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.