Permission to Laugh

This week I saw Walterdale’s production of The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh. The company did a wonderful job of maintaining the delicate balance of McDonagh’s tragic humour—the frequent collisions of off-beat comedy and very bleak reality that took the audience aback as they struggled to reorient themselves.

It made me think about Lear’s sense of comedy and tragedy. It’s hardly a balance, of course; Lear is far more relentless in its tragic vision than Inishmaan (or any other work of literature, except maybe Oedipus). But Shakespeare knew audiences well enough to know that too much relentlessness takes its toll. And there are moments of levity to help them pace themselves through the long, dark night of Lear’s soul.

The recent production at the Globe Theatre (2001, dir. Barry Kyle) apparently received a lot of laughter from its audiences—but it was probably nervous laughter, because it’s never very long in Lear until the darkness cloeses in again.

Part of the problem might be with the Fool. He’s supposed to lighten the first three acts of the play (he disappears at the end of Act Three), but modern directors tend to make him old and sad—sometimes even caustic in his quips at Lear. Also, modern audiences have trouble understanding his puns and songs—although I happen to think that some of his lines are meant to be nonsensical, that doesn’t stop us from trying to work them out. And that’s not funny, it’s just frustrating.

But probably the biggest challenge to Lear’s comedy is letting the audience know that they’re allowed to laugh. That means finding ways to engage them on that level very early in the play. How did Shakespeare do it? The Fool doesn’t appear until Act 1, Scene 4. I suppose Edmund gulling Gloucester (in 1.2) might contain some laughs, especially if the actor playing Gloucester lets the lines in that scene lead his character (he sounds like Polonius—a windbag and a toady). But if there’s any humour in the “love auction” scene (1.1), it’s all but invisible to our eyes.

Of course, there are always silences to fill, if one is creative but stays within the boundaries of the text. I have an odd image of the first three lines of 1.1 in my head: Kent and Gloucester are discovered talking downstage:

KENT: I thought the king had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.

GLOUCESTER: It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most, for equalities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either’s moiety.

Then they fall silent as they hear a giggle from behind the empty throne. They extract Edmund and a chambermaid, hastily dressed.

KENT: Is not this your son, my lord?

GLOUCESTER: His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge. I have so often blushed to acknowledge him that now I am braz’d to’t.

I don’t know if that would create the ideal context for Lear’s strange recipe, but it’s still not a bad idea: after all, there’s nothing like a naughty bit to grab an audience’s attention right off the top (see Romeo & Juliet if you don’t believe me).