It’s a credit to Shakespeare’s genius that he was able to craft one of the greatest plays ever written from such an unbelievable beginning, but it’s also his genius that the opening is the very heart of it all. Despite his protestations, Lear has broken one of the bonds that protects civilization from the lawlessness of nature untamed, centering the play above and beyond mere mortal concerns.
The critics aren’t happy with Kenneth Branagh and his new production of King Lear, playing at The SHED in New York City through December 15. In their view, the man who modernized Shakespeare and managed to make the Bard more popular than ever, has gone too far by cutting the famous tragedy down to the quick to paraphrase Shakespeare himself, producing a bare bones version that runs for barely two hours, has no intermission, no sets, and feels something like an action thriller.
The New York Times described it as “short” and “shallow.” Vulture preferred “fleet and facile,” noting “Branagh’s overarching vision seems to be textural rather than essential — ‘to be as urgent as possible.’ He and his co-directors have sheared the behemoth down to two hours sans intermission, and the thing does move, but to what end?” In their view, “it’s not just the extreme text trims that create a sense of flattened character and circumstance but also, and more significantly, the one-dimensional hastiness of the direction.” They proceeded to criticize the sets and production design, “Branagh, Ashford, and Skilbeck may think that they’ve sufficiently summoned King Lear’s prodigious existential scale by literally bringing the cosmos into the room…Jon Bausor, who designed costumes and set, surrounds the stage with Stonehenge-like slabs and suspends an enormous, doughnut-shaped projection surface above it — a kind of looming God’s eye where, as the audience enters, galaxies and nebulae swirl murkily,” but “the portentousness feels counterintuitive, not to mention a bit silly. This is how a high-school student starts an essay on King Lear (or on anything, really): ‘Since the dawn of time, mankind has always …’ It’s also much more cinematic than it is theatrical.” Ultimately, Mr. Branagh offers “no consistent access to the play’s magnificent existential darkness. Even in his Lear’s final moments, Branagh, despite the God’s eye above him, chooses the literal over the cosmic. When he carries in his dead youngest daughter, Cordelia, his howls of mourning feel strangely unwrenching, and his eventual death a downright misreading of the play” because “Branagh, who has seeded a couple of aneurysm-like attacks throughout his performance, plays the moment with crushing realism. He seizes up, gasps and grabs his head, thrashes, contorts, dies. Not only does such an interpretation fatally diminish the play’s scope, it also makes the moment about him, not about Cordelia, and not, even more crucially, about the invisible thing he’s exhorting us all to see. A King Lear without that invisible thing might have battles and betrayals, drums and trumpets, and get us back out on the street in a cool two hours, but it won’t be ‘the thing itself.’ It will, in the end, come to nothing.”
At the risk of questioning the wisdom of the critics, who I doubt could actually recite a single line that was cut, they are both misreading the real genius of the play and Mr. Branagh’s unique ability to both understand and distill the essence of Shakespeare better than anyone else of his era or otherwise. Unlike Shakespeare’s other great tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear doesn’t hinge on a unique or subtle character flaw. We are not left with any underlying riddle to muddle over and debate, like trying to satisfactorily explain Hamlet’s inability to act or Macbeth’s failure to see how his murder of King Duncan would fundamentally alter him beyond recognition. Instead, Lear begins and ultimately ends with what amounts to a colossal mistake, a decision so stupid that it’s only possible to believe if we assume that the titular character is losing his mind already, perhaps long before the play begins, and is incapable of understanding either the most basic consequences of his actions or the obvious personality traits of his own offspring – even when he is warned against them. No king in his right mind, especially in primeval England, could be blind enough to believe there was a placid retirement waiting for them with the trappings yet not the cares of state, that there would be no consequences for dividing their realm into three parts, and choosing the relative sizes of those divisions based on how much each of their three daughters insist they love him on the spot, in front of the entire court, and yet this is precisely what Lear does. When his only fair and true daughter, Cordelia, refuses to play along, insisting, rather obviously, that she “cannot heave [her] heart into [her] mouth. I love your Majesty According to my bond, no more nor less,” a loaded phrase that foreshadows the driving force of the play, Lear responds first by threatening her, then by banishing her. Kent, one of the few honorable men in the realm, immediately begs him to reconsider, urging him in plain view of the gathered nobles to “check This hideous rashness. Answer my life my judgment, Thy youngest daughter does not love thee least, Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sounds Reverb no hollowness.” He tries to warn him two more times in quick succession, insisting the plain truth that “thou dost evil,” but in a reversal of Peter denying Christ himself, it is to no avail. Lear brands him a “miscreant,” ironically berates him for asking him to “break our vows,” insisting he has never done such a thing in his life when, in fact, Lear is the one who has just done so by abdicating his throne, claims that “nature” itself is on his side, and for his pains, Kent is banished under threat of execution.
