During a break in rehearsal, Corin Redgrave talks about King Lear.


I didn’t have a very strong preconception of Lear’s character before we started work on this production, but I had, from about forty years ago, quite a strong idea of the play. I was very much interested at that time in the rising of Black consciousness and what was called at that time Black Power, one of the most articulate and interesting spokespersons of which movement was the Trinidadian author CLR James (1901-89). CLR wrote a great deal about a number of subjects, chiefly political and historical, but he was also astonishingly interesting, I’m told by those who were more intimate, on cricket and published a part-autobiographical book, Beyond the Boundary (1963). His great book though is about the revolution in Haiti, the first Black revolution in the world. He was also deeply well read in English literature and a great amateur, in the best sense, of Shakespeare and he responded to our invitation one night, to sit and talk about King Lear, which he talked about entirely from the point of view of an England that had become divided into two: the (small number of) haves and the (very large number of) have-nots. From that point of view King Lear is modern, topical and relevant because it so vividly portrays a country divided by an almost impassable fault-line between those who have enough and those who don’t. Any attempt I make to build up an idea of Lear the man, Lear the ruler, is still very strongly influenced by that thinking.


There are innumerable ways of playing Lear, as there are innumerable ways of playing Hamlet, and each one is perfectly satisfactory within its own terms, though it’s not all-inclusive. You could play Lear as old and infirm, in which case the decision to divide his kingdom is predicated by his age and his infirmity, which makes handing over power perfectly natural. You can, on the other hand, play Lear as I choose to, in a way that more grounds it in that basic fault-line that exists in Britain, where an aristocracy and a rising number of merchants and entrepreneurs and what later would have been called capitalists (but weren’t at that time) are newly enriching themselves, and where a large number of people are being made quite literally destitute. In Shakespeare’s day there were acts of Parliament which now seem, in Britain in 2004, to be astonishingly generous, that laid down minimum provisions for the poor, but they were not properly observed, or perhaps they were not put into practice because the numbers of the poor overwhelmed the provision parishes could make for them. Parishes then were very inhospitable to the poor, rather as Britain today is utterly inhospitable to asylum-seekers and refugees. They did not want to have the poor within their boundaries, so all kinds of devices were resorted to, to move them on: they were ‘whipped from tithing to tithing’.


Because I wanted to ground Lear in a world in which the division between rich and poor is great, I thought he should, though advanced in years, be vigorous when we first encounter him. I wanted him to be fully in possession of his faculties, with no strong sense of his own decrepitude - rather the contrary. Of course that then does beg the question, why does he divide his kingdom? If, despite his advanced years, Lear could continue to rule for several more, why does he choose not to? Lear gives away his kingdom but he still wants the trappings of power, to retain all of his power, at least on a very long lead, so that he can call it back at will. I think he sees the division of his kingdom as an interesting way of both giving up power and retaining power. There are modern analogies - at a secret meeting at the beginning of the 1990s, Slobodan Miloševic (who became president of Serbia in 1988) and Franjo Tudjman (who became president of Croatia in 1990) met and decided to divide up Bosnia-Herzegovina between them. It was secret because no such plan could be carried out legally. In fact Miloševic never intended to leave Croatia whole, but rather to grab hold of parts of Croatia as well. So there are modern analogies for dividing up what was once a larger state - i.e. Yugoslavia in that case - in order to hold on to power. Clearly that’s what Miloševic was doing. There are also certain other parallels with Miloševic, though I don’t want to accuse Lear of genocide. For example, Miloševic’s attitude to his family is that of a total autocrat whose belief about himself (namely that he’s a socialist) is completely contradicted by the facts of his own behaviour. Like Miloševic, Lear has a belief about himself that is totally contradicted by the facts of his behaviour. Lear, of all Shakespeare’s major characters, has the least knowledge of himself.


Lear has no understanding of the wellsprings of his own behaviour or of his own motivation. He attributes them to totally different causes and it’s only when things start to go disastrously wrong that he becomes interested in causes. Unfortunately what blinds people to causes is power. Power makes the bearer of power believe that things happen because the bearer of power wants them to, or believes that they should, so they don’t ever examine the causes of things. Again you have a terrifying analogy with the situation today when leaders talk about terrorism without understanding what they mean when they use that word or any inclination to investigate the causes of terrorism - and yet you can’t possibly eradicate terrorism unless you know what it springs from. Lear only becomes interested in causes when he’s dispossessed. He asks Edgar (Poor Tom) ‘What is the cause of thunder’ [3.4.148] and ‘Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?’ [3.6.76-7] - in other words, why did my daughters turn against me? But why, for that matter, did I turn against my daughters? Why does anybody turn against anybody? Why are rulers so indifferent to the fate of their subjects? King Lear is a great play because it investigates these boundless questions and investigates the depths of amorality, of people who’ve lost all sense of moral compass in the world, whose only guide for behaviour is self-interest.


