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King Lear (1998)
directed by Richard Eyre, starring Ian Holm, Timothy West, Paul Rhys, and Victoria Hamilton  
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This King Lear is a television adaptation of the much-celebrated Royal National Theater production, which earned Ian Holm and Richard Eyre numerous accolades and awards when it premiered on the London stage. Though the transition from to stage-to-screen is not wholly successful, Holm’s fresh take on the part is more than worth a viewing.  

King Lear, like Hamlet, defies any one actor’s definitive interpretation. Also like Hamlet, the part of Lear is often summative, the last great mountain for an actor to climb. Holm hardly seems cowed by the role, however; he subdues the burden of tradition with an indomitable will and a ferocious energy.

Lear’s own words, as he abdicates his crown – “while we unburdened crawl towards death” – elicits from him a scornful, sarcastic laugh. Death is not on this man’s mind. Holm plays Lear as a prickly old crank in full command of his faculties, if prone to childish fits of temper. It is a vigorous, energetic performance fueled by the kind of physicality that would tax any actor half his age. He leaps on tables, bangs his head, nearly froths at the mouth, and strips himself naked in the storm sequence – exposed to the elements and to the gods. This is not Laurence Olivier’s helplessly senile Lear, or Paul Scofield’s cold and distant King. This is Lear the Dragon: spewing fire and turning to ash and cinder all those who get in his way. “Come not between the dragon and his wrath,” he warns well-meaning Kent, and it’s not an empty threat.

He is impulsive, combative; armed with a whip and more than happy to use it. He is quicker to insult than to forgive. Contrary to his own belief, he sins as much as he is sinned against. It is a complex, compelling interpretation and Holm grips the audience’s attention in a chokehold. If I offer one reservation, it is this: Holm aims for the rafters too early. His unflagging energy is pitched so high from the first scene on that by the play’s midpoint the audience (if not Holm himself) is spent. Every great opera singer knows the importance of saving something extra for the big aria.   

The big aria, in Lear’scase, is the storm sequence. The King has tipped over the edge into madness, pushed into the abyss by his serpent-toothed, thankless daughters. He screams to the sky: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Rage! Blow!” Here is Lear raging against the dying of the light. Unfortunately, Eyre’s handling of this sequence is inept, undercutting its potential power. A herky-jerky handheld camera confusedly follows the barely-visible actors, whose lines are drowned out by the pounding rain and roaring wind. Realistic? Yes, in a way, and I suppose effective in conveying the strength of the storm and Lear’s mental torment. But for a good six or seven-minute stretch of screen time, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what the actors were saying. I might not object in the case of a brainless action movie, but for a Shakespeare production such a misstep is virtually lethal. My familiarity with the play was the only thing shored up against complete incomprehensibility.

Eyre's other missteps are minor by comparison, but worth pointing out. The text doesn’t always jive with his heavy-handed interpretation. When, towards the end of the play, Lear says of his faithful daughter, Cordelia, “her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low,” I couldn’t help but chuckle – not the intended audience reaction, I’m guessing. Victoria Hamilton plays Cordelia as a chip off the ol’ block: she’s just as fierce and fiery and prone to fits as her father, and in one scene wears Joan of Arc-style armor. In other words, “soft” and “gentle” are hardly fitting adjectives. Hamilton’s performance is as brave and emotionally naked as Holm’s, but considering Eyre felt no compunction about cutting out half the other lines in the play, I’m surprised the jarring one about Cordelia being “soft” and “gentle” survived. 

The production’s stage origins are often awkwardly evident. The last third of the play requires a series of complicated entrances and exits, and all these comings-and-goings come off clumsy and confusing when adapted to the screen. Eyre, who no doubt facilitated the transitions successfully on stage, seems to have little sense of where to put the camera or how to lucidly edit a sequence together. Someone might have mentioned to him that on film it is unnecessary to include actors walking or running off/on the stage – a simple cut to the next scene will do. Also, actors’ expressions sometimes shift incongruously from shot-to-shot. The production lives in limbo, uncomfortably pinioned between stage and screen. Eyre would have done well to study Trevor Nunn’s 1979 film of “Macbeth,” also adapted from an acclaimed stage production. Nunn concentrated the camera on his actors’ faces, keeping the shots stiflingly close, almost claustrophobic, and bathing the background in impenetrable shadow. The effect was a heightened intensity bordering on the unbearable.

Eyre also makes the same mistake Peter Brook did in the Scofield-starring version from the early-70s. Edmond, a delicious bad guy with Iago-like snake charm, is neutered by Eyre. Most of his lines are cut, and his smirking nastiness is altogether absent, replaced by a kind of brooding blandness. As I suggested in my review of the Peter Brook movie, check out Raul Julia’s sexy, energetic portrayal of Edmond in the James Earl Jones version of Lear to see how a game performer can fully realize Edmond’s potential.

The production’s weak spots are offset by the best treatment of the Gloucester/Edgar subplot I’ve seen to date. Working with a pared-down text doesn’t prevent Timothy West (as Gloucester) and Paul Rhys (Edgar) from bringing quiet dignity and poignancy to their roles. West wisely underplays Gloucester – his stalwart loyalty to Lear is a touching contrast to Lear’s own impetuosity. His son, Edgar, is a tricky role for actors: he is underdeveloped in the early scenes, and then forced to feign madness as “Poor Tom” for most of the play. Rhys lets the audience see the hurt and pain that his “antic disposition” thinly masks. His encounter in a fogbound ghost world (a kind of afterlife) with his recently blinded father is a masterpiece of suppressed emotion. Rhys also gives Edgar a clear and compelling character arc: from the bookish, nerdy brother to a formidable warrior hewn by his hard experiences. In a production that drifts occasionally into top-heavy artiness, West and Rhys are models of clear-minded understatement. Like father, like son.