It’s hard to believe that it's three years since I last put down some thoughts on King Lear. That is not to say that there have not been productions or that I failed to attend any. Last year there were two in the United States and one in Stratford, Ontario. God knows I coveted trips there, but did not board a plane to make them happen.
 
There was also Kenneth Branagh’s taking on the mantle. But, as happens a bit nowadays, it was reduced to two hours, losing a lot of text—even some lines you would think are bangers—and dance and movement inserted in  its place.
 
I try to avoid reviews of productions, yet it is inevitable that some of my reaction will creep in. In short, there were times Branagh particularly was superb, but it was a puzzling conceit to consign so much text to the theatrical dustbin. The idea of drawing on past and recent graduates from his alma mater RADA was commendable, but with varying results.
 
By the bye, Danny Sapani as the tortured monarch at the Almeida gave a performance that was pitch perfect. It was matched by so much to admire in this production—as my wife Adey Grummet said, ‘It was a lesson in how to do it. It made sense of so much of the various contexts and story’. High praise indeed who has been dragged along to see almost all of the 38 productions I have seen on stage since 1978.
 
Later this year I am visiting my native Sydney, on the excuse of going to Adelaide for a family wedding which will coincide with my seventieth birthday. (There is a seeming appropriate echo of ten years ago when I was in Australia to see Geoffrey Rush as the miserable monarch at the Sydney Theatre Company.)
 
This year it will be Colin Friels, an actor I saw on stage a lot when I lived in Sydney. Indeed, he shone out in a relatively lacklustre production of Hamlet, directed by William Gaskill in 1981. He brought a shaft of light to a confused and somewhat clunky event which featured some of the country’s best performers.
 
Eamon Flack, the director at the Belvoir Street Theatre, has opted to use the full title of the play, The True History Of The Life And Death of King Lear & His Three Daughters—which is a mouthful by any reckoning.
 
The theatre itself was the home of the Nimrod Theatre when it moved from its eponymous house in the Darlinghurst street that still retains the Stables Theatre, home for many years to the Griffin Theatre Company. That building too, is the focus of many theatrical memories, no more than Peter Kenna’s A Hard God, which sparked my interest in performing and writing for the stage.
 
Sadly, none of my work has been seen on those stages, but thems the breaks, as I have written before. It's a tough game, this writing businesss.
 
Still and all, I am looking forward to basking in the sun of Friels and company’s performances.

The drought is over and with the relief of theatregoing restored—no thanks to the dishonest, inept and corrupt British government led by archliar Boris Johnson—I have been able to see three productions in person and one, performed last year, viewed online.
 
The range has been varied, as one would expect with a mixture of amateur/professional/mixed productions. Each has offered insights and delights, perhaps no greater than Michelle Terry’s luminescent Fool to Kathryn Hunter’s monarch at Shakespeare’s Globe.
 
The production, directed by Helena Kaut-Howson, captured the always enjoyable vivacity (even in tragedy) of Shakespearean theatre, with bold and confident engagement by the actors with the groundlings and wider audience.
 
Of the four shows, two stuck to the Bard’s text, while the directors of two chose to ‘adapt’ or revise the work according a concept. Jo Emery’s take, set in the corporate world, used texting and mobile phones to varied success.
 
A stalwart question in any literary Q and A is ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
 
Mulling over my recent adventures in Learland, and reading of the car crash the Lambeth Conference has created by its own devising, I see another concept looming. The Lambeth Calls have exploded in the face of organisers of the gathering of bishops from around the world. So how about an Ecclesiastical Lear?
 
The Church of England has, of course, some previous in trying to hold the bag of snakes that come from different terrains with an attempt of some display of calm. When the decision was made by General Synod to approve the ordination of women to the priesthood, it also set up a system which ‘accommodated’ those who did not agree.
 
In doing so, it established an ongoing sore. My views on this are clear. Women should be involved in all levels of the Church, including its ordained ministry.
 
Though I have argued on Biblical principles that men should be excluded from the Archiepiscopacy. This is based on the commissioning of Mary Magdalene as the Apostle to the Apostle by Jesus after his Resurrection.
 
