Word: sellarsization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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No 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...
In the 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...
We 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...
ALL TOO 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...
Martin Davies, as Edgar, often manages to escape Sellars' designs. His sweet British accent gives Shakespeare's poetry its proper melody. And his transformation from Eton dupe to London punk adds a clever twist to Sellars' dismal view of modern civilization.