Even during the interval of King Lear, I knew that I would be writing my performance review about Edmund. His character interested me the most; largely because the production’s interpretation of him was so different from what I’d anticipated. My expectations chiefly came from a workshop in Stratford-upon-Avon with director Gemma Fairlie. With her we looked at Edmund’s first monologue extensively, so we discussed his character as well. She told us that when casting Edmund, directors tend to choose an actor who’s “proper hot” – someone appealing that the audience can connect with, and to some extent, want to root for. Often there’s a turning point when he takes his villainy too far and the audience loses all sympathy for him.
The Edmund in Sam Mendes’s production, however, is entirely different – a villain through and through from beginning to end who never connects with the audience. Edmund appears in the first scene, and even before he speaks, his style of dress alone creates distance between him and everyone else, including the audience. He’s dressed perfectly in a very proper, conservative suit with slicked back hair and glasses, holding a briefcase, and standing stiffly upright. His brief, polite, but guarded answers to Kent forestall any human connection, and he’s so self-contained that even his hair is carefully controlled. Wearing glasses, while making him look intelligent, also indicates that he’s hiding his eyes, those windows to his true nature, from those around him.
His manner of dressing suggests a disguise – but what is he like when he’s alone? He’s not asking for sympathy from other characters, but he might yet in his monologue. However, Sam Troughton’s delivery of Edmund’s monologue doesn’t bring this extra dimension to his character. Although Edmund is now being open about his motivations and intentions, he still comes across as cold and reserved.
There’s potential for a wide range of emotion in the text, from jocularity to grief, but Troughton only portrays negative ones – anger, bitterness, and contempt. His volume and anger escalate as he asks, “Why brand they us / With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?” (1.2). But he’s a man who keeps himself under tight control, even when alone – he quickly recovers himself and delivers the next line more quietly and calmly. Instead of the monologue working to humanize Edmund, it shows his wicked nature. In fact, Edmund comes across as more human and likable when he’s deceiving his father and brother than when he speaks to the audience. He expresses doubt, reassures, speaks kindly – but it’s all an act. His coldness is his true identity.
Shortly after, his mockery of his father’s belief in astrology, while still funny, comes across as cruel, too. There’s so little warmth and humanity in him. It’s interesting that the production chose to so thoroughly vilify Edmund, particularly as the portrayal of Edgar would have made it so easy to sympathize with the bastard brother. I didn’t recognize Edgar as himself when he first enters; he looks almost homeless – slovenly dressed, unshaven, smoking, and carrying a bottle of wine. The contrast between him and the sharply-dressed, proper Edmund is all too apparent, and in this context, Edmund’s desire to usurp his brother makes perfect sense. On appearances alone, the audience would certainly side with Edmund. But the production doesn’t develop this comparison as much as they could; while Edgar eventually shapes up and pulls through as a hero, Edmund simply remains a villain from beginning to end.
Edmund’s costume evolves over the course of the play. He loses the glasses as he stops trying to hide his villainous nature. During his romantic interlude with Goneril, he wears an overcoat but no suit jacket or tie – no longer as strictly contained as he once was. Later he adds a secret police-style coat, as seen here with Regan, which rather neatly encapsulates his journey from only wanting the inheritance from his father, to his entanglements in politics and war with Goneril and Regan. His ambitions increase, but otherwise his character undergoes less of a journey than his wardrobe. This Edmund doesn’t change over the course of the play.
Edmund’s death reveals how he remains fundamentally the same over the course of this production of King Lear, which simplifies his character from the text. Edmund’s final lines in which he tries to save Lear and Cordelia are cut; Sam Troughton’s thoroughly villainous Edmund never says the words, “Some good I mean to do” (5.3). It seems as though this production tries to minimize Edmund’s importance, as Edgar kills him quickly and without ceremony, even though their final fight has the dramatic potential of the confrontation between Hal and Hotspur.
In fact, if I could describe the characterization of Edmund in this production in two words, they would be “lost potential.” The text provides so many opportunities for Edmund’s character to be developed in interesting and complicated ways, but this production ignores them all, in some cases even cutting dialogue, to make him one-dimensional and uninteresting. Edmund could have easily been portrayed as a sympathetic underdog who only wants what he knows he deserves, his father’s inheritance, which, if he doesn’t receive, would go to his plainly irresponsible brother. The audience would start out on his side, if disapproving of his methods, and would slowly feel distanced from him as he begins to make more and more questionable decisions. There’s potential for a major turning point in his character when he decides to leave his father to be tortured by Cornwall. It would be much more powerful if he struggled and felt conflicted; he would be making the choice that puts him past the point of no return. Instead, this Edmund has no qualms making the decision and immediately exits, apparently without any conscience that could be troubled.
Perhaps Sam Mendes simply didn’t want to focus on Edmund; perhaps he felt that his character distracted from other, more important parts of King Lear. I just think it’s a shame that a character with such potential for rich and interesting development is simply written off as a villain all the way through.