I believe the Church of England was, and is, wrong to extend its tolerance to incoming clergy who object to women in the breadth of orders. It could have extended care for those who felt ‘the rules had changed’ but to keep ordaining objectors, who use theological arguments to justify what is sexism, of not misogyny, should be called out for what it is. An uncomfortable parallel exists, though often denied, if such provision were based on race or class. (Oh, I forgot, the CofE is riddled with privilege.)
 
Which gets me to my Ecclesiastical Lear…
 
The Head of the Communion thinks he will have a conference to ‘carve up’ the territories and provinces. This will be based on a ‘Tell me how much you love me’ basis. Archbishop, or Pope, Lear is doing this ‘that future strife may be prevented now’. As solutions go, it has its own impetus. Spoiler alert: it does not go well.
 
Such a production would allow my interests of theatre (especially King Lear), religion and poetry to run riot.
 
Perhaps it could be performed as a sideshow to the circus in Canterbury?

​There has been an understandable drought in the wastes of Learland, replenished during the Covid crisis by online offerings. It is a blessing that so many film and archival recordings are available.
 
To slake the thirst since my last public thoughts on this monumental piece, I have gulped from the delights of silent movies, an archival performance of Colm Feore at the Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Ontario, Canada, and Michael Hordern from a BBC Play of the Month. There was also the peculiar King of Texas, with Shakespearean Patrick Stewart as the Wild West rancher in a film that had echoes of one of my suggested takes on the play in which a pastoralist carves up his property between his daughters.
 
So it was with parched excitement I found myself in a theatre in rural Hampshire to see what was an experiment of sorts, with opera singers staging the play. I had seen this production had music by Nigel Osborne, so I assumed, wrongly as it turned out, to be a new opera—I could have read the background to the production before booking, but I tend not to do that in case it tarnishes an attempt at an open mind.
 
I had seen a production of Albert Reimann’s King Lear at the Coliseum in 1989 when the ENO decided to conform to its house policy of performing in English, replacing the German libretto with words from the Bard himself. The production was a splendid example of how to opera Germanly but with great performances nonetheless. The Grange Festival offering was not to be of this ilk.
 
Instead, a group of singers would present the spoken drama, as they call it in China. This, as pointed out in an article by Michael Billington in the Guardian, was to challenge the trope that opera singers are second rate actors who ‘just wave their arms around like traffic cops’.
 
Only three performances of this play were scheduled and even those were hit by Covid restrictions—audience members had to show proof of double vaccination and a negative lateral flow test. From an audience point of view, it was extraordinarily comfortable, with no queues at the bars and plenty of space in the auditorium.
 
The project harked back to the controversy some years back about those who gloried in the verse over the sense, and others accused of debasing the iambic pentameter to go for ‘modern’ expression with scant regard to metre. John Gielgud, later in life, admitted that he was prone to 'singing' the text earlier in his career. Others have been accused of being so into the role, and competing with stage effects as loud as a storm scene, of being not only incomprehensible but inaudible

​​But what of the Grange Festival performance itself?
 
Its genesis came when Kim Begley discussed the idea with director Keith Warner in the back of a taxi. Begley, an actor who moved into opera, himself took the stage as the Fool, an assured and funny realisation that drew heavily on its classical theatre Chorus function.
 
The other roles were taken by operatic giants, John Tomlinson as the mad king, Thomas Allen as the blinded Gloucester, and performers better known for Wagner and Mozart rather than Shakespeare and Ayckbourn.
 
By and large it was a revelation. If nothing else it affirmed my suspicion that vocal training at drama schools seems not to be the major plank it was. I have seen, even at the RSC, some incisive acting cut asunder by weak vocal technique. I once made this comment to a friend working in Stratford-upon-Avon, questioning the efficacy of its once-famous voice department. ‘You can only work with what you’re presented with,’ was his maudlin comment.
 
It should come as no surprise that Tomlinson and his colleagues succeeded in spades where others might be struggling to be heard. Years of daily practice, singing over an orchestra, and the challenge of changing approaches to performance in the operatic world, gave a resonant clarity to text. Every word from the principals was crisp and clear.
 
And the acting? Like most productions, it was variable. Some rose to the challenge better than others. But there were stand out wonders: Tomlinson’s Lear, Allen’s Gloucester, Begley’s Fool, and, Susan Bullock, Emma Bell and Louise Alder as the trio of sisters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. Robert Flaum’s command of text and madness in Edgar and Mad Tom was exhilarating.
 
