The Tragic Hero of Our Time Is a Wizened Old Man (Played by a Woman)

King Lear by William Shakespeare.  Directed by Sam Gold.  With Glenda Jackson, Jayne Houdyshell, Elizabeth Marvel, Ruth Wilson

It’s fascinating the way works of art change through the course of one’s life.  When I first read Don Quixote—as a junior in college—it seemed a comic work about a befuddled old man who had fallen in love with chivalric romances and gone completely overboard.  I was to read the book twice more, in different translations, and by the third reading, in my fifties, it seemed not the story of a crazy old man but of us all: we dream of being heroes and carrying out some noble purpose, but we’re stumbling through a world that doesn’t recognize our noble aims.  The book didn’t seem comic in that third reading.  It seemed wrenchingly sad (though Sancho Panza, with his more realistic outlook and wry humor, lends a comic effect).

Then there is King Lear.[1]  When I first read this play I thought it was about a great man who in his old age made a fateful error: he decided to turn his kingdom over to his three daughters, and offered the largest slice to whichever one would demonstrate her love the most.  Both Goneril and Regan fell all over themselves demonstrating their love, but the youngest, Cordelia, refused to demonstrate her love, believing she embodied it in her life.  Lear—showing how much his judgment had failed him—believed his elder daughters and cut out Cordelia altogether.  They then disrespected and humiliated him, stripping him not only of his power but also of his humanity, until the whole kingdom wound up in ruins.  It was the story of an old man who made a dreadful error in judgment, and it cost him the peace of his old age.

This Sam Gold production turns the story on its ear.  Not only is the setting and the dress “modern” (apparently its intent is to suggest Trump-style gaudiness), but Lear is played not by James Earl Jones (who took the role in an earlier production), or Christopher Plummer (the last actor my brother saw in the role)[2], or Ben Kingsley (the last actor I saw), but . . . the 83 year old Glenda Jackson.  The Duke of Gloucestor—who features importantly in the major subplot—is also played by a woman, Jayne Houdyshell.  And as in the new production of Oklahoma!, which my wife and I saw the night before, the cast was racially and ethnically diverse, one of the elder daughters’ husbands was deaf, so he had an attendant doing sign language.  Both of the plays had been modernized in ways that accord with the current sensibility.[3]

The effect on me was that gender ceased being an issue.  As soon as the amazing Glenda Jackson stepped on the stage, old, wizened, wrinkled, and tiny, I accepted her in the role of a man.  If I may be forgiven a brief step from the sublime to the ridiculous, she reminded me of William Hickey in Prizzi’s Honor.  Seeing Jayne Houdyshell as a man was a bit more of a stretch.  But she acted with male energy and authority, and her gender seemed to make no difference.

Lear didn’t seem a great man making a single (and singular) failure of judgment.  He seemed a dignified elderly man who naturally desired to withdraw from public life, while maintaining his honor as a King.  His middle-aged daughters, who had been lurking in the wings, were both hungry for power.  Lear had been King for so long that he believed people deferred to him because of his greatness.  His daughters were willing to defer, or do anything at all, to seize power.  The truthful and genuine people in the play—Cordelia, the Earl of Gloucestor, and Edgar, the Earl’s legitimate heir—watch helplessly in the midst of this charade (Edgar is being nudged out by the Earl’s illegitimate son, Edmund).

The second act is a tug of war to see which daughter can be meaner to her father, and I found myself—this was another shocker—initially sympathetic with the daughters.  Lear had an entourage of one hundred attendants—he was like a rap singer—and one of the daughters’ objections was that they couldn’t put up that many people.  Made sense to me.  Lear, on the other hand, felt he was being stripped of his dignity, his importance, his very Kingship, when his daughters whittled down his entourage.  He had given himself to their care.  Only gradually does he realize that he has also given them all the power.  The second act traces his gradual humiliation.  He’s no longer a King.  He’s a little old man.

