theatre was of some Blakeian Ancient of Days tottering around a Stonehenge-like set but that was forever banished by Paul Scofield’s performance in Peter Brook’s 1962 production. For a start Scofield was only 40 when he played Lear: roughly the same age as Richard Burbage in the first known performance in 1606.