The Arden

Walterdale’s board meets to deliberate on the season in a week’s time. I’ve been reading up a bit, so as to give myself some sharp (but by no means definitive) ideas about Lear, in case they ask me questions like “What will your Lear be like?” I find the best place to start when I’m getting acquainted with Shakespeare plays to be the introductions to the Arden editions. The Ardens are so thoroughly researched, it makes my head spin. In the past, Arden introductions used to talk about the plays in exclusively theoretical terms, as if they were poems or novels, not living, performable scripts. That’s changed a little bit with the Third Edition Ardens, but they’re still pretty print-focused.

However, that’s a good thing in my case, because I don’t really want to start out by reading all about other people’s productions of the play. It’s not that I object to borrowing clever tricks and tactics from other people’s shows—great artists steal and all that—I just don’t want my first impressions of the play to come from other people’s productions. And so, I’ve chosen a text which sees the play in abstract terms, focusing not upon the question of “how,” but more upon “what” and “why.”

The Proposal

I dropped off my proposals for Walterdale’s 2005-2006 season, including King Lear. The theme of the season is “Family Values” (tongue-in-cheek), which could be made to apply to nearly any Shakespeare play, especially the histories and tragedies. One of the characteristics of his plays that make them “universal” is his strong reliance on family dynamics. Most of us cannot relate to being a monarch or a murderer, but nearly everyone can think of a few times when they’ve hated their parents or wanted to disown their children.

So if the board of directors reject Lear, there are plenty of other Shakespeare plays I could sub in without compromising the season’s overarching theme. But I don’t see why they would object to Lear, unless they’ve caught the “unactable” virus. Charles Lamb started this ugly rumour back in 18??, writing that “The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted,” and somehow, despite 150 years of splendid, powerhouse productions, the reputation still persists. I guess it’s understandable—I mean, the play is huge, and reading it on the page gives you such a cosmic impression that it feels like a disservice to squeeze it into a finite theatre space.

But plays were written to be performed, and while inadequate productions can certainly be seen as doing their writers a disservice, I think I would rather have inadequate productions of my plays than none at all. Of course, my goal is a production worthy of Lear, and worthy of Shakespeare—not just adequate but out-and-out spectacular.