Volume 51, Number 5 · March 25, 2004
Lear for Real
By Geoffrey O'Brien
King Lear
by William Shakespeare, directed by Jonathan Miller
at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, Lincoln Center, New York,February 11–April 18, 2004
'You mean Cordelia dies in the end?' a little girl exclaims in protest in the seat behind me, moments before the lights dim. Her father has been whispering a synopsis, and has thus casually administered the same shock of injustice that so perturbed Samuel Johnson that it was years before he could endure to read King Lear a second time. It is a play that hurts the unwary, and even the wary (we, that is, the grownups who know what to expect) continue to look for ways to feel at home in it. The most immense of plays is also the most constricting, and it would be almost inhuman not to harbor a nagging apprehension at the prospect of undergoing, once again, the process of settling down for a dress rehearsal of one's own disappearance into an abyss that doesn't become any more domesticated with the passage of centuries. If the apparently innocuous opening lines of King Lear—the politely ribald chitchat as Gloucester introduces Kent to his bastard son Edmund—are already imbued with a sense of dread, it is because we know this is the last moment when all that follows might have been avoided, when some other entertainment, some comedy or court romance, could have begun: a very short breathing space before the springing of the trap.
Review, 3778 words
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