73. Trevor Nunn’s King Lear (2008)

I’ve taken a few months off my Shakespeariation, dear readers. I presume if you are reading this blog, you want to know which films to seek out, which to avoid due to being fatally boring, and which ones are weird enough to huff some glue to watch. Well, the winter of my discontent has lasted longer than normal—chronic pain, and marathoning one’s way through tragedies gets on one’s nerves—but I think I have the equanimity to offer some rulings once again.

King Lear? Damn it. I recently interviewed the poet Gerald Stern, who prefers Lear, and I wish I had more time with him to get to the bottom of this. I suspect the adoration comes as a reader more than as a viewer, though I do not dare speak for Mr. Stern.

There’s a lot of crying in Lear. A lot of screaming. Not a small amount of whining.

In his autobiography, Mark Twain wrote,“I have seen and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; after two acts I have gone away physically exhausted.” That’s how I feel about Lear, or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

But as I grow older, your rogue tries to be humble, and remain open to the possibility that maybe Shakespeare knew what he was doing when he wrote Lear.

Trevor Nunn can be a fine director, as shown in his unparalleled Twelfth Night. And Ian McKellan is an extraordinary actor. If you’re not a Shakespeare addict, then you probably have seen him as Gandolf or Magneto. If Ian McKellan played Village Idiot #17 in a film called The Fart in the Heart of the Screaming Hole, I would watch it once. At least once.

The plot of King Lear is that the titular king plans to divide his kingdom between his three daughters so he could retire to his dotage and let them rule securely. Before distributing the rule of these lands, he holds a flattery contest, and the youngest daughter, Cordelia, refuses to play, understanding the deconstructionist principle that what we say bears no essential relationship to what is. She is banished, yet is swooped up in marriage with the king of France. Her older two sisters demonstrate to their father that he is no longer king, and he goes insane. Then the sisters plot against one another while defending their kingdom from France. I am missing a subplot about the bastard Edmund and his machinations to usurp his brother’s noble place in society.

One of my contentions that I made when speaking to Gerald Stern was that the clown in King Lear is not funny. Sylvester McCoy proves me wrong. He has a funny, yet intelligent face, and he is stuck in the dialectic of despairing at Lear’s decisions and delighting at the comic opportunities such wild behavior offers him.

Speaking of the clown, one fascinating choice made with the script was to address one of the ambiguities of the play: when was the fool hung? Lear announces that his clown was hung in Act V, sort of like the proclamation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s death at the end of Hamlet—but the character disappears from the play, and the announcement seems tacked on considering how important the fool is to this play. So Nunn has the clown hung in Act III, and McCoy delivers his soliloquy from III.2 as the soldiers prepare the noose:

This is a brave night to cool a courtezan.
I’ll speak a prophecy ere I go:
When priests are more in word than matter;
When brewers mar their malt with water;
When nobles are their tailors’ tutors;
No heretics burn’d, but wenches’ suitors;
When every case in law is right;
No squire in debt, nor no poor knight;
When slanders do not live in tongues;
Nor cutpurses come not to throngs;
When usurers tell their gold i’ the field;
And bawds and whores do churches build;
Then shall the realm of Albion
Come to great confusion:
Then comes the time, who lives to see’t,
That going shall be used with feet.
This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time.

Directors, please hire Sylvester McCoy to do more work!

Ian McKellan’s performance modulates well between Lear’s self-indulgent nobility and his deteriorating mental state when confronted by the stressors of becoming disowned and homeless and betrayed. At times, he speechifies beneath a bare tree, which reminds one of Waiting for Godot. McKellan is so alive with the role.

One interesting wrinkle comes from Frances Barbera’s Goneril, who weeps when Lear rails against her when exiling himself from her portion of the kingdom. The lust for power and psychodynamics of the play are not completely straightforward.

Of course, the behavior of Lear’s oldest daughters probably has some origin in knowing Cordelia, the youngest, was his favorite (“our joy”). The queen is never mentioned. Lear was probably desperatefor a male heir. Lear is really only an interesting play if we see that some of the terrible things that happen in the play were a long time coming—that what the play, as long as it is, represents is the tipping point for a wounded family.

Romola Garai shines as Cordelia, which is to say, she manages not to seem to Pollyannaesque. When she refuses her father’s demand for blandishments, she seems tough enough to face her father, yet frightened enough once his wrath is awakened.

The costumes for this production are adequate, but Cordelia’s dress in Act 1 is tremendous: a cream-colored, corseted gown. With her chignon and necklace strands, Garai looks simultaneously regal and vulnerable. I don’t know if Andrew Joslin, Lorna Carmichael, or Rachel Farrimond was responsible for the dress.

I am not a cross-dresser, but I make no case for it.

However, this is still King Lear. Our clown is hung in Act III, which makes the last two acts a grind, as the two sisters plot against one another, and Edmund plots against the entire world, it seems.

This was a film adaptation of a stage version mounted by the Royal Shakespeare Company. From the cheap-looking sets and occasionally awkward cinematography, this Lear probably should have been a film of the theatrical performance instead. Is it cheating to just watch the first three acts? Can Mark Twain give us absolution?

