King Lear

Having come to King Lear later than the typical high school standards (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream), I felt there was this need to compare this film with other previous Shakespeare adaptations while at the same time juggling my own impressions of the play. For one, in this film, I appreciated the modern setting. The Tower of London acting as a backdrop for the opening sequence created an ominious atmosphere of pomp and corrupted circumstance. The cast of actors I thought were especially fine from Emma Thompson as Goneril, to Emily Watson as Regan and Florence Pugh as Cordelia. The vindictive atmosphere the two seasoned actresses bring to their roles offered a pleasant contrast to Pugh's more sympathetic and compassionate Cordelia. Yet, as a novice to King Lear, and very much aware of the play's history, its darker themes and near nihilistic views of humanity and existences, I felt the film lacked a kind of composure or pace that would have allowed a viewer like myself to digest some of the more thoughtful and poignant moments. There were many lines of Edgar in the play that were either cut out entirely or not allowed to linger in this adaptation. As soon as we meet Edgar, he is soon scurrying off to become Tom O'Bedlam. From my reading of the play, Edgar is the witness to Lear, a fellow sufferer and yet his victory against his brother in the end didn't feel well-earned as he feels more sketched out as a presence as opposed to fully realized. And this is my problem with many Shakespeare adaptations, the screenwriter remodeling the bard's poetry and scenes often excises some meaningful lines and takes the theatrical moments away and replaces them with the tempo of a film. The film jarred me. I wanted scenes to linger or at least bring a moment of stillness. No, these characters had to keep moving and the camera work added to this restlessness. Also, it felt like Hopkins was bombarding the entire film with his exhaustibly raw and scene-chewing performance. I know Lear is mad and the frenetic pace was perhaps meant to create a cinematic imbalance yet I found Hopkins portrayal remained at the emotional decibel level of 11. Even in the more subdued moments towards the end, his grieving over Cordelia, I felt the actor charging emotionally through the scenes. Learning that Hopkins has played Lear for decades, I wondered while watching this film adaptation if he had brought a bit of Lear to many of his other movie roles (Legends of the Fall, Dracula or any time he had play a character who raises his voice). I admire Hopkins and without another cinematic or theatrical King Lear to compare him with, I am not the ideal critic yet in all honesty, I found this performance trying. I would say there was 90% power here in the delivery leaving only 10% poignancy. It became difficult to find myself sympathetic with this bullying man when I knew there was more to him as a character. Yet Hopkins is still incredible and even in his whirlwind, you go along. You cannot not watch him and sense his energy that vibrates like the storm Lear rails against. Still... I would also suggest that after being disjointed the film was claustrophobic. The threat of France looms on the play's horizon while in the film, when actual war breaks out, I never got a sense of where the characters were and where the enemy lurked. One aspect I appreciated in Brannagh's adaption of Hamlet was the looming presence of Fortinbras. Though this film could be regarded as overlong, I found occasional film snippets of the Norwegian crown prince's smouldering in costume with his army provided a nice balance between the devious politics within the castle. This allowed for a greater contrast to the world at large. Here, in this King Lear, I would have appreciated some representation of the enemy beyond machine gun fire and helicoptors. An actual glimpse or an impression of the invasion would have helped create for me a greater sense of the stakes and the grim sides taken. And also, if Edmund is supposed to be lusted after by the two older sister, I didn't feel the actors showed this or offered an element of arousal. Nonetheless, this film is a force to be reckoned with. It is visually compelling. The acting is top notch while the work is difficult to digest, even in one sitting. King Lear as a play scars people and this film leaves a mark. Despite my difficulty with Hopkins, his performance is the reason the scar remains noticeable days after.

