King Lear at the Delacorte Theater; photo by Joan Marcus

“This is most strange,” the King of France says at the beginning of King Lear. “This is above all strangeness,” says Edgar near the end of it. The word “strange” and its variants are repeated no fewer than eleven times over the course of the play, a refrain to which the tragic action always returns.

The staging of Shakespeare in the Park’s King Lear matches the strangeness of the play itself. The director, Daniel Sullivan, eschews the old convention of full regalia and flouts the newer convention of “bold,” distracting staging, choosing instead a minimalist middle ground. John Lee Beatty’s set is simple and unobtrusive, consisting of a bare wooden platform with several sets of stairs on every side; a rough dark background that turns a velvety gray in the dimmed light; and a layer of gravel that looks like “moulten lead” (to borrow Lear’s expression). The set almost focuses attention on its own barrenness, a strange and ingenious effect of self-negation. Austere garments and dissonant music round out the high seriousness of the play.

Unfortunately, this seriousness does not always receive its due. Jay O. Sanders (Kent) does not embody the good counsel and dignity of the king’s chief advisor. Instead, he becomes entrapped in a strange, hard to place accent for the bulk of the play. Sanders’s over-the-top alter ego amuses, but the amusement comes at a price: Since we never take Kent all that seriously, it’s hard to feel the pain of his exile, or the loss Lear has brought on himself by banishing him.

John Lithgow, luckily, carries much of the play, and with the help of Edgar (Chukwudi Iwuji) and Gloucester (Clarke Peters), his Lear awakens the compassion and sorrow of the audience in full measure. The stage-acting veteran has given life to a character of immense complexity, and shape to his fragmentary language.

The same cannot be said of many of the supporting actors. Goneril and Regan, played by Annette Bening and Jessica Hecht, seem almost dead in their delivery; their speech is flat; the words fall out like stones. Somehow it has been assumed that evil is emptiness, rather than the teeming source of multiplied perversities which Shakespeare conceives it to be. Bening’s Goneril is stiff and staid; she lacks the rich and varied malice of the murderess, whose lust for power is almost sensual.

Bening speaks clearly enough, as many of the cast do, but the intonation is off much of the time. Regan alternates between a honeyed drawl and a harsh, word-by-word enunciation used to deliver edicts and death warrants. This cross between petty tyrant and charming temptress hardly suits her unfeeling nature, or the severe, personal abuse she inflicts on her father. Even Jessica Collins, who plays Cordelia, cannot go beyond a one-dimensional goodness—she is a simplified Christ-figure who wants something human. The secondary characters dwindle. Of course, most characters do pale in light of Lear’s arm-swinging madness and impotent rage. Nonetheless there is no excuse for them to be played as mere echo chambers; they are richly drawn and demand a nuance of their own.

A strange mixture emerges from these elements. Nature and artifice mingle and make for an eerie, disorienting atmosphere. Stiffness and flatness in some of the cast serve as backdrops for the forceful expression and dynamism of the rest. The production succeeds admirably where it most counts, where the play reaches its highest pitch of tragedy: Lear howling on the heath; Edgar gashing himself as Poor Tom; Gloucester attempting suicide and being pathetically disappointed. The skin tingles to hear the famous passages declaimed with such energy in the cool of night, and you feel in these moments that Lear is not just the story of a king in decline but of the end of the world, the unaccountable and impenetrable darkness that covers all, from the proudest king down to Poor Tom the madman. The rest of the play sounds rather too much like a recitation, and, were it a playwright less talented than Shakespeare, perhaps such plodding rhythms might be forgiven. As it is, Shakespeare’s phrasing demands not only technical precision but depth of feeling. Without this, the tragedy of Lear seems too much like a destination without a journey, a peak of heartbreaking sadness with no path leading up to it, which the mind suddenly beholds without the guidance of a thickened plot and evolving dynamics. Perhaps further performances will remedy these defects; for now, we have a Lear of fine moments—solemnity in grief, majesty in madness, sympathy in vain—but not the full-fledged art and arc of Shakespeare’s deepest play.

For a different take on Shakespeare in the Park’s King Lear, be sure to check back for Kevin D. Williamson’s coverage in the September issue of The New Criterion.

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