King Lear was definitely the performance I had been looking forward to most. I’m quite familiar with the play and was even in a production my freshmen year of college. All that familiarity, of course, meant that I had a lot of expectations, most of which I am sad to say weren’t quite met by this production. There were many excellent things about the show we saw, but there were also several uncomfortable choices made that really jolted me out of my theatre-going experience and back into my own head, where one thought kept repeating itself over and over: “This just isn’t right.”
Lear’s fool was the most persistent and annoying of all the faults I saw in the production. Interestingly, although textually we don’t see the fool appear until the fourth scene of the first act, this production chose to have him visible behind King Lear’s throne in the opening scene. He crouched in the shadows there, sitting on his suitcase. From the very beginning, it was clear this production was going to do something radically different with their fool. I was not at all prepared to dislike their choice as much as I did, however.
This production of King Lear seems to have been in a semi-modern setting; King Lear himself is dressed as a military dictator, and his daughters wear clothing that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the early 1940s. They seem to be going for a post-World War II sort of idea. Given this, we might expect the fool to be dressed like an ex-soldier, returned home after the war, or perhaps any kind of beggar or homeless person. Instead, we are given a fool dressed at the height of fashion: from his immaculate suit to his leather suitcase and round, bright-colored glasses, the fool comes across more as a high-level government official and trusted adviser to the king rather than a low-class peasant whose pointed comments are tolerated because of how amusing they are.
Nothing in the text or that I can find about Elizabethan fools themselves seems to support such a well-dressed, high-class fool. Fools were usually employed to provide frank and humorous advice to their patrons, but they were typically dressed as servants or dressed gaudily to enhance their amusement factor. In fact, the tidy, proper dress of director Sam Mendes’ fool may actually be inhibiting the fool’s purpose: to be funny. Few of the fool’s antics really had me laughing, with the exception of the line he delivered while straddling the dead stuffed moose on the dining table. His incredibly uptight dress really seemed to hamper his ability to make me laugh.
Lear’s relationship to his fool is also incredibly troubling in this production. The king is shown to lean heavily on the advice and care of the fool simply by the way they relate to each other on stage. In act three, scene two, the fool is quite literally the only thing supporting and keeping the aging king from toppling off the raised platform where he delivers his “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” speech. Yet despite this strong physical connection, Lear bludgeons his fool to death in the infamous trial scene. There are many ways to handle the disappearance of the fool after the third act, but such an incredibly violent end for the fool is rare and quite unsuggested by the text itself. Lear seems to imagine one of the daughters he has put on “trial” is escaping and exclaims the lines, “Arms, arms, sword, fire! Corruption in the place! False justicer, why hast thou let her ‘scape?” The text leads us to believe he’s shouting at a vision of both his daughter and her jailor, yet it is at this point in Mendes’ production that Lear brutally turns on his fool and bludgeons him to death inside a bath tub, discarding the bloody pipe he has used to do so when he is finished. This might make some sense if the fool had been up and about, or at least in the middle of the stage where Lear was looking. He’s not, though: he’s sat behind Lear on the rim of the bath tub that will soon become his coffin. Why should Lear turn on his fool when he doesn’t even seem to be in the field of view for this vision?
Gloucester later re-enters and asks where Lear is, to which Kent replies “Here, sir; but trouble him not, his wits are gone.” It’s possible that Mendes thought the best way to show the loss of Lear’s wits was to have him kill his own fool, but besides the obvious textual inconsistency of such an action, there’s another problem that pops up at this point: no character makes any sort of reaction to the fool’s death. At the very least, there ought to have been some sort of non-verbal acknowledgment of the fool’s tragic end. But no: Mendes’ production ticks on inexorably, every character seemingly unconcerned about this brutal murder.
The utter lack of acknowledgement does not sit well with me at all. I barely had time to process the fool’s death during the production and so I have dwelled on it since, constantly wishing that this choice had not been made. Even though I wasn’t a fan of this production’s interpretation of the fool, this gruesome end, practically ungrounded in the play’s text, made everything ten times worse. First, Mendes gave me a fool I could not laugh at, and then he took him away in a brief patch of violence I could not process.