Lear's Chaotic universe

While this is indeed what I generally think about life (it is chaotic and often feels unjust for those of us "down here on the ground"), here I am specifically referring to Shakespeare's King Lear.  I am just back from the play, and am kind of wiped out.  It was a good performance, and I picked up different aspects of the play.  My first Lear (a couple of years ago in Vancouver) was such an unbearably intimate affair that nothing else will likely come close.  It did not help that it was like being in a cough echo chamber.  (Last year at Othello there was a coughing woman who was finally removed, but this time the periodic coughs went the length of the play, mixed with sneezes towards the end!  Maybe it was the fake fog that they were using.)  And there was an idiot towards the end of my row who had their phone on vibrate at the start of the play, and then let their phone keep going pretty much all through the storm scene that opens the second half (as if it wasn't already hard enough to hear the words through all the thunder).  I'm increasingly convinced that major theatres and perhaps even movie theatres need to be allowed to implement cell phone blocking technology.  This will never happen in the States, but there is a slim chance of it happening in Canada.  So a lot of things kind of kept me from being completely immersed in the play.

I found the plot more problematic than usual, which is often what happens when you are half in-half out of a play.  Lear really is an unreasonable bully at the start of the play and in general acts like a petulant child whenever he is crossed.  (I kept having visions of Donald Sterling going through my head and was wondering if Lear is the first documentation of early-onset Alzheimer's.)  It is very difficult to imagine him being a decent king who would inspire the loyalty of figures such as Kent.  For that matter, it seems so unlikely that with just a minor costume change, Lear is not going to recognize Kent when he comes back into his retinue.  (At least Edgar as Poor Tom makes a real effort, caking himself in mud and selling the part, as it were.)  As always, Cordelia is almost smug about how she won't butter up Lear even a little bit.  I've been one of those unrepentant truth-tellers, and I know they aren't any fun to be around.

What I honed in on, more this time than before, is how Edmund conjures up the plot against Edgar out of thin air.  In some ways, it is even more unsatisfying than Iago's machinations, as he simply claims all kinds of things against Edgar and Glouster swallows them without really a second's pause.  In this production, Glouster at least sees the letter (that Edmund actually wrote), and I guess it is implied that Edmund spent some time copying his half-brother's hand-writing.  The other thing is that in this production, when you first encounter him, Edgar is played as a bit of a carousing, ne'er-do-well (shades of Prince Hal really) who only comes into his own after much suffering.  So basically the director wanted to give Glouster some tangible reasons for being so unreasonable towards Edgar and so willing to swallow any lie about him from Edmund. (It's almost like this is Henry IV, Part II and all the action is background to Edgar becoming the rightful heir to the throne.  Perhaps not really what Shakespeare was going for.)

There is so much madness or feigned madness in this play: the Fool, Lear, Edgar as Poor Tom.  Even Goneril acts rashly.  I've generally always felt that the Fool often gets squeezed out of the action, when Kent comes back as a simpleton who also speaks truth to power.  I've never understood why Shakespeare has Kent and the Fool in almost the exact same role, and in this one, the Fool seems to understand this and almost aggressively urge Kent to take up his coxcomb.  That said, in this production, the Fool did kind of vanish (maybe he should have been dressed slightly more like a traditional fool -- here he looked like all the other members of the retinue).  If I am recalling correctly from Ran, the Kent figure comes back as a warrior and is part of the action but doesn't hone in on any of the Fool's business.  In addition, the Fool in Ran certainly stands out in his outre costume -- and has a better death scene; maybe it was just cut for time here, but the Fool did not have a proper send-off.  I just found the Fool was really so marginal in this production.  I'll have to check the reviews to see if they agree with me.  I basically felt Lear, Edmund, Regan and Goneril had the biggest impact.

Anyway, today more than usual Lear felt like a kitchen sink tragedy, i.e. Shakespeare threw in everything but the kitchen sink: the feigned madness and poisoning from Hamlet, making unreasonable accusations stick from Othello, the wife more bloody-minded than her husband from Macbeth, the general hot-headedness of well over half the men from Romeo and Juliet.  (And an even better parallel, the unreasonableness of Shylock leading to his undoing.)  It briefly feels like things might turn out ok when Cordelia comes back with troops, though is restoring this aging despot to the throne really such a great idea?  And then pretty much the whole battle takes place off-stage and France's forces are beaten back, largely through the valiant efforts of Edmund.  It really does seem the universe is off-kilter.  It is much like MacBeth where we have glimpses that if Edmund/MacBeth had not rebelled against the natural order of succession, their valor in battle would have led to great rewards in time.  Of course, if we turn to the history plays we find plenty of examples of usurpers being rewarded, despite Shakespeare's attempts to square history with a higher morality (the victor getting to write history and all that).  So perhaps it is understandable that they are a bit impatient...

I had a good time wandering around Stratford for about 90 minutes before the play started.  If I didn't already mention it, I really like the Stratford Direct bus (though I was sitting just in front of a couple of real chatterboxes coming in!).  It was even better going back, since there was a fair bit of congestion on the return trip, and I didn't have to deal with it.  I managed to get 100 pages into Dostovesky's Demons, which seemed an appropriate choice, though I am nowhere near the darkest part of that book.  (The Brothers Karamazov would have been an even more apt choice, but I am not going to be rereading that for years.)  I'll write more on Demons a bit later, but I think I will go ahead and reorder my reading list so I can kind of round out the Russian thinkers theme -- Isaiah Berlin of course, Herzen, Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia and perhaps The Double (in case I have a chance to catch the new film version of it starring Jesse Eisenberg and directed by Richard Ayoade).  While I read Turgenev's A Month in the Country a couple of months back, it may also be just about time to reread Fathers and Sons to sort of round out the picture.  This was a book that affected me deeply in high school, and it would be quite interesting to see how I respond to it now.

I think my wife would have liked Stratford a bit better than Niagara-on-the-Lake, as it feels more like a real place and not just a tourist trap.  I was sad to see that The Book Vault was closing down (literally the last day), as I liked it a bit better than the other book store on the main strip.  I tried to find something to buy there, but it was basically just filled up with puzzles and maybe a dozen remaindered books selling for a buck each.  I am hoping that within a few more years, I can come down with my son and then eventually the whole family.  (I did see a few families in the stands, which I thought was great.)  But it is just such a narrow window -- roughly 15-19 -- when the kids will be able to share my main interests and before they fly the coop.  Of course, maybe they will end up going to university here and staying closer to home.  It's so depressing that I will be 50-55 when this golden age finally arrives.  Nonetheless, this was one of the things I was planning for (summer trips to the Stratford and Shaw Festivals) when I finally engineered this move, so I hope it comes to pass.  I guess Shakespeare and a thousand other literary examples caution me that life doesn't usually turn out the way one wants.  But that's probably enough melancholy for one night...