Word: lear
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...revival of King Lear that is by far the best work that the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater has ever offered, Lee J. Cobb gives the finest performance of a lengthy and distinguished acting career. A graduate of the militantly proletarian Group Theater of the late '30s, he was the quintessential Willy Loman in Broadway's first production of Death of a Salesman. Conventionally cast as a Hollywood heavy in many of his countless films (among them: Thieves' Highway, On the Waterfront), he almost invariably brought glimmerings of insight to even the most routine parts...
Throwing Temper Tantrums. Here is a Lear with a willful, robber baron strain of not quite legitimate authority. The viewer feels that he has carved out his kingdom just as he proposes to carve up the map of England for his daughters. As a kind of self-made king, he falls into the first of his blindnesses, the idea that he can give away his possessions and his 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...
...King Lear used to be regarded as one of Shakespeare's library plays: great, but virtually unplayable. Presenting this epic drama, with its almost inhumanly difficult title role, is a little like climbing the sheer face of a formidable, treacherous, icy cliff. Nonetheless, some curious infusion of fatality in the modern consciousness seems to make the play accessible to contemporary audiences. And to modern actors...
...Lear should be a storm, as well as be in a storm; Cobb is not quite up to that. He is more like Job than Jove. When he hurls his anathemas, he tends to scream unintelligibly, suggesting the hapless actor of whom Kenneth Tynan wrote that listening to his Lear "was like lip reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning." But during the storm on the heath, Cobb's Lear gains in compassionate wisdom what he loses in pride and sanity. As he shelters the shivering Fool, listens to the gibberings of mad Tom and later gazes into the bloody, eyeless...
...final torment, Lear cradles the lifeless body of his heart's love, Cordelia, uttering the desolate fivefold "Never" over the daughter whom he will never see alive again. By that time, the odyssey of suffering is complete, and Cobb has elevated Lear's pain into a kingship of the spirit...