Sam Mendes’s long running production of King Lear does not shy away from showing the grisly realities of being a character in a Shakespearean tragedy. While ultimately faithful to the original dialogue that Shakespeare wrote, the production takes it’s liberties with where and how and sometimes even ifs of its characters shuffling off of the mortal coil. By showing the audience all of the deaths that comprise the play’s final body count, the director allows for what would normally be an opportunity to further explore how various characters surrounding the newly deceased would react to the death. In Mendes’s production, however, responses from any of the characters to any of the carnage unfolding around them are a complete rarity. By having the characters essentially ignore the multiple murders and death around them, the director creates the impression that the characters are desperate to pretend that everything is fine, which not only makes the moment when a character finally reacts fully to the death of another character all the more powerful in showing just how tragic events have become, but serves to demonstrate ‘not okay’ events will continue to be for some time after the play’s final scene.
An early (and unexpected) death is that of Lear’s fool, who is beaten to death in this production instead of merely disappearing. While the king is manic and angry during the actual beating, he seems to forget the entire incident as soon as he drops the metal pipe. Lear barely even gives a sideways glance to where the fool lay when the man revives long enough to gasp out his final line. Edgar and Kent are also present for the entire scene, but do not react to the events unfolding around them. Instead, both men sit and watch their king murder the fool with little emotion. Later, when Gloucester enters the scene and sees the body of the fool in front of him, he gives no more response to the sight than someone else might give to finding a dead bug in their path: mild revulsion, but very far from upset. The lack of response to the death of the fool is understandable in the immediate context of the play. All of the men who see the murder or the body of the fool are either exiled or wanted dead at this point in the play. By refusing to act even mildly upset at the fool’s murder, the characters allow themselves the opportunity to deny exactly how grim their situation has become and keep the hope that things will soon return to the previous, more stable state alive.
Another early major character death we see in the play is that of Cornwall. While the audience can clearly tell that Regan is upset in this scene, Regan is only reacting to her husband’s injury in this scene. Cornwall does not actually die on stage, however. Instead, the next time we see Regan, she is at what is clearly her husband’s funeral. While this would be the moment in the production to show what Regan’s reaction to Cornwall’s death, the mourning black is all that audience gets. In the scene, Regan simply snaps her umbrella shut and conducts her business as if nothing particularly noteworthy has occurred. It is clear from Regan’s reaction that she wishes to put the entire instance behind her. Another interesting thing to note in this pair of scenes is the murder of the servant who killed Cornwall. Immediately following his stabbing of Cornwall, the servant is killed by an enraged Regan. Besides Regan, Cornwall, the servant and the now-blind Gloucester, however, another pair of servants is present in this staging of the play. These servants do nothing to stop either the servant who stabs Cornwall or Regan; instead, the two other servants spend the almost entire scene staring straight ahead, not even flinching at either murder they witness. These servants serve as a parallel to how the more important, named characters view the events: as something to ignore in hopes of things returning to a more normalized state sooner.
The lack of reactions the characters have to other characters’ deaths is most apparent in the final scene of the play, when the body county quickly multiplies. As Gloucester and Edmund die, Regan is murdered, and Goneril commits suicide, the fact that none of the other characters seem to have any greater response to the deaths beyond a basic acknowledgment becomes more and more unnerving. This uneasiness the audience feels with the surviving characters seeming indifference serves to not only increase the tension in this scene, but show just how delusional the surviving characters are becoming in their continued idea that events can still turn out in their favor and that a neutral status quo can be achieved again. This desperate hope is finally dashed when Lear reenters the scene with a dead Cordelia. This moment in the scene is the first where the audience is allowed to see a character truly react to another’s death and give a proper response (in this case, mourn). While the reaction is limited to Lear, the moment serves to drive home the tragedy of the play. When this is paired with the surviving characters lack of reaction at Lear’s death only moments later, the scene suggests that all of the remaining characters have given up on the idea that things will ever return to their previous quasi-happy state and that the constant and senseless death has become the new normal, giving a chilling context to Edgar’s closing lines for the play.
The characters in Sam Mendes’s production of King Lear spend much of the play completely responseless to any of the deaths occurring around them, effectively in denial of the grim reality of their situations and hoping with increase delusion that things will soon right themselves and the previous status quo will be reestablished. When a character finally reacts to the death of another character (the king to Cordelia’s death), the play achieves the full potential of its tragedy, showing that things will never go back to being normal and that the previous status quo has also died. When the characters revert back to unreacting when the king himself dies a few moments later, the audience sees a new status quo, one of bleak tragedy and senseless violence, established.