Word: goneril
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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 an obstreperous child. Cobb is equally good at conveying the sense of age: he is old inside as well as outside. The years are numbered in his white hairs, but there is also the anguish of diminished manhood, the baffled rage...
...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 are properly serpentine. Only Stacy Keach disappoints, by failing into smirky stage-villain mannerisms as Gloucester's bastard son Edmund. His performance misses the point of Shakespeare's transcendent vision which makes earthly villainy pale before the terrors meted out to men by fate...
...seem content merely to don the assorted masks that Carnovsky parcelled out. This foible seemed the particular property of the villains. Matt Conley in the most unkindest role of all, the bastard Edmund, exercised enough wit and restraint to stay this side of melodrama. But Regan (Phoebe Brand) and Goneril (Ludi Claire) ranted and raved, groaned and grimaced. Robert Benedict's Oswald was arch and despicable, Nick Smith's Cornwall took appropriate relish in kicking out Gloucester's eyes; these actors' evil was far too lunatic to be cruel. The audience tittered...
While there, she gets just mad enough to cry. The episode might be more affecting if Ruth Gordon had not made Mrs. Lord just as odious as her Goneril-and-Regan duo of daughters. As every contemporary playgoer knows, the family is an heir-conditioning unit: bitches beget bitches. The denouement is embarrassing, as Mrs. Lord marries one of those beamish Balkan boys with a rich grandmother fixation...
...huge laughs on such lines as "Let copulation thrive;" "Ha! Goneril, with a white beard!" (to Gloucester), and "Let me wipe it (my hand) first; it smells of mortality." is difficult to imagine, but Mr. Carnovsky accomplishes it. And he thereby undermines the dignity, stature, and power he works so hard to establish in the early parts of the play and achieves right from Act I, Scene I--which any actor who has tackled the role will tell you is almost unplayable for credibility...