King Lear

Marlowe's Dr. Faustus turned up on television this past summer with Richard Burton in the title role and Elizabeth Taylor as Helen of Troy. No play so great has ever failed so abysmally. Not even Marlowe's poetry could save the film from its stylistic pretensions--no important line was let past without the screen quivering in peculiar effects of light and color; no setting lacked a quality of manufactured gloom. At its climactic worst--as Faustus prepares for damnation--red blotches swirl round his head, and music builds to a crescendo. Burton grimaces in the best Burton fashion, and Faustus is swallowed into hell. All told, it was a disaster of sufficient proportion to make me doubt whether any film could treat classical tragedy cinematically and not contaminate it with effects of style.

All faith lost there is now restored. Peter Brook's King Lear is not quite an unconditional success, but it is close enough. With a minimum of gimmickry and self-consciousness, Shakespeare is transcribed to film, not just filmed theatre, and the play's gain far exceeds its loss. There are sequences on the screen that could not begin to be conceived on stage; a few are embarassing, most work.

Peter Brook is nothing if not decisive. He senses a certain unwieldiness to the text and without hesitation cuts whatever he considers to be excess. Shakespeare's introductory scene between the Earls of Gloucester and Kent is eliminated; the film begins immediately with the parcelling of the kingdom among the three daughters. The first words are Lear's "Know we have divided-in three our kingdom...", Brook thrusting us into crisis at once. Within five minutes Cordelia has already refused to publicly acclaim her love for her father. Lear has disowned her, and the central dramatic movement is set.

And that is the drift of the directing throughout. Brook is impatient with peripheral events and dispenses with them as often as possible. He uses explanatory titles to speed up the action and cuts scenes mercilessly. It is toward the great events that his imagination tends--Lear raging at Cordelia or mad in the storm on the heath or overwhelmed with regret before his death--and on these scenes Brook lavishes his attention lovingly. To the Gloucester subplot he is for the most part cursory. He reserves his ingenuity for Lear alone. And as Lear, Paul Scofield carries the film.

Scofield's Lear succeeded in obliterating the Lear of my mind's eye. My Lear was lean and withered; Scofield's is a Lear of physical bulk and substance, a tragic counterpart to Orson Welles' Falstaff, completely convincing--I can no longer imagine it otherwise. Scofield contains the tragedy. He is not tossed about by adversity; he swallows adversity and swells to bursting.

Perhaps the single greatest difficulty in a difficult play is making plausible the evolution of Lear's character. In the crucial opening lines, Lear is completely self-possessed. The camera frames Scofield's face, jowly and immobile, and the mouth moves just barely, opening to let the words fall out, slow-paced and certain. By the time of his madness in the storm, all such self-possession has vanished. Lear is frenzied, physically shrunken in his defeat. It is Scofield's peculiar ability to make all of these changes appear supremely necessary. Even in the poise and control of the early scenes, the rage of the subsequent madness flickers just beneath the surface.

Brook is constantly aware of the possibilities in film for more supple dramatic movement, and he is able to use a technique as fundamental as parallel montage to alter completely the dramatic rhythms. A long speech of Goneril's is intercut with shots of Lear riding furiously on the hunt, so that by the time the single speech is finished, the relationship of father and eldest daughter is completely redefined. And when Lear first realizes the emasculating ingratitude of Goneril and Regan ("O, reason not the need!"), Brook moves toward a close-up of the king's eyes that measure perfectly the sudden recognition of betrayal.

At times--especially in the elaborate lighting effects of the great storm--Brook's style verges on the overenthusiastic, but his instincts manage to save him before style turns into self-indulgence. He doesn't belabor the black-and-white bleakness of the land-scape, just as he doesn't belabor the malice of the elder daughters, or the virtue of the youngest.

Particularly fine is Brook's handling of the difficult scene between a now blinded Gloucester and his son Edgar, still disguised as a mad beggar. Not recognizing his son, Gloucester begs to be led to the cliffs of Dover where he would be able to jump to his death. Instead, Edgar leads him to the flattest of beaches, all the while persuading him that they are indeed scaling heights. Believing he is on a precipice, Gloucester leaps, only to fall harmlessly to the ground. Finally, convinced he has been saved by a miracle, he resolves to try suicide no more. Brook presents the sequence in a simple natural setting on the shore and provides exactly the right mixture of the ironic and the pathetic.

The play has always been a problem play, whose rough edges have never been smoothed to everyone's satisfaction. Samuel Johnson found it too emotionally overwhelming and preferred a version in which Cordelia survived. The question in any production is not whether the problems will all be solved but which problems will be conceded as irresolvable.

As long as Brook remains faithful to the Shakespearean source, his dramatic choices are justifiable, but in his desire to render the play more coherent, he makes some changes that are unforgivable. Edmund is deprived of the rhetorical flourish with which Shakespeare endowed him, and the brilliant soliloquy of the first act ("This is the excellent foppery of the world...") is shortened and presented as part of a dialogue between Edmund and his brother. Jack McGowran's Fool is more than competent but too clearly the sage unrecognized. And, incomprehensibly, Brook leaves out two of the best lines in the play, Lear's dying "Pray you undo this button," and Kent's "Break, heart; I prithee break," after his king's death.

But these are finally little failures, and the successes are large. Brook is not always right, but when he is right, he is very, very right. King Lear is the summit of Shakespeare, and were this production only half so good, it would demand to be seen.