Billington quoted John Tomlinson: ‘When Terry Gilliam came to direct at ENO in 2011, he said he was going to drag operatic acting into the modern world. We were way ahead of him on that. In fact, I’d say that in the UK from the 1960s to the late 1990s, singers were generally very good actors. But I admit that in the last couple of decades, operatic acting has often been stymied by hi-tech design and concept-driven direction that treats the singer as one item in a visual scheme: the barer the stage, the better the acting.’
 
He proved his point.

There are as many approaches to a role as there are actors. The same can be said for those who are responsible for the wider setting of a theatrical production. And yet sometimes there can be a struggle to allow all contributions—design, direction, performers’—to coexist.
 
Those tackling the ‘great’ parts have sometimes felt undermined in what they think they can bring to the performance table. But the best collaborations do not suffer so. They value the contributions of each participant and mould a commonly owned end product. Or that is what one hopes for.
 
Uta Hagen in Respect For Acting (still on my shelves despite having given up the profession about 28 years ago) speaks of finding aspects of an inner life that can be used, adapted or exaggerated for a character. Sometimes it is not that easy.
 
Simon Russell Beale, when he took on King Lear at the National under the direction of Sam Mendes, chose to focus on a particular form of illness, Lewdy Body dementia, as a key to the king’s journey into and beyond madness. He is on record as saying that research and adoption of this aspect of his performance was unusual for him.
 
Hagen and Russell Beale’s approaches have come together for me to suggest yet another ‘take’ on the path of monarch to homeless ranter to prisoner and death.
 
After the ebullience and folly of his show of public admiration, perhaps too late in his career to satisfy his waning position and fragile ego, the king worries. And one of the classic symptoms of anxiety, leading to depression, is lack of sleep. Once that worm starts turning, all sorts of other annelids are let loose.
 
This, I hope, is not eisegesis. There are many solid references within the text that give this conceit potential substance. There are clear links in the play’s action between Lear’s wildness and sleep deprivation. The  incident when Gloucester urges the removal of the king from the shelter he has provided captures this when Kent responds,
Oppressèd nature sleeps.
This rest might yet have balm'd thy broken senses,
Which, if convenience will not allow,
Stand in hard cure. (Act Three, Scene 6)
 
It is one of many references that come in the action to suggest that a good night’s rest will calm the dethroned king, settle his nerves and put him back on a steadier footing.
 
Of course, the medical view is always important, even if it only confirms what is commonly known. One scene that often does make it to the stage is Act Four, Scene 4, in which the Doctor says, in response to Cordelia’s anxious query as to what might help ' In the restoring his (i.e.Lear's) bereavèd sense?'
Our foster-nurse of nature is repose.
The which he lacks; that to provoke in him,
Are many simples operative, whose power
Will close the eye of anguish.
 
This proves to be so, even if haltingly, when the Queen of France takes on the task of waking her exhausted father three scenes later. His confusion, the Doctor says, is to be expected but the hours of restful sleep are sufficient for the medic to observe that 'the great rage, You see, is kill'd in him.'
 
Appealing to others can sometimes strengthen an argument, as well as alerting the proponent of the view that one’s conclusions may not be as original as thought. In my researches for this post, I came across a paper by the academic Claude Fretz, whose PhD was on dreams and sleep in Shakespeare’s work.

His online article, “Either his notion weakens, or his discernings / Are lethargied”: Sleeplessness and Waking Dreams as Tragedy in Julius Caesar and King Lear, stretches the canvas further.
 
So to recap the arc for an actor/production team: Lear’s rash actions lead to remorse. His personality is such that his regrets haunt him to the extent of robbing him of sleep. The mounting cost of sleeplessness leads to his loosening his grip, his racing thoughts, extreme behaviour and madness. In exhaustion he collapses, coming to his right mind only after prolonged rest. Of course, that is not enough to withstand the forces against him, but those powers are outside of both his body and control.
 
Left brain or right brain, it is an approach that an actor and his collaborators may find enticing. But if does not appeal, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

It was a stamp that did it. There, sitting in my pigeon hole at work, was a letter, boldly addressed to me but with a stamp announcing in capital letters, King Lear.