The play investigates how, in a dying or decaying world, we can live better and be better towards one another. It can’t produce any conclusions to that because the world as Shakespeare saw it at that time was dying, just as our world as we see it is dying. Shakespeare was writing in a world which he sees going to hell on wheels and writing a text book in case the world should ever recover. So it is the most bleak of plays, but it is a very salutary play, a very necessary play. If we had to, we could possibly lose some of Shakespeare’s plays and not be terribly much the poorer for it but you could not possibly lose King Lear without impoverishing ourselves terribly. Kenneth Tynan once wrote in a review of some actor’s performance as Lear “All Mr So-and-So’s attempts to characterise Lear are in vain. How do you characterise an Alp?” Ultimately the play defies you to say anything about it, or come away with any coherent thought about it, because it is vast. In a sense it is like all of art and all of music in one play.


The opening scene is one of extraordinary contrasts in tempo. It’s both very slow and very quick at different moments. Lear’s realisation, for example, that Cordelia is not going to say anything at all about how much she loves him, is an agonisingly slow dropping of the penny. At the start of the play, Cordelia is very young, scarcely more than a child. She has just reached puberty, which means that she’s undergoing an extraordinarily chaotic change in her own emotional development. She’s deemed now to be of a marriageable age but until the moment when the play opens, she’s been totally indulged. If Lear’s game had been played a year or two before, when Cordelia was scuttling round the court, pulling faces and doing childish things, and if she’d said then, in response to the question “Do you love me?” “No I don’t love you at all”, everyone would have laughed and indulged her, Lear most of all. But because she says ‘Nothing’ and goes on to try and make an explanation of that, an explanation which is deeply wounding to Lear, she humiliates him and she pays the price by being cruelly, savagely humiliated by him.


There’s no reason to bring in France and Burgundy or continue with the business of the dowry except to humiliate Cordelia. Her suitors will suppose that the only possible reason she doesn’t have a dowry is because she has lost her virginity and is no longer marriageable - that’s what Lear implies when he says “if you’re interested in her you can have her, but if you have her you have her without anything. She’s damaged goods”. The King of France thinks, “Well that’s very strange, why has this happened?” Making a calculated gamble he says “I don’t believe that’s the case. I think you’re not being given a dowry because somehow you’ve angered your father. Well you haven’t angered me and I think you’re very lovely and I’m going to take a romantic gamble. I’m going to offer you my hand in marriage.” France plays a very complicated power-game and falls in love with Cordelia for his own purposes. He’s thinking, “Lear doesn’t want you because you’ve angered him in some way. How can I get back at him? I can anger him by saying I want you and what’s more I don’t just want you, I’m in love with you”. That angers Lear extremely, because marriage, in his view, has nothing whatever to do with love.


I think Lear has probably fought his way to a unified state, to a unified kingdom. He doesn’t believe that any successor can possibly hold such a state together. He therefore decides, as a supreme act of statecraft, to prepare that by dividing it up into other smaller units, keeping himself as the sort of regent, a kind of president, super-king, über-king of the whole state. I think that he has promised himself a wonderful sort of holiday at the beginning of the play, in which he’s going to be feasting and hunting and doing all the things that he most enjoys doing, a long holiday from any responsibility whatever. Roles are reversed in all sorts of areas in this play.


Lear is NOT Saddam Hussein and I don’t want to stretch a modern comparison too far but I heard a story recently from one of the senior members of the Ba’ath party who had daily knowledge of what it was like to have dealings with Saddam Hussein and it struck me as very Lear-like, very apposite. On one occasion, he told me, Saddam started off a meeting by saying “What day is it today?” and some bright person said “Any day you want it to be”. Everybody laughed and thought that was a delightful joke. Saddam Hussein’s generosity was legendary. If anyone did anything useful for him, he would reward them with a Mercedes or a Rolls Royce. On the other hand, his sons-in-law were fêted, given palaces, cars, racehorses, aeroplanes etc. but, at the slightest provocation, they were killed. I think Cornwall, who reminds me rather of Saddam’s son, Uday, is brutal because that is the only way he can function. The punishments Lear has meted out are very, very harsh. I suspect he made his daughters watch cruelty and beheadings, perhaps even torture. Cornwall models himself on the way he sees his father-in-law.


