Regan and Goneril are very driven characters and have provided actors with an opportunity to explore portrayals of evil, violent women almost unrivalled in Shakespeare's plays.
In a co-production with the RSC, Yukio Ninagawa directed King Lear with Nigel Hawthorne in the principal role. Robin Weaver, Anna Chancellor and Sian Thomas (photo 4), played Cordelia, Regan and Goneril, respectively. This strikingly visual production used colour to highlight the characters' natures. The 'wicked sisters' wore oriental-style costumes with lurid reds and purples. Robin Weaver's Cordelia wore a white woollen dress with a simple monotone brown cape.
Cordelia is a challenge for any actor because her character is such an idealised righteousness without any apparent shades of ambivalence. She also only appears in a total of three scenes of the play (that is a lot of time in the dressing room drinking tea whilst Regan and Goneril get on with their petty squabbles and driving Lear mad). Interestingly though, there have been attempts at the RSC to blur the good/evil split between Cordelia and her two sisters.
In a 1976 production of King Lear, Judi Dench played Regan with a stutter and in so doing she challenged the stereotypical division between the saintly and demonic sisters. Dench said that she hoped that the stutter would suggest how Regan came to be as she was - she stuttered only in Lear's presence, and he showed impatience at her disability. The implication being that her 'filial ingratitude' resulted from parental tyranny.
Peter Brook's 1962 Royal Shakespeare Company production also attempted to breakdown the conventional stereotyping of the sisters. In this production Diana Rigg (photo 2) played Cordelia not as a saint, but as someone who could take of herself and consequently she invited spectator sympathy for her sisters.
Likewise, some twenty years later in Adrian Noble's RSC production, Alice Krige (photo 1) played Cordelia as a 'daddy's favourite', thereby giving a possible explanation for the actions of Regan (Jenny Agutter) and Goneril (Sara Kestelman).
In 2004, Bill Alexander cast Siân Brooke as Cordelia (photo 3) and Corin Redgrave as King Lear. In Alexander’s production Cordelia was portrayed as being about 17, with a different mother to her half-sisters Gonerill and Regan. Gonerill and Regan’s behaviour was formed from jealousy and anger bred of resentment: Lear makes no pretence of treating Cordelia differently.