The label that guaranteed delivery was affixed to the top of the envelope and carried the image of a raging monarch, played by Glenda Jackson on her return to the stage (a role she is reprising on Broadway) after 23 years in parliament. It is part of a Royal Mail series to mark the bicentenary of The Old Vic Theatre in London.


Mistakenly believing that the stamp had been chosen solely for my delight and entertainment, I was somewhat deflated to learn that the contents of the epistle were related, pleasantly enough as it turned out, to the business of the College where I serve.
Having sparked my interest, I have since gone on to ponder how much of the play is a meditation on communication. And the role letters play in the drama.

The opening scene, and the sub-plots, hinge on what is said, what is not, how things are couched in language and to what extent truth, subterfuge and lies play a part in the machinations of the lives of Shakespeare’s characters.

Kent is banished for challenging the decision of Lear to expel his youngest daughter whose only fault, we come to learn, is that she does not practise ‘that glib and oily art’ of her sisters ‘to speak and purpose not’.

Edmund succeeds in estranging his brother Edgar from their father’s affections by a counterfeit missive which lures Gloucester into believing his legitimate issue has designs that seek to upend the established order that ‘keeps our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish them’.

After that the mail flies fast and furious: Oswald is despatched to Gloucester’s, where he meets the now disguised Kent bringing a communication from his master, to warn of goings-on at home; the scheming daughters send messages to Edmund to win his heart and body; Lear’s loyal retainer gets word to the king’s banished daughter; a dying Edmund gives a note to a guard which contains a commission that should see Lear and Cordelia killed.

In a final indignity Goneril, who leaves to stab herself after poisoning her sister Regan, has her own handwriting flung at her by an outraged husband, Albany, telling her to ‘Shut your mouth, dame, or with this paper shall I stopple it.’

One of my first teenage holiday jobs was a telegram boy. I went on to be a casual postal worker, walking the streets of a suburb in western Sydney to be chased by dogs, get sunburned and deliver the mail, eventually climbing to the dizzy heights of a night sorter. I even considered, for a brief delusory period, this as an option for a full time job, thinking I would be able to write during the day.

It was inevitable that you spend time thinking what might be held in the envelopes and packages you carry on your back, or push in your trolley, or however the messages are transported. At no time did I link this to King Lear.

Which, I now come to see, was a shame. After all, I was well placed, as Kent in the guise of Caius was, to have been told that, ‘If your diligence be not speedy, I shall be there before you’.

An archdeacon, now a bishop sitting in the House of Lords, told me of her amusement at having received a message from me telling her that, after a shitty day in the parish, I was off to relax by watching one old man go mad while another had his eyes plucked out.
 
It was meant to raise a laugh, even if the dramatic events referred to should not. If they do, there is something rotten in the state of Learmark.
 
The length of the first half of the performance is crucial. The times have gone when a five act play would be a day long affair with refreshments breaks – Shakespeare is not quite in Glyndebourneland.
 
I often ask theatre staff how long the first half will be for two reasons: whether it is bladder-wise to have a gin and tonic before curtain up or whether I will need one at the interval.
 
It is a decision based on experience. Most productions pivot on the barbarism of the Duke of Cornwall and Regan in plucking out the eyes of the Earl of Gloucester. I can imagine the production meeting: ‘Do we want to make people sick before or after they eat their ice creams?’
 
What happens in Act Three, Scene Seven is brutal in the extreme. Shakespeare proves his powers by mixing high drama with ultraviolence in a way that would have appealed, and still does appeal, to theatregoers of high and low taste.
 
First timers are warned it is going to be gruelling. Cornwall tells Edmund, the bastard son become betrayer, that ‘the revenges we are bound to take upon your traitorous father are not fit for your beholding.’ That judgment does not extend to the audience.
 
Shakespeare ensures – or at least his later interpreters do – that what follows is one of the most squirming-in-seat experiences in the theatrical canon. Indeed, many people choose to view it through hands over the face, or closing their eyes when it gets too much.
 
In much the same vein as Qoholeth warns that age brings on a deepening fear of heights (Ecclesiastes 12:5), experienced Lear watchers should give a heads-up: it does not matter how many times you have seen this bit of the show, it still hurts.
 