The relationship between Lear and his Fool is very difficult to talk about in a way that doesn’t over-conceptualise it. On stage, you have to make it dramatically credible, plausible and worthwhile but there are numerous occasions, when you’re reading the play, when you want to say to the Fool, “oh shut up - just leave the stage!” He is endlessly prodding the audience with little jibes and jokes which just aren’t funny. I sometimes feel about the Fool almost as Tolstoy felt about the whole play - he’s a thorough waste of time, utterly idiotic and so on. The problem with Tolstoy was that he was something like Lear himself and therefore he was blind to a whole side of Lear. There was also the arrogance of greatness in Tolstoy’s attitude because Tolstoy clearly must have felt himself to be at least Shakespeare’s equal, if not his superior. However, the Fool does have a very important role to play: he is Lear’s inner life. The director Bill Alexander has the most interesting definition of the Fool which I think is very fertile: he says that the Fool is Lear’s daemon, using Philip Pullman’s idea of a daemon. Lear doesn’t just go mad, it is the Fool’s function to drive Lear mad. Lear is frightened of going mad, because madness is the passport to self-knowledge, self-knowledge being something denied to him all his life. So his fear of madness is a painful transport, a necessary and unavoidable passport to self-knowledge and the Fool’s function is to tell Lear all the time “You did it wrong. You absolutely made a wrong choice there.” Lear could either dismiss the Fool or admit that the Fool is necessary because what he says is true. The truth is painful for Lear and at times he threatens the Fool with whipping but he never actually hits the Fool, kicks him or dismisses him. The Fool dismisses himself after the first scene because he thoroughly disagrees with what Lear has done about Cordelia. He sits in a cupboard for two days and won’t come out. He goes on strike and refuses to quip or joke.


In his film, Ran the Japanese director Akira Kurasawa makes an interesting choice - he makes Lear a very, very, very old figure, taking literally what most of us only take figuratively, i.e. Lear’s reference to four-score and upward. Kurosawa bravely makes the Lear figure terribly, frighteningly old which is enormously interesting because of course you cannot deny that the play is about old age and our very complicated responses to old age - both our own aging and also our parents’ and other people’s aging. Edmund dares to say “the trouble with these people is that they won’t just drop off their perches. Why do they have to go on living? Wouldn’t life be so much simpler if they just snuffed it? Well we’ll help them to do the humane thing and we’ll snuff them”. The problem is nowadays we’re completely ambivalent about age. For example, half of the time I think of myself as an old man, half of the time I don’t. Old age has not brought Lear wisdom. It’s made him more and more sclerotic, I think the term is, that’s to say he seems to be suffering from arteriosclerosis, a condition of the hardening of the arteries, which also gives rise to very sudden, very unreliable mood-swings. It makes people terribly hard to second guess - one can never tell what their response is going to be to any given thing. The problem with Lear is that he has absolute, total power and can’t get used to the idea of giving it up. All of his moods are indulged. He needs to be loved, and at the same time, he has no understanding of the boundaries. For example, when he’s being terribly cruel to Cordelia, there is a part of him that believes that if he goes on she’ll suddenly break down and start sobbing and beg his forgiveness, only she doesn’t: she stands up and refuses to give in. Because you see in a way, she has great deal of Lear in her.


During a break in rehearsals, John Normington talks about playing the Fool.


The Fool acts as a sounding board for Lear, who needs someone to give him whatever support he can get. But the only way the Fool knows how to support Lear is to wisecrack in a cryptic, bitter way. Households with money, prestige and power employed fools. They were servants, but not in the same way as, say, the kitchen maid. There were two types of fool - natural fools and professional fools. A natural fool would be a freak, someone perhaps mentally impaired. Lear grants his Fool high status but in Gonerill’s eyes, the Fool is the lowest of the low: ‘this your all-licensed fool’, she says [1.4.196]. As the voice of his conscience, the Fool can say almost anything to Lear. He tells Lear what Lear’s thinking and feeling and he also tells Lear that what he did was wrong. He teaches Lear to laugh at his terrors and he’s the companion of Lear’s madness. The Fool is the voice of wisdom when the one who should be wise acts foolishly.


