Word: lear
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wonders in the end why they don't go away-little tyrants, grand tyrants-all repeating themselves from year to year, reaching the same unimaginative decision about obliterating their impediments. The idea has simplicity to recommend it. "Nothing will come of nothing," King Lear told one of his daughters. He was wrong, of course. Everything comes of nothing in King Lear, as it tends to elsewhere, Argentina included. Technically the desaparecidos are nothing; the conscience and resolve of the new administration are nothing. Because of such nothings, former President Bignone is in prison this week...
...Behold my Lear," proclaimed Shaw, with his usual modesty, of this melancholy farce. Not for him the inevitable comparisons with Chekhov and Congreve. No, he would recast Lear as Captain Shotover, a wily old man of the sea, sensitive to every political current, each distant drumroll of thunder on the cloudless eve of the Great War. Surrounding the Captain are his two bewitching daughters, with their foolish suitors, and one young woman, Ellie Dunn, who is wise and innocent enough to read the Captain's prophetic mind. In Shaw's Lear, Cordelia has a divine madness...
...trouble is, the times are out of joint. World War II's air-raid sirens have a way of going off in the middle of the old boy's soliloquies. Worse, the years have taken their toll. As Sir says, anticipating his 227th performance of King Lear, "No one takes you through it; you are put through it, night after night." Simply stated, the combined pressures of external events and spiritual exhaustion have brought Sir to the edge of near terminal madness...
Indeed, Sir has become the thing he plays, a Lear-like creature wandering the blasted heath that is wartime Britain. The women of his company are very rough analogues to Lear's daughters, while Norman is certainly meant to be understood as the Fool. But Ronald Harwood's adaptation of his own play does not force these comparisons too hard. It is perfectly possible to enjoy The Dresser simply as a backstage fable, rich in the full-tilt emotional exaggeration of plays and pictures that try to catch showfolk off guard, offstage. Or as a fairly acute study...
...performances were observed and discussed by the other characters but never seen by the audience. In adapting play to film, Harwood and the always sensible Peter Yates have chosen to show Sir at work. And Finney has chosen to be as good as he can be as Lear. This redeems Sir from the bombastic egocentricity of his dressing-room self, placing a humanizing glaze on his hamminess. It also makes the ironic point that for many actors a role is the only worthwhile reality, reality a role they never quite learn...