Variations abound: how to bind or hold Gloucester – ropes, straps, onto the chair, frame, or manly restraint; the implements used – a 1960s style ice cube tool, stirrups, meat hook, spoon, screwdriver, bare hands; and what to do with the eyes once out – if you throw them, do they bounce or not, splat, squish or just get stamped on or even eaten?
 
And there is the vexed reaction of those watching. The action depends on the response of one servant who, in a deadly tussle with Cornwall, stands up for the earl. Some look on in horror, revulsion and, on the odd occasion in a sadistic glow.
 
The most extreme example of the latter was one production when Regan removed Gloucester’s second eye by sucking it out and, in doing so, achieved an orgasm. This is perhaps not the most extreme reaction imaginable, but certainly it takes the award for me.
 
All of which makes me ask what  I see in this play? The answer must be that is only part – a gruellingly brutal part – of a broader scope of the play. A number of productions have used this to questionable effect: the lights go from dim to harsh light; the black backdrop turns to white. Whatever is chosen is underlying the dramatic, the blind Gloucester and the now mad Lear have entered into a stark new reality. They have moved from flattery and imagined lives to what cannot be avoided. They no longer see things in part, but as they are, dim mirror or no.
 
For both the king and Gloucester the full realisation of love is closely followed by death. Maybe that is what we cannot – or do not? – want to see.

Before the show began I fell into conversation with a man in the seat next to me. He has a passion for the theatre, telling me he goes to performances three or four times a week. He mentioned his Lear-going and we compared notes. I had seen two more than he had last year, but that was not the point. We both relished, for reasons we shared and withheld, the experience of ‘being there’.
 
At the football I sit behind a couple of Daves whose hobby is groundhopping. For the uninitiated this involves going to football grounds with a crowd, for a game or even when they are empty. Sounds mad? Google it.
 
But theatregoing could likewise be seen as odd as groundhopping. I know of people who time their annual holidays so they can travel round the world to see productions of the The Ring Cycle. They feel no shame about it. Why should they?
 
It is personal, playful, maybe even potty. After all, I flew to Australia to see Geoffrey Rush in King Lear in my native Sydney for my sixtieth birthday. I asked nobody what they thought of that.
 
But Chichester did send me a survey, which I duly answered. There was, however, one query that drew me up short. It was question 3, which went ‘Thinking about King Lear please rate the following aspects of your visit (please tick one box for each statement)’. It canvassed my opinion about various aspects of the show, including what I thought of ‘the writing/quality of the script’.
 
I have spent some years seeking to understand and unravel my relationship with this masterpiece. Though not all would agree that, as Ian McDiarmid said when he performed in a radio version for BBC’s Radio Three, ‘Many people talk about it as the greatest play yet written’. The Guardian critic, Michael Billington, nearly always expresses reservations about it, as he did in his review of McKellen’s second thrust at the part. ‘I still find much of the play puzzling: there seems no logical reason why everyone should converge on Gloucester’s castle, or why Edgar should not reveal his identity to his father.'
 
I assume Billington was not sent a survey. The Chichester-generated questionnaire is obviously meant to canvass reaction to all plays, old and new, with a few changes to the lead-in to questions. Still, I could not resist saying how much I appreciated the opportunity to express my opinion on Shakespeare’s writing to see if it was Excellent/Good/Neither good nor poor/Poor/Very Poor.

I could rate my experience of Evensong in the cathedral, my meal in the bistro, the hotel I stayed in, my fry up in the only workers’ café in town, even my train trips on Southern trains.
 
But who cares? My opinion will hardly mar my fortunes.

There is no shortage of advice to would-be performers and those around them: never perform with children or animals and don’t put your daughter on the stage are just two. There should also be a general health warning – or maybe several - about working outdoors.
 
It takes a special kind of actor to be heard comfortably in an open air venue. Some mistake the skill of projection with shouting which, to be honest, is as tiring for the spectator as the person ‘on stage’.
 
There are myriad other threats that can disrupt a performance just because of the locale. I once saw peacock steal the show at Holland Park when a poor soprano was trying to put over her big aria. The bird had a bigger voice and more spectacular frock. A production of a Beckett play outside the Barbican Centre in London had two tramps vying with the antics of a coot doing the aquatic equivalent of strutting on a pond behind them.
 
