Word: lear
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...along precipices," Ortega y Gasset noted. "His truest obligation is to keep his balance." What is new and perverse in the '70s man, bankrupt in common convictions and up to here with cultivating his precious self, is the hope of finding salvation by jumping. It is as if Lear's soul-shaking prayer -"O! let me not be mad!"-had suddenly and rather casually been reversed...
Paul Scofield is a precision instrument. His performances are full of small gestures, asides and intuitions that are subtle, telling, always right. He is the master of inflection and implication if not, perhaps, of epic passion, which is why a Scofield Uncle Vanya is more successful than a Scofield Lear...
...coarse, brimming with such verbal pratfalls as "Discharge yourself of our company, Pistol." But Shakespeare could also buff the pun until it shone like art. Says the bleeding Mercutio: "Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man." "You see how this world goes," Lear says to the blind Gloucester. "I see it feelingly," Gloucester replies...
MORE THAN Hamlet and more than Lear, Macbeth and the movies are made for each other. Of the great Shakespearean tragedies it is the darkest, the bloodiest, the most physical and most unearthly. Macbeth has everything--slaughter, madness, treachery, revenge, ghosts and witches, and at one time or another, Griffith, Welles and Kurosawa have each taken a turn at its adaption. It is an invitation to extravagance...
...madness, a feeling for the benign possibilities of the supernatural lies always in the background. This is certainly most due to the color photography which consistently catches the pastoral qualities of the countryside (a far cry from the studied bleakness of the landscape in Peter Brook's recent King Lear). The clean, brilliant pastels of the opening sunrise out of which the three witches emerge or the shot of Macbeth's castle seen from a distance set against an evening sky both work as a kind of unstated alternative to the grimy human tragedy acting itself out below...