Word: lear
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...four hours of mechanical torture does not turn us into Lears. Even if we strain, we can't hear the hoofbeats of the Apocalypse galloping closer. Nor do we realize, like Lear, that life and space and time will not stand still while we crawl in the maddening mud of self-pity. Instead, this Lear alienates us, erects a barrier between the stage and the audience, makes us struggle to stay in our seats. We throw up our hands. We do not want to watch TV, to see the results of the New Hampshire primary or an Ajax commercial...
...want to see King Lear. The play is lost in this riot of effects. Gallons of poetry get tossed aside in buckets, muttered irreverently, spoken upstage, bellowed deafeningly into microphones, and whispered into nothingness. Too often Sellars's cast splashes sloppily through the Shakespeare. Action overtakes language so that wrestling matches, gouged eyes and rock-throwing dominate the play...
...opening scene of striking ingenuity does not hint at the wrong-headedness to come. At the edge of the stage sit Kent and Gloucester, chatting and drinking champagne. Derek McLane's austere set leaves no place for warmth. Black gauze hangs menacingly. The Lincoln rests like a hearse--Lear's castle--upstage center. Its grille grins, its headlights stare. Seven stars, like seven gods, watch from the rafters. Lear emerges from the automobile, masked in sunglasses, master of his court, eager to dispatch the richest third of his Kingdom to his youngest daughter Cordelia. But Cordelia refuses to flatter...
...CLEARLY, though, this Lear is Sellars' work. He rarely lets his actors act, posing them for effect without reason, hiding them in shadows and drowning them out with the scratching of the steel cellos. Sellars' yen for the visually spectacular became evident in last year's Three Sisters, when he vividly rendered Chekhov's work but stretched it to more than three hours by inserting a handful of maddeningly long silences and a half dozen Chopin nocturnes. Now we expect more than flashy technique from Sellars. We want drama...
...there is no curtain call. Sellars denies his actors a final chance to escape the machinery of his production, frustrates our expectations one last time. He has destroyed the Lear we came to see and offered nothing tangible in its stead. It took guts. It failed. The theater buff will discover the dangers of excess. The theater-goer will learn the truth of Edgar's maxim: "The worst is not so long as we can say, 'This is the worst...