A strong adaptation marred by a poor central performance For me, the definitive King Lear was Owen Roe in Selina Cartmell's magisterial 2013 Abbey Theatre production in Dublin. The scenes on the heath were unlike anything I've ever seen, as Roe alternated, sentence by sentence between a fairly standard (if brilliantly staged) raging at the heavens, and turning directly to the audience and speaking quietly and calmly, almost emotionlessly. Sentence. By. Sentence. Without breaking the metre of the iambic pentameter verse! Of course, Cartmell's choice here is obvious; the use of two different styles of delivery serve as a succinct visual/aural metaphor for the inner turmoil of the character, but although it's a thematically simple enough device, it requires a performance of immense control to bring it off. And then we have Anthony Hopkins in writer/director Richard Eyre's TV adaptation for the BBC. Oh dear. What's especially disappointing is how little interested he seems in doing anything beyond giving the barest essentials in his interpretation of the part. Hopkins played Lear in over 100 performances in David Hare's 1986 National Theatre production, so how can someone who played the part this often possibly give an under par performance? Well, probably because he played the part this often. The performance is lethargic, jaded, lazy, as if it's routine, become so familiar that all meaning has evaporated from the text. Hopkins plays Lear as an easy-to-anger man, used to getting his own way, with little time for sentiment, whose grip on reality is becoming increasingly tenuous. Nothing wrong with that - it's a very basic reading of the character, but still nothing inherently wrong with it. The problem is, we've seen him play this character before, or a variation thereof, in everything from Legends of the Fall to Nixon to The Wolfman. Indeed, his performance in Eyre's Lear is, beat for beat, a virtual carbon copy of his performance in Julie Taymor's Titus. There are many similarities between the characters, to be sure, but not so many that the parts should be played in exactly the same manner (as a contrast, look at Brian Cox's work in the two roles; Titus in Deborah Warner's ground-breaking 1987 RSC production, and Lear in Warner's 1990 National Theatre production - three years, and an ocean of interpretive difference separate the performances). Hopkins's performance has two gears - scenery chewing and shouty scenery chewing. Also, his tendency to pause in the middle of verse lines is extremely distracting, and completely disrupts the meter. Such pauses serve to create artificial caesuras in the iambic pentameter, turning the verse into a bizarre amalgamation of anapaestic and dactylic hexameters, and even heptameters. A stronger director would have stamped this out, or had the actor speak in prose (as a few of the other actors do), but to have the actor speak in verse, yet show no respect for the verse is...strange. Thankfully the rest of the cast are universally strong. Emma Thompson as a nasty Goneril; Jim Broadbent as a sympathetic Gloucester; John MacMillan as a soft-spoken Edmund; Andrew Scott as an emotional Edgar; Jim Carter as a gruff Kent; Florence Pugh as a wide-eyed Cordelia; Karl Johnson as a serious Fool; Christopher Eccleston as a ridiculous Oswald; Anthony Calf as a take-charge Albany; and Chukwudi Iwuji as a considerate France. However, the film is stolen by Emily Watson and Tobias Menzies as a bloodthirsty Regan and Cornwall. Watson's Regan oozes raw sexuality, and the blinding scene clearly turns both of them on. Two terrific performances which left me wishing there was more of them in the play. Also impressive is Eyre's direction. His decision to set the play in modern London, with Lear as a retiring pseudo-dictator, works very well (Edgar is an astrophysicist, Edmund is in the armed forces). In this context, a scene in a shopping mall is especially well executed, as a now quite mad Lear wanders around the near-derelict shopping mall in a bad part of town, dressed like a vagrant, pushing a shopping trolley, and talking to a doll. It's a deeply unsettling image that encapsulates perfectly just how far he has fallen. Also well-conceived is the scene set in an asylum seekers' refugee camp. The political commentary is a little on the nose, as Lear looks around the camp at the faces of the refugees, forcing him to consider issues of which he's never before conceived, but it's effective and timely. All-in-all, this is a strong adaptation with an excellent cast brought down only by a weak central performance. Unfortunately, the part of Lear is so central that if it doesn't work, there's a problem. Hopkins's performance isn't so bad as to distract too much from the excellent work done elsewhere, but what's annoying about it is it could easily have been so much better.