Corin Redgrave [who plays Lear] and I have decided that Lear and his Fool are of an age and very, very close. In a sense, the Fool is Lear’s protector, his mentor, the one the king talks to on a day-to-day basis. In our production, the Fool wears Lear’s cast-off clothes. In the storm the Fool takes off his coat and hands it back to the king, their roles reversed. So my Fool is not dressed traditionally as a clown: he doesn’t wear motley but he does have the coxcomb, partly because the play contains so many references to it. It is a battered old coxcomb, a symbolic reminded of the crown Lear has given away. Behind his great cynicism, there is great compassion in the Fool’s attitude to his master - he’s deeply fond of Lear, despite the king’s obvious faults. Cynicism is his way of handling the situation, a kind of defence mechanism. I suppose in a way their relationship is like a marriage, warts and all. It’s extraordinary the affection some characters feel towards Lear. Kent, for example, is absolutely devoted to him and Gloucester remains loyal. Lear is a terrible man, a tyrannical man but there must be more to him, something in his character that arouses fierce and loyal affection


Rather like Touchstone in As You Like ItKing Lear is a very difficult part to play because so much of what they say is impenetrable and the jokes are obscure. I’ve played Touchstone too and think that, so long as the actor knows what he’s saying, there’s an 80% chance the audience will understand. Shakespeare’s fools often remind me of the northern comics I used to follow when I was a boy: they, too, told rather cynical, cryptic jokes. I’m playing Lear’s Fool as a Northern comic and Bill and I are slowly coming round to the idea that quite a lot of the snatches will be sung, rather than spoken, so that he doesn’t appear to be pontificating all the time. Initially I tried playing him Cockney, like Max Miller, but it all became too much like Archie Rice in John Osbourne’s play The Entertainer which Corin has just done in Liverpool. So I’m playing the Fool with a Yorkshire accent. My father was from Yorkshire and my mother from Lancashire. I grew up in Cheshire, near the Peak District, not far from Yorkshire and Lancashire.


The composer, Jonathan Goldstein, has set the Fool’s songs to music. I have them on a tape, which I listen to constantly! It’s a collaborative process. I’ve been able to feed in my ideas about music hall songs and had some license to alter them as we go along. Bill is encouraging me to physicalise the songs, so I’m doing little steps, which I’m making up myself. I’m not a great dancer but I have done some musicals - I was in Guys and Dolls, which David Toguri choreographed. He was absolutely brilliant at making actors look as though they could dance. He used to put the fabulous dancers in the front row, the alright ones in the middle and the actors who couldn’t dance at the back - we got away with it but there was a lot of bravura involved! I’m hoping it looks as though singing and dancing are as natural as breathing to the Fool, that he can slip easily from one to the other and into dialogue, seamlessly.


The Fool’s line ‘Whoop, Jug, I love thee!’ [1.4.221] is probably a snatch of an old song, which editors suggest is lost. I think ‘He that keeps nor crust nor crumb, / Weary of all, shall want some’ [1.4.193] is possibly a bit of a nursery rhyme. The Fool perhaps entertained Lear’s daughters - especially Cordelia. She’s obviously his favourite, just as she was Lear’s favourite. For three days after Lear banished Cordelia, the Fool ‘pined away’ and avoided Lear’s sight [see 1.4.72-3].


There is a theory that, because Cordelia and the Fool are never seen on stage together, the same actor played both parts. It’s possible and would have been practical but for this production, we’ve decided that the Fool is an old man, like Lear. I think it’s best if the Fool is old. Robert Armin joined Shakespeare’s company in 1600 and played the clowns in the later plays - Feste in Twelfth Night, Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale and the Fool in King Lear. He apparently had a beautiful singing voice and songs were written especially for him. He would have been around 37 when King Lear was first performed, so doubling with Cordelia would have been unlikely and I wouldn’t want to try it, not with Siân Brooke in the company!


The Fool doesn’t appear again after Act 3 Scene 6 and there has been great discussion as to what actually happens to him. In Act 5 scene 3, almost at the very end of the play, King Lear says ‘and my poor Fool is hanged!’ [line303]. Some scholars think he’s referring to Cordelia, who was hanged on Edmund’s orders but I don’t. When Mad Tom appears he seems to take over the Fool’s role as court jester, leaving the Fool to fade away. I think he wanders off and gets caught up with Cornwall’s army and killed.


During a break early on in the rehearsal process, Siân Brooke talks about Cordelia.


We have decided in rehearsal that Cordelia is about 17 and has a different mother from Gonerill and Regan. We talked about the fact that Gloucester has legitimate a son, Edgar, and just a few months later he had a bastard son, probably with the girl he loved. Perhaps there’s a correlation with Lear’s story - perhaps Lear loved Cordelia’s mother far more than he loved the mother of his elder children. That might explain why Cordelia is his favourite, why he’s more doting towards her. Gonerill and Regan are not evil characters, but their characters are formed from jealousy and anger bred of resentment: Lear makes no pretence of treating Cordelia differently. All three are rivals for their father’s love.


