The Vortex

My past experience with Shakespeare’s tragedies has taught me that each play has a sort of movement or momentum to it—one which can sometimes become apparent just by reading the play. Hamlet, for example, is like navigating a labyrinth—not only for its readers (who frequently complain they don’t understand what’s going on) but also for its characters (Hamlet calls the world a prison with many “confines, wards and dungeons”). Macbeth is like quicksand—when you’re reading it, you slog forward, until suddenly you realize there’s no going back. Othello is a rockslide or an avalanche, started by something tiny, escalating until it buries everything.

At first, when reading Lear, I felt frustrated because I couldn’t see the pattern of its movement. It was clearly absorbing me, but it didn’t seem to have a focal point from which I could orient myself. Sometimes it was quick and rough and dizzying, and sometimes it felt slow and impenetrable. I couldn’t make it out. Suddenly, it dawned on me that it was this uncertainty that gives the play its power. It draws you in to something, but you can’t tell what’s drawing you, or where you will end up, until you’re inside, and it’s too late.

Its movement, then, is like a whirlpool—or better yet, a black hole—with absolute darkness at its core. “Nothing will come of nothing,” says Lear, and that’s exactly what happens. Cordelia speaks the word “nothing,” and the word opens up a rift, like a singularity, that draws in all light and hope. A gaping wound. An empty eye socket. A vortex.

The Family

Further thinking about the three thematic approaches to the play: I don’t think I can justify taking a metaphysical approach to the production. I say “justify” because I would feel as though my interpretation would require more justification if it were about the universe, or God, or gods, or the absence of all the above. To make so grand a statement, a director would really have to understand the play, in the broadest sense. I’m not sure I’m there yet—and in fact, the more I read about the play, the less I feel I really understand.

A metaphysical production also needs to be definitive, and I don’t really believe drama is about definitiveness. A great theatrical production is open-ended, outward-reaching, asking questions without providing answers. If I were to say, for example, that my Lear exists within a cruel and godless cosmos, I would be preempting the right of both characters and audience members to arrive at contrary interpretations of the Lear world.

By contrast, a play about politics seems to beg for differing interpretations, because it will be performed by and for people with a wide range of political opinions. And a play about family is even better, because not everyone has politics, but everyone has family. On any given night, the audience will be composed of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, brothers and sisters, and they will all bring their own particular perspectives to the family dynamics in the play.

To some directors, that fact alone may be enough to make them shy away from a family-centric interpretation. You may want to make your audience sympathise with poor old Lear, for instance, but find your intentions frustrated when you end up with an audience of young women with dad issues. Or, if you try to play up Cordelia’s virtuousness, you may find yourself up against a crowd of savvy seniors who decide she’s a prissy spoiled brat who can’t speak up for herself. And so on.

None the less, certain things are pretty much universal. Families fight, and no matter what side of the conflict you’re on, you’re bound to find some sympathy in the depiction of the fight itself. Lear is about a family squabble that gets out of hand. Everyone will find someone different to blame, and someone different to sympathise with—but everyone in the audience will, by the final act, agree upon the fact that everybody suffers when a feud erupts.

On the practical side of things, I have confirmed my first two cohorts in this project: Jaclyn Thomey, my Production Manager, and Murray Goodwin, my Assistant Director. Next, I will need a crackerjack Stage Manager and a designer or two. The cast will come later—much later.

The Three Themes

What is it about Lear that makes it one of the most powerful stories in history? We tend to place it in the hallowed halls of harrowing human drama alongside huge mythic stories like Oedipus, King Arthur, or even the Passion—stories which not only affect us as fiction, but have even played a role in shaping our society.

Some scholars split Lear’s themes up in to three: the familial, the political, and the metaphysical. This is an easy way to break down a play that operates upon the reader or viewer on many different levels at once. I doubt that any production of the play has ever focused exclusively upon a single theme—it’s just not that kind of a play—but productions have certainly emphasized one theme over others.

