George Orwell once wrote that William Shakespeare’s “King Lear” is a work of detailed social criticism, but only in its moments of madness. The joke, of course, is that “Lear” is all spiraling madness, one long and painful death scene. But audiences keep coming back. Its tragic framework, one of the Bard’s most bleak, allows for a profound meditation on hubris, family, and death — all themes that remain timeless. In a new production, which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on January 7, the legendary actor Frank Langella takes the title role under the direction of Angus Jackson. In a recent phone conversation, Jackson, right out of rehearsals, spoke with ARTINFO about his history with “Lear,” navigating the play’s complicated and dense structure, and why it continues to resonate with audiences.
How have the performances been so far?
Great. We’ve had three — it’s a beautiful theater — and it’s been full and the audiences have been good. The actors tell me it’s a very nice place to play, they say they walk out there and they feel very comfortable. It feels good. We have a big old stone floor in there and big broad swords bouncing off it — it’s quite an energized environment for them.
How far back does your interest in “King Lear” go?
When I was a student the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company] invited me to review their “King Lear” for a student newspaper. It was great, actually — a woman named Helen Cross was the press officer and she invited loads of students. So I saw “Lear” at the RSC with Robert Stephens, when he was really dying. It was so remarkable and, you know, at the time I was already directing plays as a student, so it made a huge impact on me — that and Nick Hytner’s “Tempest,” around the same time. But “Lear” really struck me. I sat in the middle of the front row, I remember. Since then, you know, you have those plays that you’re always thinking about doing at some point, perhaps because you’ve seen them as a kid, perhaps because you’ve read them at a point in time when they’ve spoken to you. And I met Frank when he did “Frost/Nixon,” very briefly, through Mike Poulton, who knows Frank from “Fortune’s Fool,” which Frank did on Broadway years ago. What crystalized it was doing a play called “Bingo,” by Edward Bond, with Patrick Stewart, which is about Shakespeare and is kind of a riff on “Lear.” I did that in London a few years ago and started reading “Lear” again, and I think Frank was having thoughts about it being a time he’d like to do it. We didn’t really know each other. We met up and the ideas just started bouncing around.
While working with a Shakespeare text do you feel like you’re responding to history? Are you looking at past productions trying to break away from what has been done? Or is it more a conversation with the past?
When Frank and I were thinking about doing it we spent quite a few days early on talking about, “Oh, when Derek [Jacobi] did it this was the flavor, when Ian [McKellen] did it this was very much the flavor.” You use those productions to talk about what has been expressed through those people. You use those other touchstones to talk about the play. But very quickly what happens is it’s such a breathtakingly complicated play, to the point where I sit and watch it for, whatever, the 15th time in our production, and I hear things I’ve never heard before, or Frank comes offstage and say, “I found something new tonight in the middle of that scene, did you see?” You know, because it’s an epic poetic play, you just leave the others behind, really. But it’s enormous fun, particularly with the Internet, looking at images of Lears across the generations, seeing what they wear on their head when they’re mad in the meadow, or seeing any pictures of them relating to their environment. You look at it and get an awful lot out of that. But ultimately you have to come back to the text. There’s so much there you don’t worry about repeating what somebody’s done before. You just leave it behind. But I’ll tell you, the Peter Brook film is absolutely compelling, with Paul Scofield, and he uses about a third of the play. It’s cut to shreds.
It was just a coincidence, but right before I knew I was going to have this conversation with you, I happened to watch Jean-Luc Godard’s film version of “King Lear,” which completely dismantles the play. I wanted to ask you about this impulse to pull Shakespeare apart, either through complete restructuring of the text or modernization.
I think because the opportunity is there. There’s so much in it. You can extract from it — you can become fascinated by all the profound ideas in it, or, as Peter Brook did, you can become fascinated by the wilderness that he gets thrown out to. There’s “Ran,” the Kurosawa film, which is sort of “Lear,” and there’s a Russian film by Grigori Kozintsev where Lear’s a really frail, tiny old man. Our production is in its own time — we’re a broad swords and boots production. But what we’ve done is a very filmic cut of it. When you come to the play, part of it is an interpretative choice. If you did the whole play start to finish it would be hard. You have to take the ideas that resonate with you now, as a group of artists, and the opportunities are all there. So I think it’s got to be shown through a prism of interpretation of contemporary ideas. I think we’re a very contemporary-classic production.
Why does “King Lear” continue to resonate with contemporary audiences?
It’s funny because it’s a play I absolutely love, but you ask yourself that question. It’s a play where people get their eyes pulled out, and people rail at the heavens. You enjoy the epic nature of it, in the way that we like “Game of Thrones” or we like big historical epics like “Gladiator” or something. What do I think is great about “Lear”? I was watching it last night — every night a privilege and a pleasure — and it’s this universal story of a man who makes a mistake, he does something rash — we all do rash things in our life — and the house of cards comes tumbling down. It’s beautiful to watch him, personified by Frank, an actor of immense emotional death, realizing what he’s done and that he cannot undo it — it’s tremendously moving. It’s a domestic play about a family who happen to have a huge amount of power, so there’s a war fought over their decisions, but it’s also a man coming to his humanity through great trial. It’s just profound. When he sits there and looks at the naked Edgar and says, “Is man no more than this?”, I defy you not to be moved by it. That’s why we love it.
