Kathryn Hunter played King Lear twice. Greg Hicks took him on for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford. Brian Cox was so consumed he spent a year writing a diary about the ordeal. And Simon Russell Beale played him at the National Theatre in London, where all four actors gathered backstage to talk to the FT about what it is like to play the best part in Shakespeare.
Cordelia: So the point of this all is to have people who have actually played King Lear talk about what it’s like to play King Lear. There’s one big question I want to ask you all first . . .
Simon: The trouble is that it will just be actors telling stories.
Cordelia: But that’s exactly what we want. So, everyone goes on all the time about Hamlet, how wonderful Hamlet is, how Hamlet is the part. But there is something about Lear that audiences respond to in a very specific way. It’s compelling and it’s upsetting. He’s this cruel tyrant, but still they love him. What is it about this guy that holds us so?
Simon: I used to play a game with [the actor] Norman Rodway about our top five and our bottom five Shakespeare plays. The bottom five were always the same. The top five used to change, but Lear was always up there. I mean, I think it’s the greatest play he wrote. Why? My big thing about Lear is that it fails to be redemptive. It promises redemption and doesn’t give it. It’s like the bleakest vision of our life on Earth. I can witter on a bit but . . .
Brian: Witter away.
Simon: There are two different endings for Lear. The Quarto version has him saying, “Heart I prithee break”, which, in fact, is a line that eventually ends up with Kent. But in the later Folio version, we have the famous, “look there, look there”, and it’s magnificent. I was always taught that “look there, look there” is a sort of moment of “is Cordelia breathing?” Her mouth is open. That seems to be what he means. [But] I went on stage that night and thought, can I just switch this round a bit? Instead of it being, “look, she’s breathing”, it became “Look!” to the people around him. “Look at that.” That is what life is. Life is kneeling there with the corpse of my daughter in front of me. There’s been no chance of forgiveness and of redemption. It raises the question of whether redemption is possible.
Cordelia: When you’re a working actor, do you see Lear coming at you, looming over the horizon? Or does it spring upon you?
Kathryn: I was 14.
Brian: 14?!
Kathryn: O-level. That’s when my relationship [with the play] began. It was something about the power of the language. And then, I didn’t identify with Cordelia. I sort of identified with Lear. I think it was because he went out into the storm. He didn’t say, “Give me my slippers and I’ll get old and sit by the fire.” I don’t really know, but I wonder whether, both as a 14-year-old and an 80-year-old, there’s a relationship of crisis. This was before I thought of acting or anything. And then later, after university and drama school, I had a vague idea that maybe it would be nice to play Lear. But I was 35 when I played it for the first time.
Simon: We all played it when we were young.
Brian: I was 44 when I played it. Paul Schofield was younger. Schofield was 42 when he played it.
Simon: Everyone kept coming up to me and saying, “Oh you’re so young”. And I remember thinking, “No, I’m not actually.” Most people presumably play it in their fifties or sixties.
Brian: Yeah, well, you got to have the energy for it for a start.
Cordelia: Brian, I’ve been reading your diary of the year you played Lear, in 1990 here at the National.
Brian: Oh, you know, I couldn’t find my copy today. I’ve just ordered it from Amazon.
Cordelia: So much of what you wrote strikes me as just about the exhaustion of playing the part.
Brian: It was! It was tiring. Olivier played Lear in 1944. And then he did the film that I was involved with in 1983, when he was quite old and quite ill. But I’ll tell you a quick story about that.
So we were waiting in the wings and Olivier was going, “Oh it’s so tiring. It’s so fucking exhausting this part. I really find this part so fucking tiring. And it’s the lines! I don’t know the lines at all . . . Did anybody see Michael Hordern play it on the television?” And then we would be interrupted. He’d be taken off. And then he’d come back and go, “I don’t know my lines. I don’t know a fucking word of this part. Not a word . . . Did anybody see Michael Hordern do it?”
And nobody said anything. He knew his lines. He knew all of his lines. And this, I swear to God — may God strike me down dead if this didn’t happen — he said, “but I’m still a better fucking actor than him any day!” We couldn’t believe it. The man, you know, suddenly, this old dying man was just suddenly [full of life].