The familial theme is a good place to start. It does two things at once: it makes the story more accessible (because we all have families), but it also makes it more fantastical, more like a fairy tale (wicked sisters, good sister, etc.). A lot of recent productions have de-emphasized Lear’s function as a king in favour of his role as patriarch. It’s a sensible move; we don’t think of kings or monarchs in the same way as people in Shakespeare’s time would have done. But Dads are Dads, in any century, and Dads can be cruel, and Daughters can retaliate, and so you’ve got a story that anyone can understand (or relate to, if they are unlucky enough to have that kind of dysfunctional family life).

The family aspect links Lear to stories like Oedipus (which is also about a king who discovers that there are more important things than being a king). It makes the cosmic story more intimate. It has a lot going for it. If it has a disadvantage, I’d have to say it can probably be found in the fact that Lear’s harsh words to his daughters sound too harsh when they are put in the context of a modern-day nuclear family. That doesn’t mean they aren’t believable; only that they aren’t forgivable. When we see Lear not as King but as Father, he is no longer “a man more sinned against than sinning.” He’s merely a brute.

The political aspect of the play is trickier, but also rewarding. I think nowadays it’s usually interpreted as a play about class, with Lear as the arrogant nobleman who learns to empathize with the plight of the lower classes. It sounds flippant, and maybe even apocryphal, but it’s right there, in Act 3, Scene 4: Lear sees Edgar the mad beggar and says:

“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this!”

When I read those lines, I feel a strong temptation to do the play as a commentary on 21^st century Albertan politics, with Lear as Ralph Klein. I probably would never go that far; but I do think there is something valuable (and still accessible) in telling the story of a selfish King who discovers that underneath his royal robes, he’s just “a foolish fond old man.”

Then there are the thorny metaphysical questions raised by the play. In particular, there’s the God question. Is there a God in the universe of King Lear? Or more than one god? Are they cruel and sadistic entities, or do they punish for a reason? Do they grant the characters (and the audience) any sort of respite by the end of the play, or do they leave us in a state of distress? Is there light at the end of the tunnel, or just perpetual night? These are the sorts of questions which drive interpreters mad—and just as soon as you think you’ve got them figured out, you have to start working out how to convey your findings to an audience. It’s a Herculean task.

Right now, if I were backed into a corner and forced to defend one interpretation of the play, I would have to say that the gods are neither cruel nor benevolent. Most of the grief and suffering in the play is brought about by human weakness or malevolence; what little is left over seems to be random, coincidental—perhaps a bit capricious but not direct enough to be the vengeance of an angry deity. I’m not sure if that means that the gods don’t exist in Lear’s world, but only that they are silent. But I don’t think they’re silent out of spite. Like the audience in the theatre, they are silent because they are shocked and dismayed. They’re watching a gigantic human car crash and they can’t look away.

Maybe it’s belittling the message of the play, to call the gods a bunch of rubber-neckers. But what else can one say about them? In other Shakespeare plays they intervene, they descend from the heavens and help to sort things out. They would sure be of some use in Lear’s world, but they never show up. Like in the real world, Lear and his fellow human beings are on their own.

I think one of the central issues for resolving these three thematic challenges will be the journey of the title character. If Lear suffers for good reasons, if we see his transition from King to Father to Beggar, if he reaches some sense of personal resolution before his death, then all these themes can be incorporated into that journey at different stages. It’s a bit like the four stages of grief: You’ve got Denial (‘I’m still the King!’), Anger (‘Pelican daughters!’), Bargaining (‘Come on, ye gods, let’s make a deal’), and Acceptance (‘Let’s away to prison’). In the course of that journey, you’ve got the political, the familial, and even the metaphysical.

Gee, when I put it that way, it doesn’t seem so huge. But I know better.

The Green Light

Lear has been approved for next season! Now that’s it’s gone from daydream to reality, it seems even larger and harder to wrap my brain around.

