King Lear in New York

– Steve Kogan –

I HAD A strange and disconcerting night at the theater this spring, when my wife and I saw Derek Jacobi in the title role of Shakespeare’s King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. On our subway ride back home, my feelings ran so high that we began to quarrel over their intensity, and it was only after we apologized to each either in the morning that I was able to express exactly why my emotions had been roiled. What follows grew out of what I said to her and what I later discovered when I read a review of the production in the New York Times.

In my last two years of college, I took a one-year course on Shakespeare and a senior semester on Lear, which we read scene by scene and line by line. There was a time in my life when I went to the theater to see whatever works of his and his fellow dramatists were being performed in the city, and I developed a way of turning even mediocre acting to advantage by supplying my own imaginary performance as I let the familiar words sink in. When the acting was good, my absorption was complete.

I also came of age when New York’s museums were as quiet as a library, which is to say when libraries themselves were shelters for quiet study and reflection. Times have changed, although concert halls and theaters still maintain the old proprieties, since there is no getting around the requirement to sit in one’s seat and attend to the performance until an intermission. Silence is no longer a given, however, and audiences are now everywhere instructed to turn off all cell phones and beepers. The last time I went to Carnegie Hall, there was an added instruction for people to remove all cellophane wrappers from their cough drops and candies.

Cell phones and beepers are easy to turn off. It is not so easy to turn off an audience. I had an early warning several years ago that something was amiss when my wife and I went to see The Big Clock, a suspense drama starring Charles Laughton and Ray Milland, which was shown in a series of revivals at the Film Forum in Lower Manhattan. Right from the start, people began laughing at the dated scenes and lines of formal-sounding dialogue, to the point where I began to wonder why they had come to see a 1948 noir-like film if they weren’t movie buffs in the first place, the very audience to which the Film Forum caters. Was there a new breed of aficionado in New York? After half an hour, I was writhing in my seat and was about to tell my wife “I’m out of here,” when all of a sudden the words shot out of my mouth, “This is not a comedy!” There were a few titters and then silence for the rest of the film.

No such relief was available to me at BAM, a fitting acronym for what was happening inside my head as I began to hear pronounced laughter that continued almost to the end, when even the most disconnected spectator could find no opportunity for amusement at the death of Lear next to the lifeless body of Cordelia, his youngest and only faithful child.

If I had had a counter in my hand, I could have pressed it forty times for every laugh I heard.

Many came in response to sharp exchanges of conflicting points of view, as though the audience were being treated to witty repartee, while others followed sadistic comments during the blinding of Gloucester and even scenes of murder, as when Regan collapses – “Sick, O, sick” – after being poisoned by her elder sister, Goneril, who retorts in an aside, “If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.” Other moments of laughter accompanied the sexual intrigues of the two sisters for Edmund’s affections, particularly the moment after Edmund kisses Goneril and she exclaims by allusion to her husband, “O the difference of man and man! [big laugh] / To thee a woman’s services are due; / My fool usurps my body” (secondary laugh).

There was also much delight over the Fool’s most cutting lines to Lear, and it all began with the opening words when Gloucester tells Kent of Edmund’s illegitimate birth, in Edmund’s presence, no less: “Though this knave came something saucily into the world before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair, there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged.” Edmund’s repetitions of “bastard,” “bastardy,” and “base” in his great soliloquy “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” were also good for a laugh, and laughter even punctuated one of the scenes that Melville had in mind when he spoke of Shakespeare’s “short, quick probings at the very axis of reality.”

It is the scene in which the crazed king and the blinded Gloucester meet, and Lear speaks “the sane madness of vital truth” on practically all the core themes of the play: authority, adultery, forgiveness, human and animal sexuality, moral blindness, folly, and the mystery of wicked children: “When I do stare, see how the subject quakes. / I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause? / Adultery? / Thou shalt not die. Die for adultery? / The wren goes to’t, and the small gilded fly / Does lecher in my sight. / Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester’s bastard son / Was kinder to his father than my daughters / Got ‘tween the lawful sheets. . . . Get thee glass eyes / And, like a scurvy politician, seem / To see the things thou dost not.” The audience was tickled by “copulation,” “bastard son,” “scurvy politician,” and, if memory serves me right, “Does lecher in my sight.”

Lear’s pronouncements on “this great stage of fools” also came in for a chuckle.

As if this were not bad enough, I received an added jolt when I subsequently went online and read “Fantasies Aside, Life’s Tough at the Top” (The New York Times, May 5), a long string of supercilious pleasantries about the production, one of which went so far as to turn it into a vicarious night at the movies.

“‘Entertaining,'” writes Ben Brantley, “is hardly the first word that springs to mind when thoughts turn to ‘King Lear,'” yet that is what he calls his evening’s worth of excitement, “chock full of sex and violence,” where “You cry, for sure . . .  But you laugh too” and become so caught up in this “terrifically entertaining” production that “you may look around and wonder why the heck you don’t have a bag of popcorn.” Does he mean to suggest that others do? As we read on, we begin to wonder if he means anything he says.

