First Lap Done

Just like that? Six weeks of rehearsal are past, and I won't see most of these faces until January? Strange...but I think we're all leaving with a strong sense of expectation. We know we've got the potential for something really great here, but we have to take some time to let it brew before we start to serve it up.

Last night and tonight were both focused on the last scene of the play: a long, intense catastrophe which ends with more bodies dead than are left standing. I scheduled it last deliberately, of course, but also partly out of fear. I had hoped that, by the time we got around to it, the director's instincts would have kicked in, and the answers would have presented themselves to me. Well, not quite. What happened was, I blocked it fairly hastily on Tuesday night, and then spent most of Thursday trying to envision the stage composition (tricky, as I've said, with actors missing).

Yet, in spite of my fear and uncertainty, it played out very naturally. Apart from a few oblique lines at the start, when Edmund and Albany are engaged in a power struggle over the kingdom (and Regan and Goneril are engaged in a power struggle over Edmund), it is what it is: a scene where people die, and other people watch them die. In fact, the last hundred lines or so have a remarkable nested effect: Cordelia is dead; Lear is watching Cordelia be dead; Kent, Edgar and Albany are watching Lear watch Cordelia be dead; and the audience is watching them. So, staggeringly simple and mind-bogglingly complex at the same time. Welcome to Shakespeare.

Knowing that much of Thursday would be spent fine-tuning the blocking (and having Dale carry Anna-Maria onstage a dozen times), I paused at the end of Wednesday's rehearsal to scrutinize Lear's final lines. Dale, Max, Allan, and Keiran all paused with me, and we stood in a circle and spoke of it in hushed tones, as if we were discussing the passing of a loved one. In our version, Lear says:

No, no, no life?
Why should a Dog, a Horse, a Rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.
Pray you undo this Button. Thank you, Sir.
Do you see this? Look on her—Look—her lips,
Look there, look there.

Lots of challenges and pitfalls for an actor here. How does one deliver a line made up of nothing but "nevers"? What's the deal with the button? And (the really big question): does Lear die knowing that Cordelia is dead, or thinking (once again) that she's alive?

Lear has a button, but by now, it is no longer in his possession (Edgar has it, and he will affix it to his own collar when he accepts Albany's offer to rule the kingdom). Why does he ask to have his button undone? Who is he asking? He has already rejected Kent ("Prithee away"), and doesn't seem to acknowledge anyone else on the stage ("Mine eyes are not o'th'best."). Dale had an unexpected suggestion: what about God? (Or Nature, if you want to keep the cosmology of the play consistent; but at this point, who's counting?)

Perhaps it is a metaphorical button--not unrelated to the real one, which stood for his earthly power. In order to rejoin Cordelia, he first had to overcome his guilt at banishing her, which he does in the storm by relinquishing his stranglehold on authority: "Come, unbutton here!" He cries, shifting from King to beggar in an instant. Much later, after he has passed out of madness, he does get to see Cordelia again, and she forgives him--and even though they are captured, he is happy to be with her. He wants to be her father, not her king. But Fortune has a final twist of the knife, and Cordelia is taken from her. How can he rejoin her now? By relinquishing his life: "Undo this button." And the "thank you, Sir" becomes particulary poignant, when contrasted with his formerly antagonistic relationship with Nature. He's come a long way.

As Dale admits, "It'll be hard to sell." But he's already starting to get there. And, as is often the case with Shakespeare, one solution leads to others. The decision to give up his life reveals the state in which he dies--he is not in anguish, nor is he deluded into thinking she revives. "Look there, look there" is looking up, where Cordelia is already waiting for him. And it even helps us to resolve the "Never, never, never, never, never," since that line can now help Lear move from despair all the way to acceptance--like all the stages of grief condensed into ten rhythmic syllables.

Ah, Shakespeare. Is there anything he can't do?