The board only raised one concern about the production, and it has nothing to do with the play per se: they warned me about the timing of the rehearsal period (November to February), pointing out that it is difficult to rehearse a large and complicated show over Christmas. In effect, they said, I’ll have to break from rehearsing after about three weeks, and resume another three weeks after that. That’s an obstacle, all right, but definitely negotiable.

There are (at least) two ways to handle it: either spend the first block doing text work, and then get on our feet in January; or else block the play like a speed demon without pausing to worry about text, intentions, relationships, etc. The latter would actually be more conducive to memorizing lines over Christmas—once you have the blocking in your “muscle memory,” it’s much easier to the lines into your head as well. But it expect it would make those first few weeks confusing and frustrating for the actors, especially those who are new to Shakespeare, and don’t have a firm grasp on the language yet.

The first alternative—“table” work in November—would be a much more gentle way to ease an inexperienced cast into what is (let’s not kid ourselves here) a very unsettling play. But it would make the second leg of rehearsals more hectic, as actors struggled to learn lines and blocking at the same time—scripts in hand, stumbling over their own feet, trying to use too many parts of the brain at once—I’ve seen it before, and it’s just as stressful, although maybe more familiar (some types of stress just come with the territory).

Hmm...I wonder if there might be ways to work memorization exercises into the text work? A couple of years ago, I discovered a wonderful book called “The Art of Memory” by Frances Yates, which revealed secrets of memorization that go back to Ancient Greece. They are designed to activate the imagination by associating words with images, and by placing a series of mental rebus puzzles within a familiar architectural environment. For instance, you close your eyes and “walk through” the house where you grew up, and as you enter each room, there’s a sort of pictogram waiting for you that prompts you to remember your lines.

It sounds terribly obscure, but I might be able to adapt it into some sort of rehearsal exercise. Lear is so jam-packed with visceral images, it seems foolish not to use them, somehow.

Well, lots of time to mull that over later. For now, I need to start collecting a crew, starting with a production manager and a stage manager. And I need to start reading. So much has been written about this play, I’ll only be able to get through a fraction of it before rehearsals.

The Concept

The board meeting has been postponed to Wednesday, giving me a couple of extra days to ponder my picks. If I were forced, at this point, to commit to a concept for Lear, it would be as timeless as possible. I generally don’t mind modern-dress productions of Shakespeare—I’ve done more than my fair share—but Lear is so big that I think transposing the setting is adding another unnecessary layer of interpretation to an already overloaded play.

The other side of that argument would be that period dress is alienating to a modern audience, and while I don’t really find that to be the case (I think most people know that Shakespeare set his plays in the past), I think Lear is, again, a problem, because its time is so hard to pin down. Myths about Lear set it in pre-Roman Britain, but when you go that far back in time, you don’t have much to go on. A scarcity of images and records from that period has left us with a performance tradition of Druidic robes and stonehenge-like standing stones. You mightaswell be outside of time.

And perhaps that is precisely where Lear takes place. I am reminded of the Fool’s bizarre soliloquy in 3.2, which ends with “This prophecy Merlin shall make, for he lives after my time.” Even if you expect an audience to accept that the Fool is psychic, the very fact that he mentions Merlin wrenches spectators out of any sense of historical reality, and throws the play into an achronological whirlpool of mythology. I’d like to see that whirlpool expand, not contract, and see what else it can pull in with its undertow.

That might mean working to keep the play from settling into any one time and place, but rather existing, moment to moment, in whatever locale seems most resonant for us, as twenty-first century interpreters. That’s easier said than done, of course, and it runs the risk of doing exactly what I wanted to avoid, which is slathering on a bunch of extra interpretive layers. If it works, it should work in glimmering instants—like the “Merlin” line, almost a throw-away; looking for moments, lines, or even images when a conduit can momentarily crack open, connecting an old play, an ancient myth, and a very modern audience.