abuse are evident in his daughters. Alex Kingston’s Cordelia has become rebellious, bloody-minded and rejects Lear almost more than he does her. Estelle Kohler’s Goneril and Sally Dexter’s Regan, seem still to want the love of this old, impossible man.… It is fashionable nowadays to allow us to see the “bad” daughters’ point of view, but rarely as strongly as here. Both of them seem badly in need of Valium, psychoanalysis, or both. They are frustrated, exhausted, at the end of a tether which finally breaks, liberating all that suppressed anger and barely contained madness. Their evils proliferate, but they, like Goneril and Regan themselves, are ultimately Lear’s fault. 48
Order opens up to reveal chaos. And the same pattern is visible in erratic human behaviour. Lear, having cursed Goneril with sterility, rushes back to embrace her. Astonishingly, Regan first conspires in the blinding of Gloucester and then tenderly asks him, rather than her wounded husband, “How dost my lord?” Mr. Hytner ushers us into a morally topsy-turvy universe in which good and evil frequently cohabit within the same person. 49
One cannot escape the fact that what Regan and Goneril do is evil and unnatural. In Buzz Goodbody’s 1974 production, which cut the role of Cornwall, “Regan put out Gloucester’s eyes unaided, with a broach.” 50 Modern stagings of the blinding scene nearly always show Regan’s active participation in the mutilation of Gloucester.Emily Raymond, who played Goneril in 2004, felt that Goneril and Regan “had a brutal upbringing—[with] 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.” 51
What impact does it have to turn the violence and evil in
Lear
into something psychological instead of metaphysical? Does the implication that it is somehow the “natural” result of a bad, neglected upbringing diminish the epic nature of the play and the horrific impact of the sisters’ monstrous acts? Lear’s world is thrown out of order by his inability to be an adequate father
and king
. James I, in his publication
The True Law of Free Monarchies
, underlined the divine right of kings and the duty of all monarchs to treat their subjects as a caring father would do his children. Lear’s misunderstanding of his role as a fixed point in the natural order of things and his irresponsibility in relation to his position in society unleash unnatural chaos.
In 1993 Adrian Noble emphasized violent cosmic forces prevalent in the play by use of an abstract but symbolic set:
When David Bradley’s superlative Gloucester, his eyes gouged out, staggers away from the scene of atrocity and from Simon Dormandy’s chillingly, psychopathic Cornwall, the focus clears at last. Noble used the Folio edition of the text, so cutting the aid of Gloucester’s servants after the blinding. The sightless Bradley gazes in the direction of a blue and white model of the globe, fixed above the stage. As he stares, a crack runs across the globe’s circumference and the sands of time begin to pour out of it. The society of King Lear, with family life collapsing in warfare and inhuman cruelty … is ominous of all civilized human life ruined and coming to an end. 52
In this bleak vision,
Noble’s most original stroke is to suggest that the cruelty unleashed by Lear’s folly spreads to even the conventionallygood characters. The chief beneficiary is Simon Russell Beale’s extraordinary Edgar who starts as goody-two shoes and who is turned by the horrors he has witnessed into a symbol of revenge. In this production he doesn’t just kill Oswald; he batters his face with a staff as if in retaliation for the blinding of his father. The most unplayable major role in Shakespeare suddenly acquires a specific identity: a man forever
Order opens up to reveal chaos. And the same pattern is visible in erratic human behaviour. Lear, having cursed Goneril with sterility, rushes back to embrace her. Astonishingly, Regan first conspires in the blinding of Gloucester and then tenderly asks him, rather than her wounded husband, “How dost my lord?” Mr. Hytner ushers us into a morally topsy-turvy universe in which good and evil frequently cohabit within the same person. 49
One cannot escape the fact that what Regan and Goneril do is evil and unnatural. In Buzz Goodbody’s 1974 production, which cut the role of Cornwall, “Regan put out Gloucester’s eyes unaided, with a broach.” 50 Modern stagings of the blinding scene nearly always show Regan’s active participation in the mutilation of Gloucester.Emily Raymond, who played Goneril in 2004, felt that Goneril and Regan “had a brutal upbringing—[with] 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.” 51
What impact does it have to turn the violence and evil in
Lear
into something psychological instead of metaphysical? Does the implication that it is somehow the “natural” result of a bad, neglected upbringing diminish the epic nature of the play and the horrific impact of the sisters’ monstrous acts? Lear’s world is thrown out of order by his inability to be an adequate father
and king
. James I, in his publication
The True Law of Free Monarchies
, underlined the divine right of kings and the duty of all monarchs to treat their subjects as a caring father would do his children. Lear’s misunderstanding of his role as a fixed point in the natural order of things and his irresponsibility in relation to his position in society unleash unnatural chaos.
In 1993 Adrian Noble emphasized violent cosmic forces prevalent in the play by use of an abstract but symbolic set:
When David Bradley’s superlative Gloucester, his eyes gouged out, staggers away from the scene of atrocity and from Simon Dormandy’s chillingly, psychopathic Cornwall, the focus clears at last. Noble used the Folio edition of the text, so cutting the aid of Gloucester’s servants after the blinding. The sightless Bradley gazes in the direction of a blue and white model of the globe, fixed above the stage. As he stares, a crack runs across the globe’s circumference and the sands of time begin to pour out of it. The society of King Lear, with family life collapsing in warfare and inhuman cruelty … is ominous of all civilized human life ruined and coming to an end. 52
In this bleak vision,
Noble’s most original stroke is to suggest that the cruelty unleashed by Lear’s folly spreads to even the conventionallygood characters. The chief beneficiary is Simon Russell Beale’s extraordinary Edgar who starts as goody-two shoes and who is turned by the horrors he has witnessed into a symbol of revenge. In this production he doesn’t just kill Oswald; he batters his face with a staff as if in retaliation for the blinding of his father. The most unplayable major role in Shakespeare suddenly acquires a specific identity: a man forever
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