Cordelia: How old do we think Lear is? Because you, Kathryn, played him quite old and frail, right? Michael Billington said something like “a geriatric toddler” of your performance, in his review.
Kathryn: The thing about being a girl as well was that I’m not big and thunderous and mountainous. And I was 35 the first time. So there was the gender and the age thing to address. I remember going into an Iceland, you know, the supermarket, opposite the theatre to buy something, and there was a frail old gentleman. And I went, “Right. OK. That’s him.” I thought, were the crowds to part, why couldn’t he be a king? I was going for the fragility.
Simon: You don’t have to be big.
Brian: Not with your voice, Kathryn. You’re blessed with this extraordinary voice.
Kathryn: I did see a rendering where somebody — who shall be nameless — didn’t play the age, and that doesn’t make sense. You can’t not.
Simon: No. It’s so accurate in terms of what we now know about growing old. I think Shakespeare saw or knew somebody very old, because there’s so many details about forgetting your words.
Brian: A lot of that comes out with the relationship with the Fool. The Fool gets him going and he’s trying to catch him out and trying to jog him into some kind of life force.
Simon: He’s the one who he says “Oh let me not be mad” to . . .
Brian: Exactly.
Simon: The first mention of the word.
Cordelia: Greg, Kathryn played the Fool to your Lear in 2010 for the RSC at Stratford. What was your dynamic?
Greg: Close. We sure were close. Tight.
Kathryn: Incredibly bonded, yeah.
Cordelia: I remember seeing that production, Greg, and I saw you play Leontes in The Winter’s Tale the year before. I’ve always thought there’s something interesting in the movement in Shakespeare’s writing from Leontes to Lear. You’ve got these two jealous kings who are tyrants in different ways, and neither of them has real redemption. There’s no clear redemption for Leontes either (there’s a happy ending of sorts, but it’s not obviously forgiveness). What did you feel about the transition from one part to the other?
Greg: In mountain terms, Leontes was halfway up, and Lear was much further up. I used to watch the [Akira] Kurosawa film, Ran, on a daily basis. I think it’s my favourite film version of Lear.
Brian: It’s great.
Greg: It’s astonishing, its depth and its . . .
Brian: It’s boldness.
Greg: I’d love to have another go at Lear.
Brian, Kathryn and Simon: Yes.
Greg: I now think I understand much more the concept of being shattered, utterly shattered. And the difference between Lear and let’s say Hamlet or Othello or Macbeth is he is utterly shattered. So much so that he’s able to get down on his knees and go, “Although all those people haven’t got anything in life, I know how they feel. I feel pity for them.” And that’s because the entire construct of his ego has been shattered. Of course, Hamlet’s shattered and so is Macbeth. And so is Othello. But there’s something about the shattering of Lear which is truly monumental. And I think that’s what makes it on another level to the plays that surround it, which are also masterpieces, I’m not saying they’re not. But I know I didn’t get anywhere near it. I had a go and I’d like another.
Simon (to Greg): There is a link between Leontes and Lear. How do you start both of those parts? Because the similar question for both of them is, why do they behave in the first scene like they do? Every actor has to make some conscious decision about why Lear divides the kingdom. And why Leontes is jealous.
Greg: Right! So, when Lear says “necessity’s sharp pinch”, I used to be obsessed by the whole thing about Ananke. You know, the god of necessity. I think it was necessary for Leontes . . .
Simon: To be jealous?
Greg: To be jealous. And I think it’s necessary for Lear to go, “Tell me which one of you loves me best”. Because without that necessity, that death of the ego, which he experiences beyond measure, would never have happened.
Simon: You mean it’s cosmically necessary?
Cordelia: Rather than necessary for Shakespeare in a technical sense?
Greg: Yes, I do. And it informs his relationship with the storm, with the elements.
Kathryn: Yes, that’s brilliantly articulated.
Greg: Where does Leontes’s jealousy come from? It just comes.
Simon: My problem, perhaps more acutely with Leontes I think, is that I’ve no idea where it comes from. As you say, it just is. But the thing about Lear is that it’s such a stupid decision!
Kathryn: I figured that Lear’s in love with Cordelia. She’s imminently about to be married and he can’t really bear that — “I thought to set my rest on her kind nursery”. So I don’t know, I have this picture of him saying, “Right! you know, and then I’ll come and live with you.”