The BBC will release a film version with Anthony Hopkins soon. I am not sure how many Lears I can stomach. At least one more, I am sure.

If you think you see what I am missing in Lear, please do try to correct me below.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

69. Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night (1996)

Songs in Shakespeare can be a tricky thing since his texts share lyrics, but not melodies. The normal theatrical approach to these songs is to keep them brief, and not to commit to melodies that are catchy or especially even musical, which kind of defeats the presumed delightful fucking purpose of songs to Shakespearean dramaturgy. Musical creativity is not generally a priority for most troupes, since few could have a budget for commissioning a composer.

That’s only one reason why Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night is thrilling: Ben Kingsley sings!

Trevor Nunn is one of those rare figures in Shakespearean adaptations: someone who belongs to both the Shakespeare and musical theater communities. This may be why Shaun Davey was enlisted to compose music that could creatively compete (and so complement) the poetry and prose of Shakespeare’s text.

This is crucial for Twelfth Night, whose very first lines begin with an emo complaint from poor, love-stricken Orsino:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

Another reason why music is crucial to the spirit of Twelfth Night: the play was written to be performed as a revel for an actual Twelfth Night (AKA, the twelfth day of Christmas–seriously).

I leave it to you, gentle reader, if you wish to look for the semiotic/symbolic traces of the holy associations with Twelfth Night in the play. (Please leave your analyses below in the comments. Remember that the play begins with shipwreck.)

The elevation of the music of the play coincides with the elevation of Feste, the clown, in this adaptation, with Ben Kinglsey playing the part. Feste is interpreted as not only as a sardonic commenter about the society he lives in, using his wit and lowly status to convey more truth than is otherwise socially tolerable—this Feste is also like a chorus and the conscience of the play.

The song with which the play closes—a lilting meditation on the role of entertainment in the meaning of our lives—becomes a framing device for the whole story in this film:

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

Without imagination, we would not be able to endure life. Shaun Davey’s undulating melody works as a leitmotif with enough theme and variations that the film gels miraculously.

As the other song in the middle of the film will demonstrate, music can also articulate our sorrows, which is also a consolation, if temporary, and helps us to understand ourselves. Orsino, in particular, is looking for answers.

The cast is stunning. Helena Bonham-Carter plays Olivia. Nigel Hawthorne plays Malvolio. Sir Toby Belch, one of Shakespeare’s greatest drunkards, is played by Mel Smith, who you may remember as the torturer’s assistant in The Princess Bride.

Richard E. Grant plays that caricature of an upper-class twit, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, with delicious abandon, as if to put such a typecasting of himself away for good. Imogen Stubbs manages her Viola to gender-bending poignancy. Imelda Staunton plays Maria to matronly perfection. Toby Stephens actually makes Orsino compelling despite the character being something of a High Romantic tool.

As I have said too often in these reviews, Shakespearean comedy resembles Shakespearean tragedy with the exception of the pile of corpses that ends a tragedy. This film works wonders with that dialectic. It can save your life.

But this play, and this version of this play, are wickedly funny. Shakespeare’s critique of gender, social class, and the social norms by which we express our emotional lives is more contemporary than ever.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

68. Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948)

I first saw Olivier’s Hamlet sometime in 1988 or 1989 in my English class as a senior in high school.

The film was Shakespearean kryptonite for teenagers: a shaky black and white print of a study of melancholia expressed with exaggerated erudition. The very notion that I should flatter such work with some kind of class or cultural worship was repulsive. I doubt my wonderful teacher fully grasped how much damage this did to my appetite for the bard, and how jaded it made me towards Olivier.

Years would pass before I gave Olivier a mature, second chance.

My appreciation of Shakespeare was eventually repaired by James Joyce’s Ulysses, and several fine films. My actor friend Kevin Crawford insisted I not dismiss Olivier, and his Richard III (1955) is technically brilliant. The meta-historical framing device of his Henry V (1944) is fascinating and lively. Belatedly, Olivier entered my canon—yet somehow, I haven’t yet reviewed his Hamlet here despite the fact that the Criterion Collection DVD has been in my film library for a decade. I am terrified of feeling 17 again, I know it.

Olivier’s Hamlet is almost a masterpiece. If a restored version of the film should come to pass, perhaps it already is a masterpiece. More on that later.

The film opens with a crane shot passing through clouds to arrive at the mazelike geometry of Elsinore keep. This cinematography is suggestive of a Freudian investigation into dreaming (and mysterious shots of the royal bedroom seem to corroborate this acute state of dreaming). There are Oedipal overtones as well, tying into Freud’s thoughts about Hamlet that were systematically applied by Ernest Jones in “The Oedipus-complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive.” (While this is the first film of Hamlet in the era of sound motion pictures, and the setting is perfectly traditional, Olivier was exploring what was then some recent theoretical approaches to Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy.)