To a large extent, it’s a credit to Shakespeare’s genius that he was able to craft one of the greatest plays ever written from such thin, banal, downright unbelievable stuff, but it’s also his genius that this is the very heart of it all. Despite his protestations, Lear has broken one of the most crucial bonds that protects civilization itself from the lawlessness of nature untamed, that between a king and his country, unleashing the primal elements these bonds hold back, centering the play above and beyond mere mortal concerns. The thing, in this rendering, isn’t “existential darkness.” That is always there and always will be there, unexplained and all-consuming, the void from which the entire world sprung, literally in Mr. Branagh’s version with the eye of God hovering above every scene in the play, which actually moves closer to the stage at key moments as though everything could be consumed in an instant, and the ring of stones surrounding the action, which also move and change at the whims of the elements, but it’s held at bay, briefly, temporarily, and all-too tenuously by human bonds that must remain unbroken or all is lost. It’s these bonds we have with each other, to our family, to our leaders, to our countrymen, that prevent the ever-present darkness from devouring us; the fragile things that prevent us from being consumed by the beast both without and within, both a shield and tether. In this rendering, Lear is bonded both with his kingdom and his daughters, but he breaks both at the start of the play, as well as his bond to his liegeman, Kent. Goneril and Reagan are bonded to their father and their husbands, but they also break both during the course of the events, making their father a vagabond in his own kingdom while sacrificing their marriage bonds to their respective dalliances with the bastard Edmund. As a bastard, Edmund has no bonds and is bent on breaking them instead. He cleaves his father, Gloucester, from his natural heir, Edgar, and after splitting Goneril and Regan from their husbands, breaks their bonds as sisters. As every tie of family, country, duty and the oaths that accompany them are broken, the characters are left careening from disaster to disaster and the kingdom on the brink of ruin as raw nature itself, the law of the jungle takes hold.
Shakespeare himself makes this context plain by referring to “nature” around forty times during the course of the play, all of which literally and figuratively culminates in a brutal storm that strands the increasingly detached from reality Lear in the wilderness. Rather than seeking shelter, Lear rages against the winds themselves:
Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks.
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world.
Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once
That makes ingrateful man.
Lear is too blind to see it at this point, but the storm is of his own making, what he has done to himself by abdicating his throne, betraying his sacred bonds, letting lawless nature loose to run wild and once this bond is severed, there is nothing that can be done to halt the collapse. Mr. Branagh’s short, action packed rendering underscores this reality with an increasingly breakneck pace from one calamity to another as everything falls apart and everyone is powerless to stop it even when Edmund himself has a sudden change of heart. The production design encapsulates this reality, both characters and stage are stripped down the barest essentials. The actors are practically naked beyond simple robes and furs, and as the play progresses some like Edgar are stripped almost entirely bare, even Lear is consigned to a ragged undershirt. Further, they possess nothing to defend themselves against the onslaught. The only props are spears, daggers, a couple of small shields, and a musical instrument; the hovel Lear hides in is a ramp that rises from the stage, then disappears. The play itself reduces everything else to irrelevance, even the stage it takes place upon, both narratively and thematically. Questions like those posed by critics such as whether Lear’s daughters love him are meaningless, reduced to their actions. If we wish, we can answer them both in how they treat their father and their husbands, making what they might have to say on the matter a justification, rationalization, or lament that no longer serves any real purpose, more blowing into the wind. Shakespeare himself provides some evidence of this when both Goneril and Regan demand Lear reduce his retinue from 100 knights, essentially to zero. They claim repeatedly that they must do this because the men are riotous louts, unable to control themselves and destroying their households, a man-made storm. Regan cites the “riots of your followers,” defending her sister saying their behavior clears her of “all blame.” Lear, however, insists they are nothing of the sort, all honest, upright, and honorable. Shakespeare, meanwhile, never reveals the truth. The retinue is kept entirely off stage in the original play and Mr. Branagh’s production, making it unclear if Lear’s daughters are simply making an excuse or have a real concern.
