King Lear is a long play. Because there are 300 lines cut from the Quarto to the Folio (with only 100 of those lines replaced), we know that even Shakespeare thought King Lear was too long. The best evidence for such a pronouncement, however, is in performance. The main drag on the narrative in the National Theatre’s production of King Lear is the strict fidelity to the conflated text, which is exasperated by the use of a proscenium stage and its associated acting tropes.
Act Four, scene three is a prime example of a scene that seems perfecting fine while reading but is lacking when it gets up on stage. In the quarto version of the play, there are several aside conversations between Kent and various messengers that remind the reader and the audience of the war at large, and that signal the return of Cordelia before she is seen again onstage. The largest meeting of this kind comes in the middle of Act Four, right after the fight between Albany and Goneril and Cordelia’s reentrance. This scene’s primary function in the narrative is to paint the political scenery of the play. For a play based on historical events, and one with significant levels of political intrigue besides, King Lear is surprisingly bereft of battles. We know that Cordelia’s French forces lose, but the only fights on stage are personal fights, mostly involving Edgar or Oswald (or both, in the case of the latter’s untimely death). In a production deeply focused on the way in which the political and the personal intertwine, such a lack is surely a sore spot. By keeping the scene in, Mendes adds in yet another reminder that there is a war going on amongst all this personal turmoil.
No doubt these were the original intentions of such a scene. Yet the scene undermines validity within the narrative because it offers very little to those personal details that are the lifeblood of the play. For as much as this production would like you to believe otherwise, King Lear is not a realistic play about a political reality that was or could someday be. It is a play that, much like the Elizabethan lack of elaborate staging, is much more about imagination and abstraction. The play does not present the warring armies on stage because they ultimately have only incidental relevance to the story. The scene ought to be cut because it draws the reader out of the individual storylines without offering much in return. The scene itself has no internal tension or conflict, making it uninteresting to watch. Even with good intentions, the conversation simply slows everything down too much, especially coming not too far after the intermission and two fascinating scenes. It even falls into the pitfall of telling the audience how a character behaves before that character appears on stage to show us.
This production also leaves intact the “trial” scene in Act three, scene ### (which, in this production, will probably be remembered more as the scene where Lear bludgeons the Fool to death). While I have several qualms about the scene and how it was presented in this production, I would like to again point out the difference between a scene that reads well and a scene that plays well. This trial is a mockery of the first scene, and it showcases nicely how far Lear has fallen and how emotionally and mentally distressed he is. In performance, it is a scene that showcases Lear yelling at a joint stool and not following the directions of people who have his best interests at heart but rather playing around with the “mad” Edgar. This right after a scene of Lear not listening to people who have his best interests at heart but rather being overly concerned with the “mad” Edgar, and that scene comes after a scene of Lear yelling at the weather. (Act three, in general, is very repetitive when it comes to the king on the heath. We get it. Lear has gone crazy. It’s almost as if the play has his name in the title or something.)
This production attempts to make the scene more relevant and therefore justified, but ultimately fails because the great act of violence, Lear in his madness killing the Fool, offers very little substantial change to the play because the action is not carried through the rest of the scene, let alone the rest of the play. Because there are no consequences at all for Lear’s actions, the violence seems gratuitous and senseless, more fitting for a production of Titus than of Lear.
The problems in pacing are made more apparent because the Olivier Theatre is a classic proscenium stage rather than a thrust one. This means that the audience is essentially separated from the action which creates a more passive viewing experience. In this case, this means that the play is divorced from the energy of the audience. The pacing becomes more introspective, then, and, while this allows the actors to take more time to deliver their lines and ruminate in the meanings, it still extends the run time of the show significantly. Mendes seems to have made the stage choice consciously, as the program interview tells us, because he was looking to mirror the isolation that the characters in the play feel. While I certainly agree with that concept and find it a central theme in the play, I wonder if this relationship could be displayed in another way.
I love the Quarto. I think it’s much more interesting than the Folio, partially because of the politics, partially because I’m not the biggest fan of Lear himself and so I appreciate the focus on other characters, and partially because I like Albany better than Edgar. What this production proves, however, is that some scenes really are unperformable. Sometimes, strict fidelity must be cast aside in order to let the story shine through.