In the first scene Cordelia believes wholeheartedly that her sisters are lying. She says to them, ‘I know you what you are’. For the rest of the play she follows that truth and tries to restore her father to his rightful place. She has a strong sense of what is right and wrong, which is why she can’t come to terms with her father’s behaviour in that first scene. For her, much of the play is about truth and being true to herself. Like a crusader, she’s a seeker of truth. Cordelia is convinced she was right about her sisters. She realises though she was wrong so stubbornly to have insisted on repeating the word ‘Nothing’ in the first scene and wrong to imagine her father would change his mind. I don’t think she does forgive her sisters at the end but I think she wants to know whether they have repented their treatment of Lear because, just before she’s led off with Lear and killed, she says to Edmund, ‘Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?’ [5.3.7]. Her death is, in a sense, a martyr’s death.


Cordelia says to Lear ‘you have begot me, bred me, loved me’. When politicians want to make a statement, they say it in threes. I think perhaps subconsciously what Cordelia is doing is responding to Lear in the way he speaks to her. She’s learned his rhetoric, learnt from him how to put her argument across. I don’t think Cordelia encourages her father’s favouritism or abuses it but it certainly causes tension and friction between the sisters. Cordelia is who she is: she loves her father wholeheartedly and respects him enormously - and she is like him in many ways. So many of the daughters in Shakespeare’s plays are like their fathers. Cordelia has Lear’s inflexibility, his hotheadness. Once she’s made a decision, there’s no budging her. All three daughters are like their father to an extent - all can be fierce.


We discussed whether Lear had told the daughters about the manner in which he was going to divide the kingdom beforehand. He may have told all three of them what he was going to do and what he would like each of them to say. We talked about Cordelia turning round and saying, ‘that’s ridiculous - I’m not going to do that, it goes against everything I feel’, warning him not to proceed. So when he actually asks them to play the game, in public, Cordelia is sitting there thinking ‘I told you not to be like this. I told you, and you’re still doing it.’ That’s what she’s thinking about when she answers ‘Nothing’. It takes enormous strength for Cordelia to say ‘Nothing’. It is not a meek, disappointed or frightened response, rather a determined declaration of her disapproval.


In rehearsal, we’ve been exploring the way Lear decides who will marry Cordelia. At the moment Lear drags her and forces her into a chair and when France and Burgundy enter, she’s still struggling and he’s still seething. It’s an intolerable situation: her love for her father is unconditional and she has an unbelievably deep respect for him but he behaves like a child, like a baby who’s thrown the rattle out of the pram, basically saying to France and Burgundy, ‘Go on, have her, have her’. She doesn’t hate her father but she perhaps hopes he’ll learn from his lesson. Their roles are reversed - she’s the mother, he’s the child. Of the two suitors, France is probably the one she would have chosen and it’s probably a relief to her that Burgundy backs out. When France takes Cordelia, he takes her solely for her virtues. So some good comes of an intolerable situation. In France, Cordelia is treated with the utmost respect.


When Lear and Cordelia are reconciled, it isn’t that they are immediately in each other’s arms. Her main concern I think is to see that her father is alright, not from any political ambition but purely for love of her father: ‘No blown ambition did our arms incite / But love, dear love, and our aged father’s right’ [4.4.27]. No doubt she’s angry when she sees him coming out of the chair but her main concern is to restore him to his rightful place. But now he is the child - Cordelia says ‘oh you kind gods, / Cure this great breach in his abusèd nature! / Th’untuned and jarring senses O wind up/ Of this child-changèd father’ [4.7.14-17]. ‘Pray do not mock me’, he says a few lines later. There is an innocence, a naivety about the language at the end of the play. It’s astonishingly beautiful: ‘Come, let’s away to prison. / We two alone will sing like birds i’the cage.’ After all the horrors, they find peace and harmony. He says he doesn’t need anything, as long as he has her.


In the fourth week of rehearsals, Emily Raymond talks about playing Gonerill.


In rehearsal we’ve talked about the family and decided that Gonerill is roughly 35 years old, Regan around 30 and Cordelia probably just 17. We’ve also decided that Gonerill and Regan are probably Lear’s daughters from his first marriage and that Cordelia has a different mother. It is important that Gonerill is the king’s eldest child and that she has been taught by a master. I get the impression they’ve had a brutal upbringing - it smacks of physical violence and mental abuse. I think Lear probably took his daughters to hangings and taught them the brutal way to deal with traitors - you don’t hang them, you pluck out their eyes and let them live, to serve as a deterrent to others. Gonerill needs to make things as controlled - as in her control - as possible. Because the ground is constantly shifting with her father, because he’s mercurial, always moving the goal posts, Gonerill likes to pin things down. Lear gives away his power and then wants it back, so Gonerill thinks, ‘well, then we’re going to have to kill him.’


