The Hopkins Review

The Royal National Theatre’s production of King Lear, directed by Sam Mendes, broadcast in HD to hundreds of cinemas in the United States on May 1, was not the definitive staging of the play. (How could there be such a thing?) It was, however, a fine and powerful staging, not particularly high-concept, a showcase for acting rather than directorial re-imaginings. As Lear, Simon Russell Beale was disquietingly power-hungry in the opening scene, treating his daughter Regan like a privileged daddy’s girl, using a microphone to issue commands as if to amplify his sovereignty even as he made a ritualized show of giving it up. He was a Stalinesque autocrat, full of what the play calls “darker purpose” and unpredictably dangerous to those around him; Beale had played Stalin in an earlier National Theatre broadcast of John Hodge’s play Collaborators in 2012. I thought Beale’s anger reached a fortissimo level very quickly, and worried that he would have nowhere to go in later scenes, but he did in fact achieve an impressive climax on the heath, in the great encounter between maddened king and howling winds. His performance throughout shifted adroitly from mood to mood. The sudden breakdown into an old man’s confusion—

I will have such revenges on you bothThat all the world shall … I will do such things …What they are yet I know not, but they shall beThe terrors of the earth— [End Page 556]

was painful to behold, while his colloquy with the blinded Gloucester in Act IV was actually funny, as it should be. Bedecked with flowers and a snap-brim hat like the one his Fool had worn, full of a tattered wit, waiting out the time on a bare stage with an aged crony, for a moment Beale turned tragedy into Waiting for Godot. The ultimate test for a Lear, however, comes in the final scene, as he enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms. Could there be harder lines for an actor to speak than “Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never”? Beale rendered each “never” singly, as if punishing himself with its implication before going on to the next term in the dreadful series. Better yet was his delivery of Lear’s final words: “Look there! Look there!” These are sometimes spoken as a relapse into delusion, a smiling fantasy that Cordelia’s dead lips are stirring with life after all, but Beale was more heroic (and, I think, more tragic) than that. He drew himself up, surveyed the dismal scene before him, and pronounced “Look there! Look there!” as an indictment, as if to say “Look what you’ve done.” Or perhaps “Look what we’ve done.”

This King Lear was a hybrid, not a film but a theatrical performance relayed via screen. To cinema audiences it gave certain advantages, such as right-on-the-stage views of the action; sometimes I wanted the camera further back. The wicked Edmund’s soliloquy in Act I was photographed in close-up, but it is really a speech spoken to the house, and it should be seen to be spoken to the house. Delivering with a smile some of the cleverest prose Shakespeare ever wrote (“I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest...