King Lear

[agoraphiliac]

I went to a screening of the National Theater's King Lear. Ian McKellen is great, of course. He dodders, he weeps readily, and when he's carousing with his knights, in fact when he does anything at all, walks or gestures or even stands and breathes, you can see how his ruined frame was once much stronger, how even his tremors now are those of a

Comments

[nightspore]

Plus Anthony Hopkins', released yesterday on Amazon. The mikes were awful. I thought McKellen was really great -- so easy to ham up Lear and he didn't. I liked Edmund and the Fool as well, and really liked Gloucester, especially when Edgar is evoking the seascape and he closes his empty eye sockets and takes immense pleasure in picturing it.

[agoraphiliac]

Yeah, the Fool really made the jokes and songs seem like his own. And they had the good sense to suggest his murder after Gloucester's blinding, not before.

In retrospect, I like the things you liked too. Also Edmund. When Edgar disguises himself as a madman, you kind of have to pretend not to notice his gym body, or pretend no one else will notice it. Edmund plays up that aspect of himself--I forget which speech it was, and he was clothed, but he gestured to himself, like, look, just look at me.

[nightspore]

I didn't like that moment of phantasmagoria or whatever when Edmund confronts the Fool just before intermission. And McKellen does look away from Cordelia when he says "And my poor Fool is hanged," making it (correctly!) look like he's reporting the death of the Fool, not Cordelia. (I didn't like, I don't think, the switch of lines between Kent and the Gentleman in the "Where's the King?" scene -- it made the wrong kind of sense of "I know you.")

Anyhow infinitely better than Simon Russel Beale's Lear killing the Fool in a fit of Lewey Body dementia.

[grashupfer]

"It's not good when you're glad her breath doesn't mist the mirror."

O the understatement of the year!

[agoraphiliac]

She wasn't completely awful, just, not all that good, which doesn't show well next Ian McKellen.

[nightspore]

I was impressed that he carried her in, though not of course in his arms.