Lear has obviously chosen Albany for Gonerill and it’s a very bad match. In the opening line of the play Kent tells us Albany is quite a favourite with Lear but he’s no match for Gonerill. They don’t operate well together on any level. They’re like chalk and cheese. In Act 4 scene 2, Albany calls Gonerill a monster and a fiend and talks of dislocating her bones and tearing her flesh, to which she responds with the very derogatory ‘Marry, your manhood! Mew!’ (line 68). She has no time for him. As the play progresses, aspects of his wife’s character are revealed and, for the first time, he begins to see her clearly for what she is. Because Lear has daughters rather than sons, ambiguities arise and it’s never clear who has the power within each relationship or who owns the land. Does the land she inherited from her father belong to Gonerill or to Albany? In Act 5, Gonerill says ‘the laws are mine, not thine. /Who can arraign me for it?’ (5.3.156-7)


Because Albany is said to be Lear’s favourite, Gonerill perhaps expected the better share of the kingdom. I think the division has been a long time coming, that Lear has often hinted at a promise of something. That’s part of Lear’s tactics, part of his power, to insinuate they’ll get something, without being told precisely what it will be. In Act 2 scene 4, when Lear says ‘I gave you all‘, Regan replies ‘And in good time you gave it’. The way Lear divides the kingdom is absolutely ridiculous, asking them to jump through hoops, giving the biggest portion to the daughter who says she loves him most. Lear should have listened to all three answers before dividing the kingdom - but that’s not the way he operates. Gonerill speaks and he gives her Scotland. I don’t think she’s at all pleased but at least, she thinks, it’s hers. When Regan is given Wales and Cornwall, two thoughts are going through Gonerill’s mind: at least Regan and I have been treated equally but more than that, she’s thinking oh, well, what a surprise, look what’s left - Cordelia is to be given England, the jewel in the crown. When Gonerill is saddled with her father and 100 of his knights, she realises it’s a terrible deal and will end in disaster: ‘the best and soundest of his time hath been but rash’ she says. Things have always been difficult, but this is a new level of insanity and instability.


Gonerill believes that she and her sister need to join forces and fight France, or face loosing their land. She’s the strategist - until she falls totally and utterly in love with Edmund and then everything goes to pot. I don’t think Gonerill has ever known anything like it. He’s her downfall. Her love for Edmund makes her go a bit mad - she looses the ability to think clearly. Feelings and emotion become part of her life in a way that they never have been and she becomes obsessed with him at the expense of everything else. She doesn’t even care if her husband knows. Edmund is a man quite like her father, only stronger, better, more able to deal with things. He’s certainly completely different to Albany. Gonerill is obsessively, possessively in love.


It’s not just spite or jealousy that makes Gonerill want Edmund. I don’t think Regan is particularly in love with Edmund, it’s just that she doesn’t seem to want her sister to get him. Gonerill’s obsession is such that she’s prepared to kill her sister over Edmund. I saw a programme on TV the other night about jealousy and it really struck a chord. The emotion of jealousy is so incredibly strong it leads people to want to kill. It was agony to watch one woman who ended up stalking her ex-partner because he’d found someone else. You can’t be clear-headed when jealousy takes over - it poisons the mind. You don’t sit in a chair and feel jealous. You might sit in a chair and feel depressed or upset but jealousy gnaws away at you and makes you do extreme and terrible things.


Lear says atrocious things to Gonerill - he calls her an ‘unnatural hag’, ‘detested kite’, ‘a disease that’s in my flesh’, ‘a boil, / A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle’. More terrible still, he calls upon the gods to ‘convey sterility’ into her womb:

Dry up in her the organs of increase And from her derogate body never spring A babe to honour her. If she must teem, Create her child of spleen, that it may live And be a thwart disnatured torment to her. Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth, With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks, Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits To laughter and contempt, that she may feel How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child! [1.4.274-286]

What he says is so awful, so vile, so horrendous that you feel Gonerill is justified in her actions. Lear stamps on her, crushes her in a violent and horrible way. I think that is absolutely indicative of their relationship. Even if she doesn’t believe in the gods, Lear’s curse is not something to be taken lightly. Leo [Leo Wringer plays Albany] and I have talked about their marriage and decided that they have been married for at least ten years, so it’s quite significant that they haven’t got children. Lear’s curse, then, is a double kick: it is a terrible reminder of the fact that her marriage to Albany is childless and now there is no hope of a child, which means also that there will be no one to inherit the kingdom after her. Playing Gonerill makes me wonder why anyone sympathises with Lear - and then you get to the final scenes, and it breaks your heart. The language at the end of the play - Lear’s ‘come let’s away to prison’ speech’ - is exquisitely beautiful.