Simon: And will he give her most of it?
Kathryn: Yes. That was the plan. If it had gone according to plan, he would give her most of it and then go and live with France or Burgundy or whoever she marries. But be near her. I think he can’t bear to part with her. It’s linked with the patriarchal thing of, “You belong to me. And anyway, I love you. So you belong to me even more. Because I don’t often love people. So if you’re going to say nothing, then punishment will come.”
Simon: And punishment on the whole world too.
Kathryn: I was reading Eve Ensler’s The Apology, where she imagines her father apologising — the apology that he never made — for abusing her since she was five years old. And, I just thought, Ah, yeah, there’s anyway a sort of, well, a love, an obsession with Cordelia.
Simon: Do you think he might be aware of his failing powers? I mean why now?
Kathryn: Yes.
Brian: I think he seeks reassurance right from the word go. He really seeks reassurance from his family and the only way he can get it is by doing this elaborate thing, which is wrong. It’s a big mistake, but he doesn’t know how to do it any other way. And then it goes horribly wrong.
Simon: Reassurance that he’s still . . .
Brian: That he’s loved. He needs love. He desperately needs love, Lear. And you can’t buy love in that way. And that is so much of what goes on in the relationship with Goneril, the relationship with Regan. It’s a family, essentially. And when you get older you seek that reassurance. I’m now in my late seventies. And I now understand that more than I did then, when I played Lear in my forties.
Simon: As a parentheses, I have to say that when he curses Goneril, I think that must be one of the most unpleasant speeches that Shakespeare ever wrote. I found it terribly upsetting every night to do that thing about — be barren.
Brian: It’s cruel.
Simon: It’s absolutely cruel.
Brian: Because Regan is a lot worse than Goneril.
Simon: Goneril’s fine! She might be a bit irritating, but she’s fine.
Kathryn: Can I pick up on something Simon said about there being no redemption?
Simon: All right go on.
Kathryn: I disagree. Going back to Ananke. Lear does it because he has to, because he has to go on this path. He does kneel. He comes to the point of saying, “I have taken too little care of this.”
Brian: But he comes to that point much later.
Kathryn: What I mean is that, I can’t regard it as a play with no redemption because his heart opens and opens gradually. That’s a huge event in the spiritual journey, isn’t it? So when does it start? I guess it starts with “poor naked wretches”. And then, “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” And then with Gloucester, “I know thee well enough, thy name is Gloucester, thou must be patient, we came crying hither”.
He spins all the time. So he goes, “We came crying hither. Thou know’st the first time that we smell the air we wawl and cry. I will preach to thee, when we were born, we cry that we are come . . . ”, which is hugely kind of ironical, isn’t it? That we cry. You know why babies cry? “We cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.” That’s why babies cry because they go, “Oh, fuck, I’m on a stage of fools!” Which is full of a kind of humour isn’t it?
Brian: There’s also a lot in the play about dementia. I think there really is. And I think that “let me not be mad”, is the fact that he does go to an extreme and he kind of loses it. The craziness of him going out into the storm and trying to take on the elements.
We did the play at Broadmoor [the psychiatric hospital] with a bunch of people in the room who were killers, people who had done horrific things. And when we got to the moment, where Lear asks. “Is there any cause in nature for these hard hearts?” It’s something I’ll never, ever forget as long as I live. There was a young woman in the front row who, we discovered later, had slashed her sister with a knife on the face and nearly garrotted her. She was locked up, and, apparently, she hadn’t spoken until this moment. And when I asked “is there any cause in nature for hard hearts?” she said — I swear to God — she said, “no cause, no cause, no cause”. And for us, all of us on the stage, it was one of the moments when you go, this is the power of theatre.
Kathryn: Was there a scene that you particularly “enjoyed” playing?
Cordelia: Yes, everyone should answer that.
Simon: Meeting with Cordelia.
Brian: Yeah, when he wakes up. I love that scene.
Simon: “I am bound upon a wheel of fire.” That is just magnificent.
Brian (to Greg): What was yours?
Greg: Meeting Gloucester, I think.
Kathryn: I’m hovering, but the one that kind of seized me was the last scene, the howl.
