Colm Feore play King Lear in King Lear.David Hou
The filmed Stratford production of King Lear, which gets its first screening Thursday as part of Cineplex's Front Row Centre Events, is the first in an ambitious project to film all 38 of Shakespeare's plays over the next decade. As a record for students, as well as for those who can't afford or manage to make the pilgrimage to Stratford in the warmer months, it's a clear boon.
The best-known precedent for a project of this scale would be the BBC Television's Shakespeare project (1978-85), with all 37 plays still available in a DVD package. Stratford one-ups it by offering 38 plays, including Two Noble Kinsmen, an adaptation of the plot of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, which is jointly attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare.
Starting the series with King Lear is a natural choice. Typically, Lear is rated as No. 1 or 2 in the Shakespeare canon along with Hamlet. Literary critic Harold Bloom put both of them beyond literature, constituting "a kind of secular scripture or mythology." If the introspective Hamlet ruled the romantic 19th century, in the postwar period the reputation of Lear ascended, linked to the theatre of the absurd and the theatre of cruelty. To sustain that interest through Timon of Athens or Henry VIII could be a challenge, but for an opener, Lear's a great choice.
The filmed production, directed by Joan Tosoni, used 10 cameras to capture a live performance from Oct. 21, with some reshoots done directly following the performance. The aim was to document the stage production (directed by Antoni Cimolino) rather than create a distinct aesthetic interpretation. Most of the film is in mid-shots and medium shots, giving the perspective of viewers on the three sides of the stage. The audience itself is barely seen (although it is heard, with the usual distracting titters at every pun). The shot choices aim for clarity: We never have more than one character with his or her back to us. There's one dramatic camera backward swoop away from the stage before the intermission (which has none of those Live at the Met-style cast interviews.) There are some closeup shots of the reunion of Lear and Cordelia (actress Sara Farb sheds a single poignant tear) but few attempts to be other than theatrical: The scene where Gloucester's eyes are gouged out is not a stomach-churning experience, just a stagey kerfuffle and then some red makeup on actor Scott Wentworth's cheeks.
Last year, Ira Glass, the host of NPR's This American Life, ran into a storm of criticism when he tweeted that he did not find King Lear "relate-able." There's some merit to that: Most of us don't spend much time whipping our fools or dividing up kingdoms. Cimolino's production is somewhat consciously "relatable" with its emphasis on intergenerational grievances, mortgaging our futures and homelessness. But these are less "relatable" than how well the production manages to articulate a literary vision that runs from the Book of Job and Dante's Inferno to Samuel Beckett: Nothingness, nakedness, blindness, betrayal, nature turned to horror.
In more specific terms, the production is a reminder that there are good reasons to prefer a repertory Shakespeare company than the usual film one-offs, with star turns surrounded by secondary actors mechanically reciting the text. Colm Feore seemed a more complete actor onstage than in film (where he tends to be cast as a high-forehead schemer) and he presents a particularly physical warrior king. He walks with a pronounced limp and tends to flinch at each insult as if it were a blow, but he's strong enough to be threatening (after all, he kills Cordelia's assassin bare-handed). His broadest gesture comes when Feore's Lear grabs his daughter Goneril from behind and places his hands atop her uterus to curse her with sterility, an assault that, arguably, serves to explain, if not justify, his daughters' rage with him.
There are no weak spots in the cast, from Stephen Ouimette's cuttingly angry Fool; Maev Beaty's semi-justified Goneril; Liisa Repo-Martell as the more monstrous Regan; Scott Wentworth as Gloucester, another abused father; Sara Farb as the straight-shooting, serious Cordelia; and Brad Hodder as a different kind of truth-talking villain, Edmund.
The Stratford production of King Lear is not visually remarkable, which may be a paradoxical asset. In Shakespeare's days the best seats were to the side or behind the actors; the worst were what we would call front-row centre, where the ground-lings stood. It was a form of theatre for an audience, in the sense of a group that hears, rather than spectates. When the right attention is paid to elucidating the text, the poetry sets off fireworks in the imagination, rather than in front of your eyeballs.
"Look with thine ears" says Lear late in the play, reminding us that we understand Shakespeare best through hearing. The image of a mad king, a half-naked beggar and a fool stuck in a hovel on a moor while a tempest rages is hard to stage convincingly, an image that burns in our minds more than a representation on stage or screen can capture. At least a film can deliver those words to far more people than can ever crowd under one roof on a single day.