During a break in rehearsals, Matthew Rhys talks about playing Edmund.


When I first read the play, I thought Edmund was evil through-and-through. But then I re-read that short speech of Gloucester’s at the beginning (when he’s talking about his illegitimate son) and I was appalled. Gloucester tells Kent, ‘the whoreson must be acknowledged … He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again.’ Should Gloucester be telling anyone ‘there was good sport at his making’? I felt sorry for Edmund because he’s had such a raw deal. So to my way of thinking (and we’re still in the early stages of the rehearsal period) he’s not evil at all, just hard done-by. The director Bill Alexander has suggested that when Edmund was sent to Italy for his education, he came under the influence of the Italian political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527). In The Prince (1513), Machiavelli argues that the ends can justify the means and that rulers must be prepared to do evil if they think good will come of it.


In Edmund’s opening speech (‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound’), feeling rejected he asks why he is branded with the words ‘bastard’ and ‘base’. Edgar, his half-brother, is only 12 or 14 months older than him. They have the same father and, Edmund argues, ‘My dimensions are as well-compact, / My mind as generous’ and yet he is deemed to be vile and despicable simply because he was born out of wedlock. I think his argument is completely justified and so my starting point was to think whatever action he takes is justifiable.


Edmund has a wonderful speech about how easy it is to blame fortune and the stars:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune - often the surfeits of our own behaviour - we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical predominance. [1.2.118-21]

He mocks people who believe the movement of the stars is responsible for what happens to them and says it’s stupid ‘to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star.’ He’s saying “Stand up! Stand on your own two feet!” We are each responsible for what happens to us. It’s a very modern attitude, a revolutionary attitude for those Christian times.


I suppose I’m applying what might be termed modern psychology to the role when, in any given situation, I’m asking how I personally would react. For example, Gloucester says he loves both his sons equally and yet Edgar will inherit the land. Gloucester doesn’t say that Edgar will inherit because he’s the elder son, he says it’s because he’s the legitimate one. For me, that thought quickly gives rise to anger.


Edmund is unaware of Cornwall’s true nature, but when he takes Edmund under his wing, Edmund is quick to see that he can use him to get what he wants, which is to stop Gloucester and get rid of Edgar. Edmund also seizes the opportunity when Gonerill and Regan show an interest in him: he thinks ‘Oh I can ride this and see what happens.’ He’s not in love with either of them - he’s just showing an interest to see how it can play to his advantage.


Edmund returns from Italy to be the avenging angel and punish his father. You could argue he has time to write the letter during the short scene between Gonerill and Regan but I believe he arrives at court with the letter already written. Edmund resents Edgar for no particular reason - it’s not that he dislikes him personally, it’s just that Edmund is the younger, illegitimate son. The wheel comes full circle though because, when Edgar kills him, it’s he, the wronged brother, who is the avenging angel.


During a break in rehearsal, David Hargreaves talks about playing Gloucester in the current production.


The Earl of Gloucester is obviously a very powerful and wealthy man and he’s prepared to go to great lengths to catch the man he thinks is a traitor. When he set in motion the countrywide manhunt for Edgar, we learn that he has the power and money to bar all the ports. We also learn in the early scenes that he has a past of whoring and a degree of guilt about his bastard son, Edmund. Initially he denies having anything to do with Edmund and he gets him out of the way, sends him off to Italy. But Gloucester is a kind and honourable man. He makes provision for Edmund and pays for his education. When Edmund comes back, full of Renaissance flair, Gloucester brings himself to acknowledge that he is his son: ‘His breeding, sir, hath been at my charge. I have so often blushed to acknowledge him that now I am brazed to it’ (1.1.9-10). We don’t hear anything of Edmund’s mother but I suspect Gloucester was fond of her, that he might have fallen in love with her. My impression then of Gloucester, is of a man of conscience who decides to do the right thing.


Duty is one of the play’s key themes - duty to the king, duty to parents and so on. Shakespeare sets up the idea that the young should be as ward to the parents, which is contrary to the established view that children have a duty to their parents, that children ought to respect age and wisdom. In the first scene, when Gloucester is talking to Kent about Edmund, we know that Kent disapproves and yet Gloucester carries on, speaking freely about his whoring days: ‘there was good sport at his making’. That element of bravura though is qualified when he says, ‘the whoreson must be acknowledged’. The aristocracy all had bastards - they put them into the background, gave them a title and an income. Gloucester, though, has actually invited Edmund to Court.


