King Lear -- Stratford, Ontario, 2014

I think it was G. Wilson Knight who first pointed out that the Fool and Cordelia are never on stage together. They may have been played by the same actor. The Fool disappears in the storm scene. It’s an ill wind. He’s made redundant when Lear starts spouting the Fool’s kind of mad compulsive wisdom. Knight’s point is that when Lear, cradling Cordelia’s corpse, says “My poor fool is hanged,” he speaks from a higher understanding, perceiving the actor behind the role. 

It’s the birth of meta-theatre. It's a reminder that Shakespeare is still ahead of our avant garde and our theoreticians. Not that it didn’t happen before. When Thomas Nashe wrote Somer’s Last Will and Testament his speaker was both the season and the actor, Will Somers. In Elizabethan theatre prologues and epilogues often flirted with the boundary between actor and character. But out of such a casual frisson Shakespeare fashioned a major theme.

I didn’t realize — or as embarrassing, have forgotten — how many other times this happens in King Lear. Blind Gloucester remembers that the first time he saw mad Tom, he thought of his banished son Edgar (who was playing Tom). The post-mad Lear sees Kent in the servant Caius, whom he hadn’t recognized before. In a comic replay, the Fool pretends to see Lear’s vision of a daughter: “Cry you mercy, I took thee for a joint stool.” He sees only the “actor” stool  but now playfully pretends to see beyond to the imagined character. The rejected Cordelia’s suitors split on this: one sees the character beneath her new role of shame, but the other is stuck on her apparent reduction. There’s even a reversal. When Edgar in disguise refers to Gloucester with the generic honorific “father” Edgar’s role-playing conceals the fact he is indeed addressing his father. In these instances we are aware of our actor playing a character who is playing another role.

The awareness of the actor within the role parallels the layers of physical reality in the Edgar-Gloucester scene at Dover. As Peter Brook contended, the physical setting works on several layers simultaneously. The basic level is the stage floorboards. But that floor plays the role of the British landscape where the drama unfolds. On a third level Edgar as Tom persuades blind Gloucester that they are climbing to a cliff at Dover. The fourth is when Edgar as local rustic persuades Gloucester he has fallen a dramatic distance to a lower plane, and has been miraculously preserved. For all the imaginative overlays the basic reality — the “actor” — remains the unaccommodated floorboards. 

This device points to one of the play’s major themes. The wide range of roles individuals play — along whatever spectra of authority, power, wealth, station, favour, etc. — are but superficial overlays on the essential human, the bare forked animal, unaccommodated man. From this springs director Antoni Cimolino’s take on the play. He finds a contemporary compulsion in the play’s alertness to the predicament of the Toms whom Lear first encounters here: the homeless, the abandoned, the afflicted. He realizes: “I have ta’en/ Too little care of this.” When Gloucester gives his disowned son Edgar (as Tom) his purse he says “distribution should undo excess/And each man have enough.” 

With those prompts in the text Cimolino adds a new framework to the play. In a dumbshow before the first scene a few ragged peasants scuttle about the stage, one warms at a fire behind, two curl up for a cold sleep. When the play opens at the court, the royalty appear in the context of the neglected underclass. Lear’s ensuing division of his kingdom among his daughters seems a trivial Upstairs to the radical Downstairs of the kingdom’s division between royal Haves and peasant Have Nots. The peasants make a few silent appearances thereafter. In the last scene one puts his hand on the new king’s shoulder, both bracing him and reminding him of his responsibility for his lesser subjects. To the play’s compelling vision of the human condition Cimolino adds the — neither redundant nor insignificant — reminder to neglectful governments, whether America’s Tea Party, the Canadian and British Tories or the abundant Putins.

To this powerful production I had only two troubled responses. One was playing Kent/Caius as a younger man than the  references to his white beard would direct. The older man’s abuse in the stocks would set up the harsher treatment of Lear and Gloucester, as his physical strength would prepare us for Lear’s despatch of Cordelia’s hangman. An older Kent would more sensibly be preparing to follow his old master, as by implication the older Fool already did.

My second reservation was the spectacular storm opening after the interval. The fact that Stratford can stage a thundering realistic storm doesn’t mean it should. Indeed, given the play’s faith in reimagining the physical stage in the Dover scene, one might have trusted the poetry and the performance to convey the storm without all that thunder and smokescreen. Especially as the returning audience has to shift back into the poetry gear, drowning out the language in the noise and the performance in the smoke was unproductive. Some very pertinent passages were lost. Even the loud Lear was more dinned against than dinning.
     Though not as brilliantly nuanced as his Merchant of Venice last year (see my blog), Cimolino’s King Lear was still a remarkable, moving experience.