Word: dotard
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KING LEAR At the Stratford Shakespeare festival in Ontario, director Robin Phillips and star William Hutt brilliantly reinterpreted the title role as a dotard whose authority has long faded and whose daughters' stern discipline is common sense in the face of senility...
...Lear, the young players are joined by William Hutt, 68, perhaps Canada's most distinguished stage actor, in what may be the performance of his career. His king is no autocrat but a dotard whose authority has long been a polite fiction. His plans for dividing the kingdom are a surprise to no one; his daughters' resistance to his extravagant wanderings are no meanness but utter common sense in the face of senility; the brutality they eventually show is brought on by invasion and civil war, both instigated by their holier-than- thou sister. Hutt superbly manages Lear's transition...
Envision a King Lear cut down to 100 minutes, cast only with men -- the daughters sporting beards, the fool a burly fellow in nurse drag -- and staged as the fantasies and fuddled memories of a dotard near death. Not outraged yet? How about a Lear in which the title character is played without age makeup by a 30-year-old? For which the director is a Japanese staging his first work entirely in English? For which the costumes are pieced together from antique kimonos, the set is metal gratings and a chair, and Lear spends a long while stuffed into...
...American painter to make a career in Europe; he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as the second president of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. West might be known as the American Raphael, but this praise was as excessive as Lord Byron's dismissal of him: "the flattering, feeble dotard, West,/ Europe's worst dauber, and poor Britain's best . . ." He knew how to cater to Europeans' expectation that he, as an American, would be a cultural Natty Bumppo; when he went to Rome as a young man and was shown the Apollo Belvedere, the first nude sculpture...
...aged mother, dominating the mother with her dogged servitude, then slipping into reverie to imagine her self the sad heroine of a gothic novel. Is she mad? Is she dead? Perhaps both, or in transit between the two states, like the old woman Whitelaw plays in Rockaby. A child-dotard in her cradle-rocker, a near relative of Psycho's Mother Bates, she lullabies herself to death with the sound of her own (offstage) voice, interrupting the melancholy monologue only for four plaintive cries of "More...