Storm Continues. Enter Lear and Fool.

My internet's been bad all weekend due to rain so I watched something I had on file last night, Laurence Olivier's 1983 King Lear. It remains my favourite of all the productions I've seen.

I think Olivier, of all the Lears I've seen, does the best job of conveying the impression of a man going mad but who is also painfully aware of his madness. That's the real heartbreak in his repeated, "Let me not be mad!" line. Not that he's going mad, but that he's aware of it. It's a real horror, especially considering it's one we all may face one day.

His madness really stems from two causes--his age and his grief. It's one thing to say he's foolish for misjudging his loved ones, but then think for a moment about what that must be like. To be brought forcibly to the realisation that your nearest and dearest aren't who you thought they were. It really comes in two layers because first he believes Cordelia and Kent aren't who he always thought they were. He can at least muster confidence enough to banish them. But when he discovers how little he could trust the promises of Regen or Goneril, he learns he can't even rely on his ability to discern revelation. He thought he had a revelation, but he later realises he understood nothing.

This confusion is strikingly mirrored in the subplot about Gloucester and his sons. The poor old man, with his eyes put out, being led to the edge of what he thinks is a cliff. It's ironic that Edgar has the last line of the play, presented like a moral, that we should say what we feel, not what we ought. He spends a lot of time deceiving his father. On the other hand, maybe that was a product of a real temporary madness on Edgar's part. Also, if we interpret the words "say what we feel not what we ought," literally, they don't mean, "Always tell the truth," as they're often thought to mean. Pretending to be Poor Tom and then pretending to have seen a monster has a kind of emotional truth, not unlike the Fool's nonsense. And it's a truth meant to help the old man, not to cut him down, as Regan's, Goneril's, and Edmund's deceptions were.

Still, it's dangerous business. With all of life's ambiguities and confusions, who's really in a position to decide when it's best to tell a falsehood? For this reason, I do think Cordelia made the right choice. Truth is too rare a commodity.

Another Year, Another Lear

I've been so caught up lately watching Shakespeare productions from decades ago on Amazon Prime I almost missed it when a brand new, 2018 production of King Lear, my favourite Shakespeare play, was released on the service. Directed by Richard Eyre, who did the 2012 productions of the Henry IV plays for the BBC I didn't like, this King Lear is by no means my favourite but isn't altogether bad.

Anthony Hopkins is much too shouty as Lear at first, his delivery almost a monotone of bemused, rancorous yells. I warmed to his unconventionally repressed performance a little bit in the second half, though. When he brings in Cordelia's corpse at the end he's not crying but grinning, holding up the feather and talking about how it doesn't stir as though he's mocking the assembled troops for expecting it would. It was a nice way of showing how the man is retreating into his accustomed psychological barriers when the pain gets too much. He turns into a desperate boast his lines about besting Cordelia's hangman in combat. But it's good he does break down in tears eventually when this doesn't prove enough.

There are plenty of stars in the cast giving performances ranging from good to really good. The roles cast surprisingly with non-stars are Cordelia and the Fool; Florence Pugh and Karl Johnson, respectively, and it seems like Eyre has little interest in either character. Much of the Fool's first lines, criticisms for Lear thinly veiled as entertainment, are heard off-screen as the camera focuses on a brooding Goneril played by Emma Thompson.

I think someone decided Goneril was sexually abused by Lear. She curls up and recoils when he gets near and at one point he kisses her full on the lips after which she clasps both hands on her mouth, looking horrified. I guess it's a fair enough additional motive added for her apparent disregard for him but I found it more of a distraction than anything else. It introduces too many questions that aren't answered. Does Cordelia know about it? What does she think about it? What do any of Lears friends and supporters think about it?

Emily Watson is fine as Regan while Tobias Menzies, best known as the flamboyant, two dimensional villain from Outlander, plays Cornwall as a flamboyant, two dimensional villain. Christopher Eccleston is interesting as Oswald, a role usually played with similarly over-the-top priggishness. Eccleston's Oswald is slightly effeminate and really doesn't seem to understand what he's doing wrong by not treating Lear with deference, which somehow makes his run-ins with Kent (Jim Carter) really funny.