Mind you, being in a theatre is no guarantee that wildlife will not find their way in.  I once witnessed a possum completely upstage a performance of a Feydeau farce by defecating and urinating from the lighting rig. I heard of a similar hijacking of Jack Hibberd’s A Toast to Melba when a rat stopped atop a scenery flat to take in the action. He so successfully pulled focus that the humans were hardly mentioned during the interval. King Lear With Sheep made a virtue of the beastly invasion – the actor was never really meant to have a chance.
 
But let us go outside again. What about the elements? No-one is really in control of them. Two productions of King Lear within five days brought different clashes with the weather.
 
An earlier start in the garden at St John’s College, Cambridge might have allowed cast and audience all to go home undamp. It was odd that the king, Kent, the Fool and Edgar in the guise of poor Tom remained bone dry during the storm scenes.
 
When Gloucester arrived at Dover, things took a turn for the worse. A light rain began to fall and, with varying intensity, kept up until the proverbial curtain fell. Not one audience member abandoned the show, which was an act of solidarity with the increasingly sodden actors. Sadly, the poignancy of the closing scene was undercut: people hung in there under umbrellas, but the cast were up against it without protection.
 
The wooden O that is Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is both charming and disarming. The Lord Chamberlain’s - later the King's, - Men had plenty to deal with from the pit, now a rather attentive and sedate lot,  and the racket that attended nearby bear baiting on the banks of the Thames. But they would certainly have been thrown by what now leaks in from above. There are the pigeons, of course, which one assumes visited performances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Overflying aircraft can challenge even the best trained voice and the inevitable helicopter which seems to hover just over the theatre wins every time.
 
But my visit, four days after a soggy departure from Cambridge, contended with another seasonal aspect. The sun shone brightly and bare arms, a foolish virgin’s mistake in not bringing sun block, had to be covered with a light jumper. Slight discomfort was better than burning. I had sunglasses to hand and ushers gave out paper caps to the audience while actors went about their business on stage.
 
These are relatively minor inconveniences. Actors have the burden of the play on top of all that, and in both cases they rose to the challenge. No wonder so much advice is offered them. They must have many answers to Kent’s question that opens Act III, ‘Who’s there, besides foul weather?’

Love is blind, so we are told, but are theatregoers? The answer would seem to be yes and no, or dependent on who wants to do what.
 
There has been a welcome rise in ‘blind casting’ in plays though, on occasion, it may seem a little taxing on the suspension of disbelief – can people really imagine that those on stage actually mistake identical twins when one is male and the other female? Or one black and the other white? Basic biology would suggest that neither is possible. They may be twins, but they sure aren’t interchangeable.
 
Blind casting is growing in popularity, but it only goes so far – as far as I know all black casts are still the norm for A Raisin In the Sun or Porgy and Bess. This, of course, may justified as a proper revolt over the dubious practice of ‘blacking up’ in the theatre, perhaps most famously and commonly for Othello. But could it cut both ways? Would a white man be cast to play Martin Luther King?
 
There is also, to revert to my first twins, gender neutrality. Men have routinely taken women’s roles in Shakespeare, often justified on the grounds of ‘authenticity’ – the theatrical equivalent of period orchestras using ‘original instruments’. I have only witnessed one production where the mooted doubling of Cordelia and The Fool was played – the hot pants on the latter, like it or not, ensured it was a very feminine court jester.
 
Women, though, would miss all the big roles if they were cast by natural selection. This has been addressed – or redressed? -  by a number of all female productions to give a kind of balance to the all male ones that pop up from time. A season at the Donmar Warehouse seeks to do just this. But what of the big roles - Hamlet, Othello, King Lear?
 
Readers of this blog will not be surprised at my interest who gets to play  in the mad sovereign.
 
Two recent productions have been mounted with women as Lear – one definitely as a queen, her royalty enshrined in the play’s title; the other with Glenda Jackson as the monarch who divides her coronet, only later to be crowned with flowers.
 
It is not my practice to review productions on this blog. My aim is more ruminantary.
 