Wisely, however, Mr. Branagh choses to keep Edmund’s motivations more plain, reducing, but not eliminating his soliloquies because he can best be seen as a literal incarnation of nature unrestrained, what happens when someone has no bonds to begin with. As a bastard, he is a figurative affront to civilization itself, not confined to the traditional ties of family, or anything else, and he relishes the role from the very beginning, creating much of the mischief that consumes the play. When we first meet him, he declares that wild, untamed nature herself is his “goddess. To thy law My services are bound.” He continues to describe that the very customs and bonds Lear just broke do not apply to him at all, “Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines Lag of a brother? why ‘bastard’?” Edmund’s father, Gloucester provides the inverse of this perspective shortly after, reading ill portents in the heavens themselves, “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us,” and he proceeds to name precisely what has caused the tumult. At the time, he mistakenly believes his loyal son Edgar is the villain, and yet he reveals the driving force of the entire play if we care to look upon it:
Love cools,
friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies;
in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and
the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. This villain
of mine comes under the prediction: there’s son
against father. The King falls from bias of nature:
there’s father against child. We have seen the best of
our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and
all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.
Between the two, both prominent in Mr. Branagh’s production, we see the primordial battle between the lawlessness of nature and the bonds humans have formed to ward against them, a battle we will ultimately lose, both personally and as a society, no matter what we do. Interestingly, Mr. Branagh himself serves as an avatar for this interpretation in his portrayal of Lear as a man who’s own mind has broken its bond with his body. In Shakespeare’s day, they wouldn’t have differentiated between clinical madness and dementia or Alzheimer’s, lacking anything resembling the modern field of psychology. This makes the nature of Lear’s mental illness unclear, prompting questions of whether he is indeed mad at the start of the play. Today, however, we would more clearly associated his symptoms with dementia, an aspect of which Mr. Branagh appears to emphasize in his performance, especially as he continues to decline. Anyone who has witnessed Alzheimer’s first hand can attest to the defensiveness that accompanies the illness, sometimes leading to startling aggression, the unwillingness to brook or entertain any argument, even as the victim clings to falsehoods, vacillating wildly between moods and energy levels. Personally, I was struck by how perfectly he captured the look my mother-in-law used to get when she was attempting to process something outside the mania gripping her mind at the moment, only to suddenly dismiss it, either getting angry or switching to a completely different topic, and how these shifts are all consuming at the moment. Rather incredibly given Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have known this, dementia often starts with a brain suddenly reorganized around a false idea. In my mother-in-law’s case, she lived with me and my wife, but when my wife was away for a week, her sister came to help take care of her. Previously, she’d shown some mild signs of dementia, but nothing blatant or irreconcilable, only noticeable if you watched her carefully. When my wife returned home and her sister had left, she asked my mother-in-law about her visit with her daughter. She replied, who? That nice girl that was here? She was a nice girl, but she wasn’t my daughter. From then on, she refused to believe she had two daughters to the point where she would frequently demand speaking to a lawyer to double check her last will and testament. Whenever anyone tried to reason with her, she would get wildly defensive, angry and aggressive, frequently repeating herself over and over again as though she was the victim of some grand conspiracy, and she would do so until she became incapable of speaking coherently at all.
To me at least, Mr. Branagh captures all of this and more on both a large and a small scale. For example, when Lear begins raving about his own daughters he blindly repeats some combination of a serpent’s tooth in his heart twice in the same scene, as if the word was new to him, “sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child,” and “struck me with her tongue Most serpentlike upon the very heart.” All of this culminates in his death, where the moment is certainly about him, he whose mind went to war against itself and broke the original bond that set the whole calamity in motion. That Mr. Branagh makes this real and urgent right in front of the audience, literally and figuratively returning the play to where it all began, only illustrates that he remains the greatest living interpreter of Shakespeare, if not the greatest of all time. In addition to being an excellent actor and director, he should also be seen as a scholar, illuminating and illustrating what drives the text with each adaptation. That the shorter length certainly makes it more accessible to modern audiences – surprisingly, much of the audience when we saw it last week had to have been under thirty – is only an added bonus. He remains ahead of his critics on all counts, at least in my opinion.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 