Word: lear
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...late to be a Halloween goblin, too early to be a Christmas Santa. Actor Charles Laughton was trapped 'tween seasons with enough facial forestry to make a sensation at a woodchoppers' ball. Actually, he had let himself go to seed for a role as King Lear at Stratford-on-Avon's Shakespearean theater. Leaving London on a brief trip to Paris, where presumably he would roam incognito. Laughton muffled: "I'll be glad to get a lawnmower on this...
...away, the jokes he holds his nose at, the changes of pace, the changes of face, the alarming sounds in his throat. If Flanders' way is to be sinuous, mocking and charming, Swann's way is to play everything straight, then suddenly seem straight out of Edward Lear. He is as repressed and colorless as a don, then as vaultingly mad as Don Quixote. Their combined way has given Broadway its gayest evening since La Plume de Ma Tante...
Shotover is a crazy old man of eighty-eight, drunken and self-confessedly futile, yet hedged about, like one of Yeats' Lear-like old men, with an almost sinister magnificence. His crews believe that "he sold himself to the devil in Zanzibar, and can divine water, spot gold, explode a cartridge in your pocket with a glance of his eye, and see the truth hidden in the heart of men." Made up with a white beard in a wretchedly unsuccessful attempt to look like G.B.S., "Mr. Evans' Captain," as A. E. Watts acutely notices in the Traveler, "is a cute...
Having forsworn the part of Hamlet a few years ago, Gielgud now says he will not play Benedick again after this production finishes its present run on Broadway. When someone objected, he replied, "I'll always be left with Lear and Prospero...
Whatever the critics think, Actor Laughton is convinced that his is Shakespeare's true Lear. With his wife, Elsa Lanchester, he studied the play in a facsimile of the First Folio all last winter, finally concluded that the author had scored it like music. Voice inflections, pitch, rhythms, everything seemed indicated by what would otherwise be pointless punctuation and irrational typography. "Elsa noticed it first, and I think she was the first to treat it that way. But it works! It works! Shakespeare tells you how to say every word...