Then Olivier (in a voice-over) delivers part of Hamlet’s speech to Horatio in observing his uncle’s reveling as they await his father’s ghost:

So oft it chances in particular men
That, for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As in their birth,- wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin,-
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit that too much o’erleavens
The form of plausive manners, that these men
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature’s livery, or fortune’s star,
Their virtues else—be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo—
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.

Before he is told that his uncle is a murderer, Hamlet is already suffering from melancholia, and feels too much in common with those he hates. The person Hamlet is most suspicious of is, of course, himself.

The speech is followed with a pan towards a parapet where a procession has brought Hamlet’s corpse, and Olivier (again in voice-over) offers an explicit thesis for the film: “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.”

Is Hamlet’s mole of nature his indecision, or is it his own sense of lust, of paranoia, of violent urges that he is trying to control?

He and his mother kiss on the lips rather more often than seems appropriate, and the length of those kisses makes one wonder.

I should point out that beginning a film that may seem painfully academic with a thesis statement further enhances the sense that the movie is going to be a chore, so thankfully the incestuous overtones actually livens up this ponderousness.

If Freud and Ernest Jones seem to be the theoretical godfathers of this Hamlet, the thesis would seem to indicate that Emerson Venable is the other (his The Hamlet Problem and Its Solution appeared as a book in 1912). Frankly, I prefer the Venable text to its treatment in this film. But a film of Hamlet is of course a tricky proposition, since there is no normal sense of action until late in the third act. Hamlet delays his revenge, and thinks about his delays, and thinks about his thinking about his delays. In Olivier’s conception of this problem, indecisiveness is Hamlet’s hamartia. But in Venable’s conception, if memory serves, the problem is that Hamlet distrusts himself to enact revenge for his father’s murder because he identifies too closely with Claudius, and his loathing of Claudius is something that he himself suspects. Hamlet’s struggle is not so much that he cannot make up his mind, but that he is trying to be the master of his own will. He wants to be the dispassionate executioner rather than someone who derives personal satisfaction from violence.

Olivier depicts Hamlet as someone suffering from profound melancholia. He slouches on his princely throne. His mind may seem muddled from this depression, perhaps. He should be in bed. He should be sleeping, if only he did not have bad dreams.

The cinematographer, Desmond Dickinson, moves the camera lot around this wonderful set of Elsinore keep. It’s as if the camera cannot make up its mind sometimes, in determining whose story this is, in determining where in the castle it will go. I would love to see a remastered version of this film, if the print were sharper, and if the camerawork could be stabilized more than a hald-century after the fact, as the camera does wobble sometimes. Nothing as emetic as The Blair Witch Project, but still.

One of my favorite scenes in the film is when Laertes confronts Claudius. The scene begins with the dialogue far off, as Ophelia is walking down a long corridor to interrupt their business. It’s as if the camera cannot quite make up its mind whose story this is, which is the genius of Shakespearean drama—all the characters matter.

The cinematography makes this film better each time one watches it. For example, during the “Murder of Gonzago,” the camera keeps finding Horatio, who is watching the watchers of the play for their responses, as Hamlet’s other, perhaps better pair of eyes.

Ophelia’s death scene is also remarkably performed. Most productions have the good taste not to show it, and let the poetry of Gertrude’s speech announcing her death suffice. The harshness of her death would deny her the tenderness of the grief Gertrude and the court of Denmark will feel for her.

Olivier and Dickinson, however, somehow recreate the fairy strangeness of John Everett Millais’s painting of Ophelia floating downriver in a very narrow, overgrown channel. The camera pans away from when her dress drags her down, leaving instead an empty landscape with a running river.

I have often asserted that every production of Hamlet is made or broken by its Ophelia, which is the most challenging role. Jean Simmons is a remarkable Ophelia, conveying such intelligence, sensitivity, vulnerability, and a madness that is trying so strenuously to make the world make sense.

Another fine performance comes from Normand Wooland, who plays Horatio with such an emotive force that counterbalances Olivier’s generally bland depressiveness as Hamlet.

Eileen Herlie plays Gertrude remarkably well, and the Freudian themes seem more plausible for her relative youth (she was actually significantly younger than Olivier).

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been trimmed from the play, removing some comic relief.

Peter Cushing, Grand Moff Tarkin for you Star Wars fans, plays the flamboyant courtier Osric with a fun gusto, however, that seems satirical without being grating.

None of the performances are bad, although Felix Aylmer’s mutton-chopped Polonius seems a little generic and on-the-nose to me.

In the final analysis, the initial descent through the clouds seems to infect this film experience for me. Olivier could have used color film, but chose black and white “to achieve through depth of focus a more majestic, a more poetic image, in keeping with the stature of the verse” (151). Maybe that’s how the film looked in 1948, but on the Criterion edition DVD the overall effect is often of a slightly weak focus, and an unsteady camera. It’s reach exceeds its grasp. Great, but not as great as it could be, or perhaps was.

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Source: Olivier, Laurence. Laurence Olivier: Confessions of an Actor. New York: Touchstone, 1982.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.