Word: lear
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...faith lost there is now restored. Peter Brook's King Lear is not quite an unconditional success, but it is close enough. With a minimum of gimmickry and self-consciousness, Shakespeare is transcribed to film, not just filmed theatre, and the play's gain far exceeds its loss. There are sequences on the screen that could not begin to be conceived on stage; a few are embarassing, most work...
...senses a certain unwieldiness to the text and without hesitation cuts whatever he considers to be excess. Shakespeare's introductory scene between the Earls of Gloucester and Kent is eliminated; the film begins immediately with the parcelling of the kingdom among the three daughters. The first words are Lear's "Know we have divided-in three our kingdom...", Brook thrusting us into crisis at once. Within five minutes Cordelia has already refused to publicly acclaim her love for her father. Lear has disowned her, and the central dramatic movement...
...that is the drift of the directing throughout. Brook is impatient with peripheral events and dispenses with them as often as possible. He uses explanatory titles to speed up the action and cuts scenes mercilessly. It is toward the great events that his imagination tends--Lear raging at Cordelia or mad in the storm on the heath or overwhelmed with regret before his death--and on these scenes Brook lavishes his attention lovingly. To the Gloucester subplot he is for the most part cursory. He reserves his ingenuity for Lear alone. And as Lear, Paul Scofield carries the film...
Scofield's Lear succeeded in obliterating the Lear of my mind's eye. My Lear was lean and withered; Scofield's is a Lear of physical bulk and substance, a tragic counterpart to Orson Welles' Falstaff, completely convincing--I can no longer imagine it otherwise. Scofield contains the tragedy. He is not tossed about by adversity; he swallows adversity and swells to bursting...
Perhaps the single greatest difficulty in a difficult play is making plausible the evolution of Lear's character. In the crucial opening lines, Lear is completely self-possessed. The camera frames Scofield's face, jowly and immobile, and the mouth moves just barely, opening to let the words fall out, slow-paced and certain. By the time of his madness in the storm, all such self-possession has vanished. Lear is frenzied, physically shrunken in his defeat. It is Scofield's peculiar ability to make all of these changes appear supremely necessary. Even in the poise and control...