The Storm

I just finished rescripting the famous storm scene—the one which begins with Lear screaming at the tempest, “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks,” etcetera. It didn’t need a whole lot of fixing—it’s one of those scenes whose brilliance transcends the play around it, and becomes its own little drama. But despite the ease of adaptation, the storm still troubles me.

In the last two hundred years, the storm has become one of the biggest challenges in producing King Lear. Lighting and sound effects can create tremendous clamours, but if they grow too loud and fierce, they drown out Lear and the other characters. It’s also difficult to figure out exactly what sort of storm we’re dealing with: Shakespeare trots out every single image one could possibly associate with rough weather, and trying to realize them all on stage would short-circuit the audience’s sense (and possibly the theatre’s lighting board).

Here’s one example. This is Kent, speaking after Lear has finished the majority of his storm-rant:

Things that love night
Love not such nights as these: The wrathful skies
Gallow the very wanderers of the dark,
And make them keep their caves. Since I was man,
Such sheets of Fire, such bursts of horrid Thunder,
Such groans of roaring Wind, and Rain, I never
Remember to have heard. Man’s Nature cannot carry
Th' affliction, nor the fear.

Directors and producers are enticed with the challenge of creating an audio-visual ordeal which lives up to these sorts of hyperbole. But I think less has got to be more in a situation like this. In his own theatre, Shakespeare had very limited resources for storm effects: maybe some drums, or a metal spiral that clatters when you roll a cannonball inside it. No wind machines. No rain sticks. No lighting effects, since the Globe was open to the elements.

And that, of course, is why he poured all the fury and intensity of the storm into his poetry. It is a storm of the imagination; in fact, it seems deliberately crafted to provoke and extend the imagination, as if daring the audience to picture The Perfect Storm. Can an audience imagine something bigger, stronger, more terrifying than the sound and light effects of modern theatres? Of course they can.

I’m reminded of a similar case of imaginative hyperbole, in Macbeth. After killing Duncan, Macbeth goes to wash the blood from his hands. He exclaims:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.

Any make-up director who takes these lines literally and attempts to stain the poor actor’s hands with an oceanful of blood is clearly misinterpreting the purpose of the scene, and of the lines. The same is true for the storm; it can have a visual and aural presence, sure; but trying to stage the vast cosmic cataclysm which the characters see in their minds will only end in headaches.