The playwright Ronald Harwood, whose play The Dresser, happened to have a West End run about the same time as these two productions of King Lear. The action unfolds place while the failing Sir, at the head of a depleted and second rate cast, is mounting a production of the tragedy in the war torn provinces. Harwood has declared a woman must not play the lead in his play and has reportedly ensured this in his will. And he said more. On the classical piece involved in his drama, Harwood said, ‘A woman as King Lear? It is an insult to the playwright.’
 
Neither Ursula Mohan (Queen Lear) in a fringe venue nor Glenda Jackson, definitely every inch a king in a packed Old Vic, was insulting, In fact, each of them provided some telling and interesting aspects to the role, even if the productions were variable and at times tricksy. Yes, even with vastly different budgets the highs and lows of productions can thrill or irk.
 
A woman invoking sterility on her daughter, as the Queen does, seems even more chilling than a father doing so. And a woman being a king seems no big deal when all on stage carry the weight of relationships. Deference is all.
 
Is it blind or universal? Perhaps both? Or neither? As I said, it depends on who wants to do what. And what the actors do in response to the royal personage.
 
A couple of years ago I saw a friend of mine played Henry IV on stage at the Sydney Opera House. We had been at acting school together in the 1980s, where we both strutted and strained as students. He has had a successful career in acting, even if he has had to drive cabs from time to time. I have never driven a taxi, but my last foray on the professional stage was over twenty years ago, and some might say that is not long enough in the past.
 
My friend, David Whitney, said ‘It’s great being a king. You don’t have to do anything. You walk on stage and people do everything for you. If only we knew this thirty years ago.’
 
David may one day play King Lear. I will, of course, only be his Fool in life. I hope to be in the audience to see it. I expect it will be a very manly event. But then, perhaps, friendship is blind.

Does it matter who speaks the last line in a drama?
 
Some years back I developed a personal working method for necessary components before writing a play. No word could be put down on paper until three elements were clear – how it started; what happened before the interval (when drink and loo breaks were compulsory); and how it ended.
 
Last lines matter. (A company once changed the ending of one of my plays without consulting me, but that’s another story.) In the current rash of King Lears, to coincide with death of William Shakespeare 400 years ago, I find I have developed an heightened expectation toward the close of play.
 
Who will speak the final lines? Will they come out of the mouth of Albany or Edgar? Given the vastly different experiences each has undergone – Edgar betrayed, disguising himself for self-preservation only to protect his abused and deluded father; Albany, the ‘milk-livered man’ in his wife’s eye, who goes on to command forces to victory in battle. Does it matter?
 
Perhaps we shouldn’t start from there, as the joke goes. The question should be how did there come to be such variations? Fortunately, bigger brains than mine have sought to deal with this. The mystery lies in how the plays were preserved – in the Quarto or Folio editions.

Dr Christie Carson, from the Royal Holloway University of London, in an article from the View From the Experts section of the British Library website, says
 
'The final lines of the play in the Quarto are given to Albany, which is appropriate in terms of his seniority within the social structure to the play. However, in the Folio these lines are given to Edgar, the only person on stage who has not engaged in the battle between the generations until the very last scene. Edgar is presented in the Folio as the leader of the new generation and the representative of a gentler form of leadership.
 
'Albany (Q) Edgar (F) The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest have borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long. [300]
[Exeunt with a dead march]

'Edgar ending the play introduces hope of a new beginning with a different set of values in place. As Richard Eyre, who directed the play at the National Theatre in 1997, says "there is something wonderful about this terribly simple advice being given to you by a man who has had to grow up in the most violent way. Edgar, a sort of mild, bookish man, becomes a warrior, then sees this holocaust, and the advice he gives you is, 'open your heart, speak what you feel'".
 
'I suggest, then, that there is strong evidence the changes between the Quarto and the Folio were made as a result of the audience response to the play during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The ending, in particular, is altered to change it from a scene of absolute despair to a scene of possible redemption and rebirth. Hope is reintroduced into the Folio ending of the play, something that makes this tragedy more poignant but also more bearable in its Folio form.'
 
The contention is that, even then, authors would try out material and change it according to taste. What a shame writers today aren’t given such a chance to see their plays a second time, let alone tinker with them.
 
(With thanks to Dr Carson for permission to quote her Expert View.)