Images I

Images, vignettes, stage pictures, frozen moments...

Kent in the first scene, standing up for Cordelia. His sword comes out, not to threaten but to plant in front of Lear, a gesture of his loyalty but also his intransigence. Lear kicks the sword away from him.

End of the first scene, Goneril trying to convince Regan that something must be done about their father. But Edmund has made his entrance for Scene Two a bit early, and Regan is distracted. Goneril grabs her face, hauls her sister’s eyes to meet her own. Foreshadows Goneril plucking Gloucester by the beard...

Edgar runs from mounted soldiers (before his soliloquy in 2.3). Trying to make a simple line across the stage, but every time he sees a light, or hears the thunder of hoofbeats, he ducks down...

Lear and Fool in the storm. They try to make a simple line across the stage, but every time they see the flash of lightning, or hear the thunder, they duck down. The moment of terror in a lightning storm is the silence just after the flash, when you can’t help but count the seconds before the crash. Is it getting closer? Is it coming for them? Will they find shelter? Or will Lear fight back?

Desperation in the Fool’s jokes once they’re in the hovel. Perhaps the weather has done him in—a racking cough or the spasms that accompany a fever. But he fights it, tries to comfort Lear with bits of their old banter. Their last exchange, quiet, hopeful but acknowledging all that’s been lost:

LEAR: We’ll go to supper in the morning.
FOOL: And I’ll go to bed at noon.

Edgar, standing with his blind and suicidal father, trying to convince the old man that they stand before the cliffs of Dover. Did they go there, long ago, when Edgar was a boy? Gazing down with wide eyes at the tiny people on the shore, it was the first time he ever truly saw something, the first time he appreciated what it meant to see, to have sight, what a gift it was. His father took him there, gave him the gift of understanding. Can he make his father understand the gift of life?

...Yes, we’ve suffered, yes, we’ve lost so much. We’re losing still. But what do we still have? “See better, Lear.” Look past the faults and find the heart.