Word: lear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Charles Lamb is responsible for the idea that King Lear cannot be shown on a stage. But the final production of the current Shakespeare-Marlowe Festival at the Loeb last night, offered evidence that it can be done--done well--and that Lear is as great theater as it is literature...
...translation from page to stage owes much to George Hamlin, who directed the Loeb version; but it owes more to Daniel Seltzer, who acted Lear. Those of us who saw Seltzer as Falstaff and Faustus expected that he could meet the test of King Lear, and he does. In a role which demands an incomparably exhausting range of emotions, Seltzer manages them all. From the first scene, an unlikely, impossible beginning, his Lear was "every inch a King." In that scene he made the mythology work, starting at a tremendous pitch and moving past it. Lear roars, cries, whispers, laughts...
Close on Seltzer's acting heels is Mark Bramhall, Edmund the bastard son of Gloucester. Bramhall dominates the big Loeb stage and plays a cunning, cold-hearted bastard with wonderful confidence and relish. Standing near Bramhall are Lear's fool, Harry Smith, who seems too bitter, too sharp at first, but who persuades us finally; the Earl of Kent, Yann Weymouth, who acts with welcome restraint amid the general ranting; and Edgar, Richard Backus, who makes a fine fool and a noble Edgar. John Ross as Albany and Thomas Weisbuch as Cornwall both perform well, but they are in demanding...
...women are not so satisfactory. Deborah Fortson is lovely as Cordelia and moves well in the part, but she does not always speak to full effectiveness. Cordelia, at any rate, the vessel of all love and virtue, may be a more difficult role than Lear. Her sisters Goneril and Regan, Madelon Hambro and Emily Levine, are excellent bitches but bad actresses. They read lines in a shrewish monotone which neither entertains nor shocks, and they fail to distinguish between themselves so that their characters, except for different dresses, might be identical. Regan should be the softer, nicer...
HOMAGE TO SHAKESPEARE (Argo). Assorted tributes on his 400th anniversary by poets, musicians and scholars on one side of the record, and on the other, brief readings from his later works by 16 leading Shakespearean actors, including excerpts from two plays now on the boards: Paul Scofield reading Lear's reconciliation with Cordelia and Sir Laurence Olivier delivering Othello's speech to the Senate...