Rei 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.

As has happened so many times with the Oscars, another great film-actor-ensemble has been neglected. Recognised nearly universally as the ultimate test of an actor's craft, Paul Scofield as Lear in this 1971 version could be deified for his performance, even more complex than his Oscar-winning Thomas More in 1966's best pic "A Man For All Seasons". Viewing this film should be a prerequisite not just for R.A.D.A. acting students. Incorporating as he did the essence of Lear so organically, Scofield sadly was not even nominated, another nod to the lowest common denominator public taste. This review, nearly forty years after the pic's release, was an on-the-spot spontaneous impulse after yet another viewing of the film. People are afraid of Shakespeare(a.l.a. DeVere); don't be. All, but especially any pained by their own offspring, will turn away from the screen with much more than a penny's worth of thought and a rediscovery of the art of Paul Scofield and ensemble. It is a cliché, but they just don't make movies like this one anymore.

Ah, now for my 100th review, chalked up after roughly four years of semi-regular sly-winking IMDb usury... What better for the "occasion" than a controversial adaptation of perhaps William Shakespeare's finest tragedy?

I watched this as part of my degree work on Shakespeare; I decided to focus on Shakespeare films, tracked down as many as I could and watched a good few. This was the first I viewed, and can I emphasise how contrasting a view of "Lear" it is as compared to Kurosawa's "Ran"? Whereas that film is wilfully expansive and an epic, if not a history, Brook's "King Lear" is a pared down, Beckettian film visualisation of the play. There are very few backgrounds, characters' faces frame so many shots, creating a claustrophobic focus. The interiors that there are are bleak, barren, less than inviting places; there is no sense of a royal grandeur (unlike "Ran") from which Lear falls.

Lear himself is played as an unfeeling, almost robotically callous chap early on, with Scofield delivering the lines in a very restrained, unexpressive way. This is far from the passionate, headstrong character of most performances. He is a husk of a man, and a dulling bully of a monarch, shown by the naturalistic, unbalanced violence he displays when in Goneril's castle. The feeling of Lear, later on in the play as genuinely a "fond" as well as "foolish" man, is downplayed deliberately. Again, the delivery of Shakespeare's poetry is muted. He comes across as perhaps too restrained and passionless in the later stages. The shift from power to impotence is however excellently conveyed during the storm scene, as first we see a shot of Lear from below, which then shifts quickly to one from a bird eye's view – Lear has been shown first as in control and central and then rendered a mere insignificant human being, with no control over anything.

Scofield however, does do very well, carrying out this very distanced, disquieting Lear of Brook's instruction, to the letter.

Other actors impress, and are much as restrained; there is little or no actorly show here, the emphasis is on Beckettian delivery of lines, paring down the expression to suggest the futility of expression; words as a mechanical act churned out by humanity, making no difference in a barren, Godless universe. Brook uses Beckett's adage: 'There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express… together with the obligation to express'. One can well say this is a reductive reading of Shakespeare, but it is spectacularly successful at its perhaps narrow aim. There are countless grounds in Shakespeare's Lear from which such an interpretation is born – the play on 'nothing' – 'Nothing will come of nothing' – and the example of Cordelia's death, which suggest a Godless, reasonless world in its arbitrariness.

Visually, Jack MacGowran and Patrick Magee, notable Beckett actors, make strong impressions, like Scofield, even if their parts are smaller. Susan Engel and Irene Worth are excellent and look just right as Regan and Goneril respectively, whereas a particularly downplayed Cordelia doesn't make much impression - the Christ-like element is absolutely not dwelt upon here, predictably, for what is a nihilistic interpretation.

Peter Brook's film could perhaps be argued to take place in the Dark Ages, but Brook is clearly interpreting the play in a universally, timeless Beckettian sense. One could liken the film's austerity to the Swedish writer-director Ingmar Bergman, but this film is certainly pared down in terms of setting and costume when compared with 'The Virgin Spring' or 'The Seventh Seal'. Brook's approach to Shakespeare shares none of the solace that Bergman finds in humanity in 'The Seventh Seal' with Max von Sydow's Knight's sublime moments with the couple of players. Brook's world-view is clearly informed by the Jan Kott school of Shakespeare criticism; the natural world is a reflection of the human one. Both spheres are bleak and hopeless, as marked by the indiscriminate, desolate Northern landscapes and the equally random acts of cruelty and violence perpetrated by the characters. A complete lack of incidental music suggests Brook is trying not to distract the viewer in any way from the effect he is trying to create.

It has been argued this interpretation is reductive to the play's language, and single-mindedly closes off many avenues in the play – Kingship, courtly manners and politics are but a few concerns that are neglected by Brook. Brook's film continually attempts to alienate the viewer, with jarring, incessantly restive camera movement and unorthodox angles. The moment of Gloucester's blinding sees Brook metaphorically blind the viewer to the action by having the screen blank; a Brechtian distancing technique, exposing the artifice of cinema and the subjective power the director has. Brook opts to make the play's usual climax point – the Edmund-Edgar duel – deliberately anti-climatic. He undercuts any heroism on Edgar's part by making the fight short and brutish, devoid of any skill whatsoever – Edgar arbitrarily wins. Likewise, the fates of Goneril and Regan are dispatched with a hurried violence. This 'Lear' ends inconclusively with no hope for the future – it does not end directly with Edgar's 'The weight of this sad time' speech, but with the shot of Lear's head tilting back, gradually out of sight against a completely white sky. This expression of emptiness – both that Lear is going neither to Heaven or Hell and that things are not likely to get any better or worse.

A very impressive film, that certainly has divided critics. While the "ultimate" film "Lear" may not have been made yet (at least from the ones I have seen), this is a brilliant, bleak, Beckett-informed version. A powerful, wonderfully alienating and stark Shakespeare.

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.