Cordelia: How do you do that amazing line, “Howl, howl, howl, howl. Oh you are men of stones”?
Kathryn: I think it’s the scale of the play. In the Dover scene, the mad scene, I thought all right, we’re in the belly of the whale now. And for me, that scene was hugely important. I always felt it is about loss itself. And when it gets to the howl, I always felt that is what the play is about.
Simon: Immensely releasing that scene.
Brian: I really loved the scenes with the Fool because in those scenes he could be more like himself, which was difficult in the other parts of the play when he’s dealing with his children. And also I had a great Fool, which was David Bradley, I couldn’t get a better Fool than him.
Kathryn: Yes.
Brian: And the truth telling that the Fool does. Yeah. I love all those scenes. It’s just that they’re so challenging and Lear has to listen to this man. He has to take it in, because this is the only person who keeps him relatively on the straight and narrow. Nobody else does.
Cordelia: As you say, he’s a truth teller and fools generally are truth tellers. But in this play, there are two truth tellers, Cordelia and the Fool, who are often played by the same actor in a production.
Brian: The distinction is one truth teller is your daughter, so there’s a lot of baggage there, whether you like it or not. With the Fool, it’s a straighter relationship in a way.
Simon: Also when he says “my poor Fool is hanged” when he’s over the corpse of his child, I always think, the last thing I want the audience to be thinking is, “Oh, that’s interesting because that’s the same actor who played the Fool.” Rather than just, that’s his dead daughter in front of him.
Greg: And how did you all do those “nevers”?
Brian: Oh “never, never, never, never, never”.
Greg: Five nevers. How did you do it?
Brian: It’s to do with the contemplation of what “never” means. You know, I think that that’s why it’s such a potent thing, the five nevers, because never is such an amazing concept.
Kathryn: Marcello [Magni, her husband] was the Fool in my first production in 1997. He died, I was in denial about it, while we were doing the Globe production in 2022. Afterwards, I had this kind of visitation about those “nevers”. There’s a strange thing in that last scene. Lear goes, “I know when one is dead and when one lives, she’s dead as earth.” She. And then he goes, “Cordelia?” Direct address. “Cordelia stay a little, what is’t thou sayest?” Direct address. And he keeps going back between “she” and “thou”. And then he goes, “Thou’lt come no more”. Not “she’ll come no more”. “Thou’lt come no more”. Thou.
And it’s almost like Cordelia goes “What, never?” That he’s explaining death to her. “You see how it is darling? You’re never coming back.” “Never?” he hears her ask. “No, never darling.” “What, never?” “No, never, darling.” I don’t know, it just flipped in my head that it’s his last ever story to his little girl. “You’re never, ever, ever coming back.”
Simon: Jonathan Miller once said that “to be, or not to be” is an impossible statement because we have absolutely no conception of the second half of that sentence. We can’t, as human beings, locate not being. And what you were saying just struck a chord about trying to define what “never” means. It’s almost impossible, isn’t it? So he needs five goes at it.
Greg: There’s something about King Lear. It’s such a massive, out-of-control truck of a play. I mean, God knows it’s just like — what’s that film where he drags the boat through the jungle?
Brian: The African Queen.
Greg: Yes. It’s that big. It’s dragging that boat through the fucking jungle of human existence. That’s the genius of Lear, it has its own motor.
Brian: Quite right. When [the part] takes you over, it leads you. And you’re going, “am I going there?” And yes, you’ve got to fucking go there. And it’s nothing to do with you. So in a way it’s not about free will. You don’t have the willpower to go, I’m going to move it this way. It takes you. If you engage, it takes you.
Greg: You don’t do Shakespeare. Shakespeare does you.
Brian: That’s right. That’s right.
Greg: It just takes you there. And of course, you have…
Brian: To be open to it.
Greg: You have to be open, and you have to have the voice and your mind and sensibilities and your soul and your heart. But actually, your job is to just lie down and get fucked by Shakespeare.
Kathryn: Would you do it again? Lear? I would.
Brian: I don’t know. I think maybe. I don’t know. I guess . . .
Simon: That means yes.
Cordelia: Would you, Simon? Greg, we know that you would.
Simon: Probably.
Brian: I mean, the only problem is learning the lines.
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