King Lear

I have read altogether too many reviews of this film which bash it all to hell because the reviewer doesn't agree with Brook's reading of KING LEAR. To all such folk I would like to say: We Shakespeare fans should positively glory in the fact that every reader (and a fortiori every director) has his or her own interpretation of all the plays. Given Brook's interpretation, the film is wonderful.

This version of Shakespeare's greatest tragedy is not only consistent with itself, which most aren't, it is acted to a hilt. The characters are brilliantly portrayed. The interactions between them appear as the absolute and utter epitome of conflict and love, of the heroic and villainous way people act when confronted with a situation that is calculated to freak a human being out.

My favorite characterization is that of the Fool, who utterly steals the show and who becomes almost a Greek chorus. The way he interacts with Lear suggests a metaphysical mood of "We know exactly what's going on here, don't we?" The understanding between these two is too deep to be expressed in normal language; in the conversation around "The reason why the seven stars are only seven" (which would have struck any of the other characters, except maybe Kent, as a demented sequence of non sequiturs) suggests that Lear knows, at least at that moment, how the story will turn out, and that his attitude is one of "what is't to leave betimes? Let be." The Fool is here a prophet of absurdity, a Dark Age cross between a Marx Brother and Lenny Bruce.

And I challenge anyone to show me any actors who could do Kent and Gloucester better than those who portrayed them in this film. To say nothing of the wonderful job Scofield does with the title role.

Brook's Lear is almost sociopathically unfeeling until disaster begins to overtake him. To be sure, this view of Lear is not mine. But again, Shakespeare's characters are topics inexhaustible, and there is no such thing as a Lear to end all Lears. Whether one agrees with Brook or not, he carries his idiosyncratic reading off brilliantly---just as brilliantly as Laurence Olivier and Ian Holm in their utterly un-Brookish TV versions. I say: Let it ride! Let's have as many defensible and indefensible Lears as possible, and let's have them as utterly contradictory of each other as the 1945 and 1991 film versions of Henry the Fifth are.

By the way, I am a recent convert to this position. Before I saw the light, I was (for example) utterly ticked off at Kenneth Branagh's film of HAMLET, because it portrayed the Prince as having had sex with Ophelia way back when, and because its Fortinbras was an uncultured creep who dissed Hamlet by tearing down his father's monument. Wasn't it obvious that the text utterly contradicts both notions? Yep! But Branagh would have every right to say to me, "The hell with you, go make your own film." And so would Brook to his critics.

See it, friend. I look forward to our friendly argument.

in a moment of irony that could occur only in cinema, the definitive version of Shakespeare's 'king Lear' is Kurosawa akira's 1985 'ran'. only Kurosawa - at the end of his own career and looking back at at a century of blindness socially and politically, that dragged his culture through the horrors of the Tojo regime and the second world war - could grasp the essential insight of Shakespeare's vision of political perversion arising from simple but fundamental personal mistakes in judgment.

brook, of course, doesn't go after that. in fact, the issues just noted have been missed just about entirely by every American and British version of the play i've seen, even Laurence Olivier's farewell performance on television just before he died.

so when we come to brook's film, we have to let go of the hope that this will be the 'ur-Lear' that we seem to have misplaced in the west ever since the Elizabethan era.

in fact, let's let go of Shakespeare completely, here - this is a peter brook film, and brook is actually after something fundamentally cinematic - but not necessarily Shakespearean.

brook's film is a relentless portrayal of the world turned upside down. the most memorable quality of the film - and it stuck to me for many years - is the camera work, that gets unsteadier and more rapidly cut as the film goes on, until the audience feels trapped inside a house in a hurricane - and one that's quickly falling apart.

to find some ground in this visual catastrophe, the audience will desperately grab onto Shakespeare's words or the fine performances by the wonderful cast - but be warned - that's not really going to help much, and it's not supposed to.

brook, who made his name by approaching theatrical stage performances in a rather daring visual style, clearly wanted to see how far he could push the medium - the audience will have to decide whether he's successful - but the effort itself is worthy of respect.

What's good: Alan Webb's Gloucester and Jack MacGowran's Fool both threaten to steal the picture. Webb is immensely touching in his attempted suicide, but then, I have trouble thinking of a bad Gloucester. Cyril Cusack as Albany and Tom Fleming as Kent should also be praised, and Patrick Magee is creepy as ever as Cornwall.

