Word: lear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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American Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Conn.: The Comedy of Errors, Henry V, King Lear and Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Through Sept...
This summer Stratford boasts a production that any Shakespeare theater in the world might prize - a good company with a triumphant King Lear, played by Veteran Character Actor Morris Carnovsky. Fact is, Carnovsky's Lear is such a popular and critical triumph that last week Stratford canceled two performances of Henry V and one each of Comedy of Errors and Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra to give Lear a longer...
Something Superhuman. At 64, Carnovsky has played many of the classic character parts - Shylock, Prospero and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. But Lear, obviously, is something else again, and Carnovsky says that when the role was offered to him he "fainted inside." The part, he says, "demands almost super human strength. The actor must learn to tell the truth...
...standard criticism of Lear is that it is insufficiently motivated: Why do the malicious whims of two ungrateful daughters plunge the old man into a frenzy of madness and remorse? Why does his single action - the banishment of Cordelia - cause his universe to crumble about...
...Douglas Seale, who directed the same play here at Sanders Theatre in 1956. Seale has done a generally admirable job, although, if memory serves, he has trimmed the text a bit more this time around. The Stratford running-time is two and a half hous. Since the Festival's Lear runs over three hours, why can't we have more of Henry...