Fighty Tension

Another artist has joined the Lear crew: Andrew Gummer, who is an outstanding local actor, but who is helping out with this show in the capacity of fight director. Andy was involved in another production of King Lear about five years ago (I believe he played Edmund, although it might have been Edgar), so he knows the play well. He’s also directed fights for several previous Walterdale shows. Our violence is in good hands.

I enjoyed talking with Andy about Lear from a stage combat perspective. There aren’t a lot of major fights in the play, but the ones that occur serve very particular functions, I think. Early in the play, there’s some casual violence (mostly Kent harassing poor Oswald), but I don’t think it’s meant to be taken seriously; it’s the sort of slapstick violence that Lear seems to like and to which Goneril takes great offence. Then we get the storm, and the madness, and the tension gets ratched right up to full—but there still isn’t much explicit violence to serve as a release valve.

Until Gloster’s eyes. I realized, when I was talking about it today, that this scene contains two murders (the Servant killing Cornwall, and Regan returning the favour), but the deaths are framed by the act of the blinding: that is, one eye is removed before the murders and the other eye afterwards (Cornwall takes his time in dying, of course).

I’m not sure what this symmetry means, but I do know the blinding is a strange form of stage violence—intimate and unimaginable, it makes you cringe and scream inside, but it lacks the release of a nice, clean stabbing or choking. The overall effect is: one eye goes (our tension is internalized), then blood is shed (our tension is released), and then a second eye goes (and the tension goes back inside). It’s like inhaling, exhaling... and then inhaling again. And Shakespeare leaves us holding our breaths.

The duel between Edmund and Edgar in Act Five has a similar, suspended feel to it. At this point, the play is so tightly wound that nearly anything could set it off. There has been a battle, but it takes place entirely offstage. Now the two brothers face off at last, and we get the sense (although not for any logical reason) that the play’s ending hinges upon this conflict. But they talk and talk and talk, and the tension goes up. And then they finally fight (Andy and I agree that a long, flashy duel with light swords is in order)—we get release. Edgar stabs Edmund! And does that mean that Lear and Cordelia will be spared? Is there a happy ending in sight?

Of course there isn’t; and the tension and agony now mounts while Edgar unmasks, and Edmund is arrested and exposed, and Goneril rushes off to kill herself, and the two dead queens are hauled onstage. Edmund continues to bleed to death while all this happens, and then finally, 100 lines after he gets stabbed, Edmund says:

I pant for life. Some good I mean to do,
Despite of mine own nature. Quickly send—
Be brief in it—to the castle, for my writ
Is on the life of Lear and on Cordelia;
Nay, send in time.

Too little too late, though (and one can’t help wondering if Edmund the Bastard knows this); Lear enters with Cordelia’s body, howls for 50 lines, and then gives up the ghost.

To make a long story short: the climactic duel, which would ordinarily serve as a release, or catharsis, for the audience’s tension, doesn’t provide any release at all. The audience exhales, but inhales right afterwards, and stays thus, turning slowly blue, right up to the point when Lear finally dies. Both acts of violence are like a last deep breath before diving much, much deeper than before.

Hmm...between that image, and the previous, overarching image of the whirlpool...I wonder if an underwater Lear might be in order...?