Henning Kristiansen's cinematography is stunning, rendering Jutland in winter the most inhospitable Learscape ever, and this is the same fellow who shot the lush "Babette's Feast" in the same general location! When Lear and friends are outside being battered by the storm, we see the ungrateful villains inside basking in the warmth of a gigantic roaring fireplace. The visual contrast has never been greater. When Poor Tom's cold, he's really cold in real snow, not just clasping himself and shivering on cue.

Peter Brook's productions often involve wholesale cuts and rearrangements, plus hefty doses of non-authorial content. Yes, this Lear is cut to the bone, the style owes much to Bergman, Beckett, Brecht, etc.

The criminal waste is that Paul Scofield was a major Lear of his generation, and it's gutted here. His magnificent voice is thinned out to a thread, and much of the time the character is distant, veiled and under-energized. His disintegration arouses pity, but no audience involvement. We watch him die from a million miles away, and lose more than we gain with this application of alienation technique.

By the same token, Irene Worth's whispered Goneril is not the volcano we want. For example, she is incapable of expressing lust for Edmund, and that's a crucial omission, not in the text, but in the performance. Two fine actors are caught at considerably less than their best, giving the director what he wanted.

The energy level all around is a bit low, which kills much of what remains of Shakespeare's language, but what really hurts is the leaden pace. Considering half the play is missing, we start slowly, and after Gloucester hits the beach, grind to a complete halt. Entropy is total. Even with the text gutted and filleted, the last half hour of the film feels longer than many complete plays.

For DVD versions with complete texts, don't overlook Jonathan Miller's neurologically-informed production for the BBC with Michael Hordern and Brenda Blethyn. The more mainstream, star-studded Olivier video is an automatic choice for many.

However, another abbreviated version directed by Peter Brook features perhaps the best reading of Shakespeare's Lear of them all, from Orson Welles. This 90-minute condensation from the early days of live television also features Alan Badel, Beatrice Straight and Micheal MacLiammoir. First you must get past the resourceful but limited visuals, two cameras in a single studio running the whole play live without a break. The reward is that no one, no one does Lear's poetry more clearly, simply, powerfully and beautifully than Orson Welles.

Peter Brook has the knack of making his stagings completely his own while at the same time enhancing the character of the play. Thus in "Carmen" he turns it into something of a chamber play, and here in King Lear he stresses the primitivism of the play turning into almost something like a documentary of the dark ages. In especially the first part including the storm he is entirely successful, in spite of the rather experimental expressionism,and the realism of the primitive middle age settings in a landscape of only moors and snows, not a tree in the whole film, is effectively impressing. The actors are superb throughout, and Paul Scofield renders a very interesting interpretation of the old man losing himself with occasional magnificent outbursts of powerful rage. The play is shortened, of course, you can't put all of a Shakespeare play into a film, (I believe the only successful attempt at that was Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" and very commendable as such,) while here the text abbreviations unfortunately suffer, the cuts being so obvious. Another flaw is that the articulation is not very good - it was fashionable in the end of the 60s to allow actors to talk on stage like as if they talked naturally, but theatre can't do without rhetoric; and especially with a language like this, which is the very essence of the play, you can't trifle with it, every word has to be pronounced distinctly, or it isn't Shakespeare.

Towards the end the direction gets more sloppy, the intensity loses its grip, while the apocalyptic battle scenes crown the direction. The austere scenery throughout I believe will be what you most will remember of this film adaptation, which couldn't be more impressive, while I think I would prefer the Russian version from about the same time as more convincingly Shakespearian. Since many years I have been waiting for an opportunity to see the Laurence Olivier version from 1983.

Much reviled at the time of it's release, this heavily cut, Danish

co-production horrified critics with it's bleak as possible take on what

some consider the world's greatest play.

Obviously influenced by nortic flicks from Dryer to Bergman,

Peter Brook shot this as a midevil horror show; and Pauline Kael called

it his "Night Of The Living Dead."

While certainly unfair to the scope of the Bard's vision, the

film is undeniably facinating; though sometimes tedious too. In the best

parts it comes alive with a vivid wickedness, you can certainly see how

Lear's daughter's came to hate his guts!

So, even if it does mutilate a classic, this film is pretty

amazing and highly recommendable. A dark product of it's own time, you

will scarcely see a Lear like this again.