Trust the writer, particularly when the writer is Shakespeare
Nine people die in King Lear, ten if you include the Fool, whose fate is uncertain. Five of these die onstage. The current production of King Lear at the National Theatre in London has moments of startling clarity, when the actors are allowed to focus their considerable intelligence on illuminating the lines, but among other peculiarities it inflates the onstage death toll to eight. The result in each case is weird. Other characters watch people die without making comment, or walk onstage and do a double-take, registering the presence of a body, and then saying whatever it was they were going to say anyway.
The Fool's onstage death at the hands of the king– brutally beaten in a fit of madness – is a brilliant theatrical moment that answers one of the text's unanswered questions, at the cost of making the rest of the scene incoherent. Kent and Edgar witness the attack. Gloucester, entering, sees the Fool, presumably battered and bleeding but not yet dead (the Fool has one more line, which he speaks from inside a bathtub, raising a bloody hand, which is all the audience can see of him). Not one of them has a word to say about it.
It's a measure of Shakespeare's genius that his plays can be endlessly reinvented in production. By the same measure he should be trusted to know his craft.
The scene that follows is a mess for different reasons. As Shakespeare wrote it, three servants are sent by the Duke of Cornwell to fetch Gloucester. Gloucester is brought in, tied to a chair, and questioned by Cornwall and his wife Regan. Gloucester is defiant, stating for the first time his opposition to Cornwall's ruthless behaviour. Cornwall punishes him by gouging out one of his eyes. A servant protests. Swords are drawn. The servant is stabbed by Regan, but not before mortally wounding Cornwall. Enraged, Cornwall removes Gloucester's other eye. The scene ends with Regan helping Cornwall offstage, and the remaining two servants, horrified at what they have witnessed, determined to help Gloucester.
The scene is brilliantly written. A whirlwind of words and action, it represents both the play's darkest horror and its moral turning point. But in this production, the verbal interrogation is interrupted with three bouts of waterboarding, performed by the servants. This turns them into willing torturers, which makes nonsense of the attitudes they will express minutes later and blurs the distinction between the courageous dissident
and the two mute onlookers. It also destroys the scene's momentum. And with what benefit? We are alerted to the connection between Lear's kingdom and current events. But isn't this something we should be trusted to work out for ourselves?
Shakespeare set King Lear in pre-Roman Britain. He also set it in a place and time of shifting identity on the earth and under the heavens. And he understood that the mechanisms of tyranny, the opportunities it offers to those with ruthless ambition and the stark choices it forces on decent people, are universal.
Joe Treasure is the author of two novels: “The Male Gaze” and “Besotted”, and teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Read more of him at http://joetreasure.blogspot.co.uk/
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