“Tis the time’s plague, when madmen lead the blind”: Sir Ian Mckellen in 2018’s ‘King Lear’
Because I am a gargantuan dork willing to arise at the crack of dawn to stand in line for 2 hours with other gargantuan dorks, I managed to score a literal £5 ticket to have my eyeballs blessed for more than 3 hours by the symphonic nuances of Sir Ian Mckellen, Mithrandir himself, as the most iconic patriarch of Shakespearean theatre. The entire thing was an utter five-course feast for the brain and, reader, my creative well is overflowing.
The mercurial setting of Jonathan Munby’s production is predominately modern, with hoovers and radios and beanies, but the players still exchange letters instead of texts or emails, and while the first half unfolds upon a huge circular red carpet with a walkway running through the stalls to the back of the theatre, the curtain rises in the second half on an expanse of weathered white stone. No doubt this staging was designed as a poignant metaphor for the luscious façade that is swiftly ripped away, exposing the eroding bones of throne and family beneath. Shakes is always timeless, but to see a 400-year-old play dissecting the vanity of patriarchs, the derision of wisdom, and kingdoms on the brink of dissolution in an age of self-delusional echo chambers is an arresting paradox. This is an all too recognisable world where truth lies hidden in the raging heart of a crucible of fantasies while unions fall apart from within and throughout it all Ian Mckellen reigns supreme as the frailest of fathers crumbling into insanity.
“When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools. This a good block.
It were a delicate stratagem to shoe
A troop of horse with felt. I’ll put ’t in proof.
And when I have stol’n upon these sons-in-law,
Then, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!”
No one does Shakes like him, the way he lives and breathes every line and plays with every syllable, from the bitter pain with which he fractures to pieces as Goneril and Regan reduce his retinue of knights to the rage and despair as he falls to his knees in the storm and carries the dead Cordelia on his back. I have no earthly idea how he recreates that from scratch every single night. It’s a behemoth of a production. The use of music is stunning, and no words can describe the absurdist horror of the eye gouging of Gloucester to the tune of Beggin’ as the frenetic firebrand that is Kirsty Bushell’s Regan careens around the bloodbath, scream-singing.
All three sisters, portrayed by Bushell, Claire Price, and Anita-Joy Uwajeh, are deliciously malevolent as they spiral into glorious toxic darkness and my appetite has been entirely whetted for Tessa Gratton’s Queens of Innis Lear. Price’s Goneril is regal and austere, going from blue satin gown to white skirt suit, with a gloriously resonant Shakespearean voice that reminds me of Pippa Nixon or Alexandra Gilbreath, and her chemistry with Bushell’s Regan is at turns moving and downright hilarious, like the face of bemusement they pull at each other as Cordelia leaves the room in the first Act. A special mention also has to go to James Corrigan as Edmund. He has that rare skill of making the Bard’s words effortlessly intelligible in his phrasing, intonation, and sheer comic timing.
Watching Ian Mckellen clutching Cordelia to his chest as he desolately questions mortality is something I’ll never forget.
“No, no, no life?
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Oh, thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.”
That scene always reminds me of Falstaff at the end of Henry IV Part 1, the foundations of his world crumbling as he muses on the intangibility and illusion of honour: “What is honour? A word. What is in that word ‘honour’? What is that ‘honour’? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it?” He concludes, “Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism”. What the king and Hotspur consider the mark of princely privilege and true valour is reduced to an adornment of the dead, as much of a deception as the lies Hal orchestrates to earn it. Falstaff’s muddied judgement and failure at playing the game ultimately see him bested, despairing at the bloodshed into which he leads men at Shrewsbury and the injustice of the recruitment system, confounded by his campaign to reform and transcend the boundaries of these incompatible worlds while Hal exceeds at the traversal: “Counterfeit? I lie; I am no counterfeit”.
Like Edgar is in Lear, Hal is the victor at the close of that play, but it is not a heroic victory, it is the fragile confluence of a series of political manoeuvres in light of the fact the realm has been rocked by deposition and brewing rebellion through which the southern wind’s “hollow whistling in the leaves / Foretells a tempest and a blustering day”. In Henry IV the ultimately unresolved and expectant ending heralds a second part but also expresses awareness of the nuance between the finality of the comic and tragic plays, and the state of continuum in which the historical moment resides. There is as much of an ending to the story as there is to the crown it follows. King Lear, on the other hand, which must rank with Hamlet and Macbeth as one of the most visceral explorations of the human capacity for greed and the inevitability with which it rips people apart ever written, storms relentlessly towards carnage. Its finality resonates with the force of Cordelia’s silenced song.
Lear’s descent into darkness is, I think, the AU Tempest, the bloodbath that would ensue if scrabbles over power led to the death of Miranda and saw Prospero spiralling into the rage he quells at the magic circle, drowning his enemies instead of his book. It is Ariel who saves Prospero, the protean magical agent who can be aligned with Mercurius, the elusive alchemical anomaly Jung compared to a storm bird imprisoned in a bottle. Lear’s Ariel, however, is Kent, who urges him to “see better”, just as Ariel influences Prospero to conclude the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance. But like Horatio, Kent must see her heart broken as her old friend and master succumbs to the final silence, beseeching Edgar to “Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass” (I say ‘her’ not ‘his’ given I was treated with the gloriously gender-bent Kent of Sinead Cusack).
King Lear is the play Shakes decided to pen and perform for the King at the height of Christmas festivities in 1606, mere months after the introduction of the Union Jack. And, as historian David Starkey put it, “it would be hard to think of a more blatantly inappropriate choice”. But as ever the Bard knew exactly what he was doing, crafting this sweeping story of the division of a mythical Celtic king’s dominion hinged upon an act of regal folly that drops a depth charge into the waters of Britain.
After the death in 1603 of Elizabeth I, his mother’s first cousin once removed, James VI of Scotland became James I of England, and his campaign to fully integrate the kingdoms began. That same year James had penned a treatise on kingship entitled Basilikon Doron or The King’s Gift, initially in secret, but it became the bestseller that spring, expounding on his elevated vision of the crown and how he perceived himself as an actor on a stage. He also wrote an explicit instruction to his son Henry to leave everything to his own eldest son, “otherwise by dividing your kingdoms ye shall leave the seed of division and discord among your posterity”, citing the story of Leir from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century History of the Kings of Britain as evidence. Shakes pounced on this line and wove it into a devastating narrative completely dismantling James’ alignment between age and authority and inverting the law of patriarchy, “the younger rises when the old doth fall”. This is the genius of the hundred knights scene. James wrote of the aura of even an ex-king, a “degraded” monarch, still being deserving of respect. Lear likewise expects the treatment of a ruler and the garments of kingship even though he has been stripped of the substance of his power, but he is punished cruelly for it by his daughters. The perennial triumph of the Lear sisters is in the lesson that power comes from power and nowhere else (if that sentiment jogs your memory, this is probably why – she gets it).
In Act 4, the Fool proclaims the ever-enduring political axiom: “Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs downhill, lest it break thee with following. But the great one that goes upward, let him draw thee after”. As David Starkey writes, “This is pure Hobbes. It is a pity that James’ son Charles I, who preferred music and masques to the drama, did not listen more carefully to this dialogue on monarchy and its limitations”. Touché.
Suffice it to say, Gandalf will always be my Lear.
