I have a problem with Shakespeare's "King Lear". Lear behaves so idiotically in the first scene that it's hard to feel sorry for him in the rest of the play. I've seen Olivier, Orson Welles and Patrick Magee (who played Lear as Winston Churchill), and I think three or five others on film, and at least five on stage, and I've always thought that Lear got his comeuppance. I began to think that it was due to the fact that I'm Scorpio, and hence implacable.
But I have to hand it to Ian McKellen (whose performance of Macbeth back in the 70s I positively loathed) - his Lear in this Trevor Nunn production touched my heart. I believe what convinced me was that Lear, already in the opening scene, was so childishly emotional about Cordelia's sass that it sanctions his behavior - he's already half-mad. In this production, Lear does not go from sane to mad at the hands of his daughters; they just give him a slight push in the wrong direction. And actually, this production convinced me that this is what Shakespeare intended, too: Goneril and Regan do hint at Lear not being all there, even before he officially goes mad. I've never seen it before, so hats off to Nunn.
And as for Gandalf McKellen: his Lear is expertly underplayed, as are several of the other characters (save Edmund and Edgar who remain true to the traditional British tendency to overact and over-articulate Shakespeare and to play great passions by always spitting out the syllables one at a time in a way that's reminiscent of voice coach Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the 1920s).
But on the whole - and while we're waiting to see how Radcliffe's and Pacino's Lear pans out - this is the King Lear you should see.
But I have to hand it to Ian McKellen (whose performance of Macbeth back in the 70s I positively loathed) - his Lear in this Trevor Nunn production touched my heart. I believe what convinced me was that Lear, already in the opening scene, was so childishly emotional about Cordelia's sass that it sanctions his behavior - he's already half-mad. In this production, Lear does not go from sane to mad at the hands of his daughters; they just give him a slight push in the wrong direction. And actually, this production convinced me that this is what Shakespeare intended, too: Goneril and Regan do hint at Lear not being all there, even before he officially goes mad. I've never seen it before, so hats off to Nunn.
And as for Gandalf McKellen: his Lear is expertly underplayed, as are several of the other characters (save Edmund and Edgar who remain true to the traditional British tendency to overact and over-articulate Shakespeare and to play great passions by always spitting out the syllables one at a time in a way that's reminiscent of voice coach Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the 1920s).
But on the whole - and while we're waiting to see how Radcliffe's and Pacino's Lear pans out - this is the King Lear you should see.