Jim Broadbent comes off as decent and kind as Gloucester, except in his first lines about Edmund, of course. John Macmillan, who doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, plays a mixed race Edmund, making good use of the potential in his lines for commentary on racial bias instilled by culture. He plays the role a bit broadly for my taste, though.

A lot of the characters are wearing military uniforms; the Wikipedia entry says it's set in an alternate universe, militaristic 21st century London, but putting everyone in modern military garb for a Shakespeare production is so conventional now it's gone past cliche to almost invisible. The famous storm sequence is drably, really unconvincing cgi.

Couldn't they have at least gotten a wind machine?

The performances are good, though, and I don't feel like I wasted my time watching it. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone as the first production of King Lear to watch.

Twitter Sonnet #1163

Connected cans consort to cop a phone.
Distorted tanks collude to stretch the tread.
A kind of ink dissolves a human bone.
Refurbished walls conceal what painters said.
Collected shields conceal colossal arms.
Tomato shapes conspire late to-day.
Decrepit walls protect the elder farms.
Encased in cagey wool the troops display.
Decisions set in dark and courtless webs.
Tenacious seeds connect the tiny rocks.
Occasion serves when noodle's ocean ebbs.
In tightened strings the frigates built the docks.
The gift of plaque rewards recoiled gums.
Recounted years reveal consistent thumbs.

Suggestions Worse than Bullets

The new Sirenia Digest, which I read this morning, features a cool Sci-Fi noir by Caitlin R. Kiernan called "CHERRY STREET TANGO, SWEATBOX WALTZ." Like a lot of Caitlin's stories for the Digest lately, it features a protagonist being interviewed or interrogated by someone demanding they tell a story that's evidently been told several times before, a someone who implicitly denies any guilt for pointing out inconsistencies in the latest telling of the story. I love the manifold quality of the idea--the same concept presented again and again of a same story being told again and again. One who reads the Digest regularly thereby over time gets a feeling of a continuum, an inexorable trap set by the universe. In this case, the protagonist is a sniper assassin being questioned by a voice coming from a radio. Along with questions relating to a botched hit, the voice also insists the protagonist recite "The Lobster Quadrille" from Alice in Wonderland, another frequent reference for Caitlin.

I found myself thinking about George Orwell's essay on a pamphlet Leo Tolstoy wrote about King Lear. It was referred to in some article I read recently, I can't remember where. But the article was interested in Orwell's point that Tolstoy's hatred for King Lear didn't prompt him to advocate censoring it but prompted him to attempt poisoning the ways in which people enjoy it. Tolstoy synopsises the play in an unflattering manner and deliberately omits or downplays its virtues, as Orwell talks about at length. Orwell ascribes this to a difference between Tolstoy's puritanical and Shakespeare's worldly philosophies. I really love this bit from Orwell:

There are people who are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use violence in certain circumstances. They will not say to somebody else, ‘Do this, that and the other or you will go to prison’, but they will, if they can, get inside his brain and dictate his thoughts for him in the minutest particulars. Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics — a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage — surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.

This fits nicely with the plot of "CHERRY STREET TANGO, SWEATBOX WALTZ" about an assassin who cannot explain her inability to hit her target beyond noticing her own unreliable perceptions. The more she's supposed to repeat "The Lobster Quadrille", the more doubtful her impressions of it or anything else subjected to gratuitous scrutiny. As Orwell says, "Artistic theories such as Tolstoy's are quite worthless, because they not only start out with arbitrary assumptions, but depend on vague terms (‘sincere’, ‘important’ and so forth) which can be interpreted in any way one chooses. Properly speaking one cannot answer Tolstoy's attack."

Caitlin's story also features nice references to David Bowie and, of course, film noir. The main concept kind of reminded me of Branded to Kill in a very good way. The story was originally meant to be included in an anthology of noir tales but the editor couldn't understand its meaning. Which would lead me to think on the diminishing interpretive powers of people working in publishing but, then again, even Leo Tolstoy thought King Lear was meaningless.