Word: lear
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Brother Blue was slotted to play Lear but quit. 'It's the greatest play ever written," Blue exclaimed, gesturing wildly at intermission opening night. "It's just such a great role." But Blue felt he could not reach the level of intensity he had sought, nor could he fathom the depths of Lear's psyche. So he told Sellars he could not go on. "They say Paul Scofield took ten years preparing for this role," Blue lamented. Sellars had allotted him only several weeks. Days before the scheduled opening last Tuesday, Sellars had no Lear. Pinched, he opted to play...
Peter Sellars is no actor. Full of noise--moans, sighs, barks, wimpers, heavy breath--his Lear is pitiable, not tragic. Like the monstrous fur coat that drapes his frail frame for much of the evening, the role of Lear dwarfs Sellars. Rather than confront the character, Sellars flops to his knees, letting his words drool in an endless, barely audible stream. His tortured soul is senile...
With only a shriveled, frenzied mutterer at its core, this Lear lacks coherence. Nor does Chris Clemenson's Gloucester provide even a hunch-backed spine to this play. He is too fretful, laborious, lumbering. In past productions, Clemenson has used his expressive and modulated voice to define a character. Here however, the lighting often shields his face and his changes in tone seem unusually grating. Only after Gloucester's blinding does he add subtle vision to his performance, staggering to the edge of the Dover cliffs and pitching forward to a living death...
...fault is so egregious, however, as the excessive length of this production. Sellar's Lear runs more than four hours. It tests our endurance with strange visual effects that add little to an understanding of the play. The notorious storm of Act III wails for an hour amidst pendulous light bulbs, harsh spotlights, rolling rocks, flickering candles, blinking headlights of a sleek Lincoln Continental, and the disturbing whine of steel cellos. Yet Sellars wants more. On comes a snake of worklights, four television sets and two Polaroid cameras with flash bulbs. Sellars uses every corner of the stage, from...
...glaring confusion of this scene Sellars tries to turn Lear's tragedy on us, blinding us with spotlights until our eyes tear or shut; deafening us with insidious noise, the constant whir of electric mosquitoes or a four-hour test of the emergency broadcast system; teasing us with snippets of Shakespeare's poetry made impotent by the onslaught of technological power. We are all Lears, Sellars implies, who have turned our backs on love, on simple beauty and grace, on people and objects of substance. Like Lear we mistakenly embrace the shiny, the glossy, the plastic, the metallic--words...