At the start of the journey, Shakespeare establishes Gloucester as a man capable of redemption, of understanding. Gloucester’s journey closely mirrors Lear’s: both think their children are ungrateful, both blame the wrong child, the rage of each echoes that of the other and both are proved wrong. Lear’s mind almost explodes as he comes to terms with and tries to understand life but he gradually finds reason through madness and Gloucester learns to see and feel when he looses his sight. The other character I’m playing in the season is Lord Capulet in Peter Gill’s production of Romeo and Juliet. They’re similar characters in a way: both Gloucester and Capulet can be extremely loving but when the established order of things is challenged, they’re full of rage.


John Dee (1527-1608) was an alchemist, geographer, mathematician and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth. He foretold the future through the movement of the planets and through horoscopes. In King Lear Edmund arrives from Italy, a new thinker, full of new ideas, scornful of the old way of thinking: ‘An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star.’ Edmund is incredulous - “Can you believe it?” he says, “my father’s looking for an excuse for his whoring in the stars!” Edmund knows he would have been what he is ‘had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardising’. [see 1.2.118-132] It’s a wonderful speech: Of course I’m rough and lecherous he says - ‘my father compounded with my mother under Ursa Major’! What Gloucester discovers after the blinding is not that the influences of the gods are any less real, but that he can no longer use them as an excuse, as a crutch: ‘Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects’ [1.2.104-6]. A Jacobean audience would have been able to distinguish clearly between ‘nature’ and ‘nature’ (i.e. mother nature and human nature) but we’ve changed the to line to read ‘yet our nature…’ to make Gloucester’s meaning clearer to a modern audience.


For the last two days we’ve been working on the scene in which Gloucester is blinded. It is a difficult scene to stage, technically as well as emotionally. The director, Bill Alexander, has decided not to have any props. We did talk at one stage of using a sheep’s eye, which is about the same size as a human eye. Cornwall could pretend to take it out, put it under his boot and stamp it underfoot but Bill wondered who would clean up the blood before the next scene. He didn’t want a stage hand coming on with a dustpan and brush! We are using blood but we haven’t quite worked out how it’s going to work. We haven’t yet decided who’s going to smear blood on my eyes. It can’t be Gloucester himself, because his hands will be tied behind his back. Audience reaction to the blinding is absolutely crucial. They must recoil since it’s the audience’s imagination that makes the actual blinding horrific rather than Gloucester’s screams or what’s really happening on stage. When Gloucester’s eyes are bound with flax and whites of eggs (see 3.7.106), we’re going to have a piece of sacking (Hessian or flax) covered in something that looks like egg whites and congealed blood, which will give an almost clownish appearance of spectacles. There’ll be blood from capsules running down into the beard too. We were talking today about the point at which Gloucester throws himself off the Dover cliff and says ‘do but look up’. At that point, I think, he will take the bandage off, which means that underneath, we’ll have to create something to look like bleeding, empty sockets. The Wig department is exploring ways of making a prosthetic that will look black and blue from the bruising.


Edgar tells Edmund ‘The dark and vicious place where thee he got / Cost him his eyes’ [5.3.172]. The blinding leaves Gloucester in desperate straits, feeling suicidal and yet, ironically, it’s only when he’s blind that Gloucester can see clearly. After the blinding, he wants to go to Dover, where all men of good faith and good will are gathering. He’s hoping to find Edgar, whom he realises now is the true son, true in heart: ‘O dear son Edgar, / The food of thy abusèd father’s wrath!’ [4.1.21-2] Before the blinding, Gloucester didn’t feel things as he feels them now. He wasn’t aware of the suffering of others. When he has no eyes, he sees ‘feelingly’ - that’s crucial. In the first scene after the blinding, Gloucester encounters a very old man who works on the estate. ‘Away! Get thee away! Good friend, be gone. / Thy comforts can do me no good at all - thee they may hurt.’ He is saying “I’m all right, but if you’re caught helping me you might pay for it with your life.” He knows his enemies will be swift to act and will show no mercy. It’s significant that he’s aware of the danger the old man is in if he helps Gloucester. Showing concern for the old man is Gloucester’s first humane act.


When Gloucester sees the world feelingly and can feel what wretches feel, he has wonderful moments of brilliant insight. When he gives the beggar (who is his son) the purse he says, ‘Heavens deal so still! / Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man / That slaves your ordinance, that will not see / Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly!’ [4.1.65-8] And then he says, ‘So distribution should undo excess, and each man have enough’ [4.1.69]. This is the first act of a new order, the first soundings of socialism, the beginnings perhaps of the later Leveller movement (a democratic pro-republican party in the English Civil War). People were beginning openly to question that there was so much wealth on the one hand and so much suffering on the other. These are the kinds of ideas that find a voice throughout this very moral play.