I couldn’t help thinking that many people in the audience—the aging folks who could afford these pricey tickets—face the same situation.  They can stay in their professions long after they have the energy to work well in them, or they can turn things over to younger people who will take the organization in a new direction and gently—or perhaps not so gently—nudge them out.  This is the tragedy—if that’s the right word—of old age.  At the very least, you’re moving into a new role, and people start to neglect or ignore you.  The question is: can you make the adjustment?

The third act was for me the most affecting, and in this production showed the play’s true brilliance.  Lear is on the Heath—it begins with the famous line, “Blow winds and crack your cheeks”—and the heath was a bare area in front of a metal curtain that had descended.  The things of the world had been left behind, and we were in the middle of nowhere.  All the spurned characters were together, Lear, the Earl of Kent (who has been unfailingly loyal), Gloucester, who has been physically blinded by his enemies, Gloucester’s legitimate son Edgar, who in order to save himself has taken on the persona of a madman, and the King’s Fool, who had shown up in the second Act.  In an act of doubling that is apparently traditional, but seemed especially brilliant, the fool is played by the same actor as Cordelia, Ruth Wilson.  The Fool keeps telling Lear how stupid he is, and Lear takes his words as the babbling of an idiot.  The irony of this situation knows no bounds.

I found the staging of the third act, the true and faithful people on the outside, while the schemers and false people are on the inside, almost unbearable.  We are being told this truth in some of the most exalted language in all of English literature, but the situation also embodies the truth, not just of this political moment (which the production was playing up) but of life in general.  The schemers get ahead while the true people are thrust into the stormy night.  I can’t remember ever feeling another other work of art so viscerally.  It was a physical pain.  I could hardly take it.

Jackson’s reading of the lines was superb and inventive, and something about the fact that she was small and vulnerable made the situation that much more tragic.  At the intermission after Act III I heard someone say, “She’s doing Shakespeare, but is she Lear?”—a good question, I admit—and I would say she is a perfect Lear for our time.

There have been complaints in various reviews that the modern political allusions were too much, also that the Philip Glass score, played by a string quartet that is often on stage with the actors—was overdone and annoying.  I pretty much ignored the political allusions, caught up in the universality of the situation, and I did not—as the New York Times reviewer did—find the music annoying.  It was incessant and nerve wracking, but that seemed appropriate.  I thought the acting and staging of this production were not perfect, but fascinating and startling in their own way.  And of course the script was magnificent.  I’m sure they made some cuts—all the productions of Lear do—but the evening lasted three and a half hours, which included one twenty-minute intermission.  It was the kind of exhilarating night of theater I have only experienced in New York.

Now, like my brother Bill, I have seen my ultimate Lear.  I may not want to see another.

[1] My excuse for mentioning these two authors in the same piece is that tradition says they died on the same day, 23 April 1616, and with them died true greatness in literature.  One wrote the greatest novel ever and the other the greatest play, though in the case of Shakespeare there is some dispute about which play it is.

When we were in college, my brother was discussing with our mentor, Wallace Fowlie, what they thought was the greatest work of literature of all time.  My brother proposed King Lear, but Fowlie immediately said, “Too many images.”  It’s an interesting criticism to make of this play, which definitely does have a profusion of images.  I’m not sure I think that’s a bad thing.  Fowlie’s candidate: The Divine Comedy.

[2] My brother though Plummer’s acting was so great that he has never wanted to see another production.  He had a chance to see Glenda Jackson in the role in London, but passed it up.

[3] Oklahoma! was a real stunner because it included not only a racially and ethnically diverse cast, it also included a woman, Ali Stroker, who was in a wheelchair, and she turned out to be the sexiest and most vibrant woman in the cast.  I’m not reviewing this play because I don’t remember its earlier version well enough, and don’t put Rogers and Hammerstein in quite the same class as William Shakespeare.  I enjoyed the play, and loved the singing and the famous solo dance, but found some of its modernization a little jarring, and not quite as successful.  The problem may be that Oklahioma! is not quite as universal a work as King Lear.  That’s not to criticize it.  Nothing else is either.