Word: cobbs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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KING LEAR. In the finest performance of his career. Lee J. Cobb plays an almost unplayable role with consummate skill, in fusing his portrayal of the foolish, suffering old man with an all-involving humanity. Director Gerald Freedman elicits beautifully modulated acting from the Lincoln Center Repertory Company...
...just as he proposes to carve up the map of England for his daughters. As a kind of self-made king, he falls into the first of his blindnesses, the idea that he can give away his possessions and his crown and yet retain power in his person alone. Cobb reveals how the fool in Lear is intrinsically a child. This 80-year-old is an eight-year-old in disguise, throwing temper tantrums against daughters whom he has naively empowered to switch roles with him. Regan and Goneril are, in effect, a stern, unyielding common mother fiercely chastising...
Lear should be a storm, as well as be in a storm; Cobb is not quite up to that. He is more like Job than Jove. When he hurls his anathemas, he tends to scream unintelligibly, suggesting the hapless actor of whom Kenneth Tynan wrote that listening to his Lear "was like lip reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning." But during the storm on the heath, Cobb's Lear gains in compassionate wisdom what he loses in pride and sanity. As he shelters the shivering Fool, listens to the gibberings of mad Tom and later gazes into the bloody, eyeless...
...final torment, Lear cradles the lifeless body of his heart's love, Cordelia, uttering the desolate fivefold "Never" over the daughter whom he will never see alive again. By that time, the odyssey of suffering is complete, and Cobb has elevated Lear's pain into a kingship of the spirit...
Quite apart from Cobb's impressive achievement, the Lincoln Center King Lear is distinguished by a supporting cast that truly supports. A rarity in the past, the players' acting rapport is a tribute to the skill of Director Gerald Freedman. Philip Bosco's Kent is a beautifully modulated performance with a Gielgud-like delivery of the Shakespearean line. Rene Auberjonois as the Fool is a supple mime of wisdom and Stephen Elliott's Gloucester is a man of probity incarnate, woefully abused. Barbette Tweed's Cordelia is appropriately sweet and good; Patricia Elliott as Regan and Marilyn Lightstone as Goneril...