After two throwaway lines about “this merciless tragedy of old age” and “the human condition,” Brantley settles down to his bag of verbal popcorn in the form of trivializing and inappropriate colloquial speech, as when “Mr. Jacobi compellingly makes the case that you really, really don’t want to be a royal,” that even in the midst of Lear’s madness “you can see exactly where he’s coming from,” that Lear is supported by “his sidekick, the Fool,” and that in this production Kent and Gloucester “for once do not seem, well, bonkers for following their stark raving monarch” (even though both we and they “can see exactly where he’s coming from”). Moreover, the director supposedly wants us to remember that Learis not just “a holy work of art” but also “a feisty old war horse that, properly harnessed, can still kick and gallop with the best of them.” In Brantley’s perverted take on the work, the play kicks and gallops most entertainingly through the words and actions of Lear’s wicked daughters, nor has he ever “had such a good time watching these vicious sisters spin, and get trapped in, their webs.” Thanks to their spinning, nearly half the cast is dead by the end of the play, yet this fact never crosses his mind, only the “good time” that he had in watching them act out and be destroyed by their viciousness. Reverting to his overblown rhetoric about the play’s “most beautiful and devastating observations ever uttered about the human condition,” he maintains his false presence to the end when he says that he “wept copiously when Lear and the noble Cordelia found the peace of death in this punishing, cruel world,” a line of pure blather whose insincerity is highlighted by his last sentence about the entertainment value that he found in this production, so much so that “I wanted Goneril and Regan to live to scheme another day.” And do what? Kill off the remaining nine characters?

What is one to make of a theater critic who says he had the munchies while seeing a tragedy that surpasses the darkest moments of Greek drama and The Book of Job even at the halfway point? Moreover, he delights in his little displays of vapid urbanity and flippant disregard of the facts, remarking that “This is the version you take ‘Lear’ virgins to, knowing they won’t become confused, even when the title character is ranting in seemingly nonsensical poetry.” In reality, the design of the play is all too painfully clear; I have never seen a production in which Kent and Gloucester seemed “bonkers” for supporting the king; Lear never speaks in “seemingly nonsensical poetry,” and in one of the high points of Lear’s supposed “ranting,” his curse on Goneril’s womb is unparalleled in drama for the clarity of its tormented rage.

In retrospect, what I witnessed at BAM was an audience of Brantley sound-alikes, who seemed to find  The Tragedy of King Lear “terrifically entertaining” themselves as they chortled their way through Shakespeare’s dark and haunting words. What made their weirdly inappropriate responses all the more wrenching was that the performance was not only dramatic but also musical in the way that every line and action flowed seamlessly from moment to moment, although I was only able to experience this quality at several removes, surrounded as I was by people whose very personalities seemed to have become desensitized and deconstructed over time. My wife later told me that an old acquaintance saw the production minus any laughter, yet when a friend sent me a note that he had just seen the play, I replied that I had a “killer problem with the audience,” and he wrote back, “YES, what were they laughing at??!!” The mayor in Nikolai Gogol’s comic masterpiece The Inspector General asks the same question and supplies the answer when he turns to the audience near the end and says, “What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves.”

— Comments —

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

I read with sympathy Steve Kogan’s account of his night out at the theater. I know precisely of what Mr. Kogan writes, having witnessed it in my classrooms going back to the early 1990s. Students laugh – and gleefully cackle and twitter – in an inappropriate way at almost all scenes of emotional or moral intensity and at almost all depictions of violence and fatality. I like to incorporate film in my courses, but I am nowadays leery of what films I show to whom. I have sometimes stopped the film, expressing my displeasure and confronting students with the brutishness of their responses, but few seem to understand. And of course, the ones who do understand are not the ones guilty of the transgression.

Fred Owens writes:

I share the writer’s frustration with a noisy audience during productions of high tragedy. Yet, going back to Shakespeare’s day, do you think that audience sat in respectful silence at the Globe Theater in old London town? By most accounts, a Shakespearean audience was a raucous crowd, chewing, spitting, drinking, jostling, pinching, and laughing, all the while listening to the play. And if Shakespeare, peeking out from behind the stage, could capture the full and silent attention of this gang, he was mighty pleased, but it didn’t happen too often.

Must we listen in respectful silence, or shall we take a clue from the people of olden times?

Laura writes:

It wasn’t noise per se that bothered Steve Kogan, it was the sound of laughter at moments of high seriousness. Even if Shakespeare’s audiences found these scenes hilarious, which I doubt, it’s still weird and disturbing. Mr. Kogan wrote,

Many came in response to sharp exchanges of conflicting points of view, as though the audience were being treated to witty repartee, while others followed sadistic comments during the blinding of Gloucester and even scenes of murder, as when Regan collapses – “Sick, O, sick” – after being poisoned by her elder sister, Goneril, who retorts in an aside, “If not, I’ll ne’er trust medicine.”

I don’t get it.

I saw Hamlet in New York about a year ago and the audience was mostly high school students. I think many of them had read the play beforehand. They did not laugh this way.

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