Mad About Shakespeare

4. Let Me Not Be Mad

For a long time, King Lear seemed either too vast or too horrific for the theatre. Charles Lamb, writing in the early nineteenth century, was typical in proposing that Shakespeare’s anatomy of the human condition was so profound and tempestuous that the play could not be staged:

To see Lear acted—to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted.

Lamb was speaking more truly than he knew. In 1811, when he wrote this, the Lear of Shakespeare could indeed not be acted. The madness of George III meant that the London theatre managers kept this play about an old, mad and despised king off the stage, for fear of offending the court.

A generation before, Dr Samuel Johnson confessed that even reading the play was almost too much to bear: I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor. The shock for Johnson was both emotional and moral. The death of Cordelia – Shakespeare’s boldest alteration of the older versions of the Lear story, in all of which the beloved youngest daughter survives – was an extraordinary breach of the principle that Johnson called ‘poetical justice’, whereby the good end happily and the bad unhappily. During the 1680s Nahum Tate, author of the hymn ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night’, had indeed imposed poetic justice on the play by introducing a happy ending in which Cordelia is married off to Edgar. Dr Johnson had some sympathy with this alteration, which held the stage for a century and a half, whereas for Lamb it was yet one more indication that the theatre was not to be trusted with Shakespeare’s sublime vision of universal despair.

I think that the way to make King Lear work in the theatre is, paradoxically, not to play it loud and large. I have only relived the intensity of Buzz Goodbody’s production in ‘black-box’ chamber theatres: witnessing Ian Holm shivering nakedly in the little Cottesloe auditorium in Richard Eyre’s farewell production as artistic director of the National Theatre; mesmerized by Lee Beagley, a worn-out Samurai warrior with a Cordelia in Doc Marten boots and a springy female Fool in a highly physical production directed for a company called Kaboodle by the Black British actor Josette Bushell-Mingo in Liverpool’s tiny Unity Theatre; tuned to the pitch of Ian McKellen’s voice in the Minerva studio, Chichester, in what he said would be his final Shakespearean role (though it wasn’t, because he returned with an age-blind Hamlet). What they had in common was the ability to do not only the curse and the howl but, much more importantly, the whisper and the tear. McKellen had toured some of the biggest theatres in the world in an earlier Lear, but he wasn’t satisfied. He knew that to truly own the part, he would have to do it again in a place where he could be up close and personal with both the other players and the audience.

The night that my son Tom and I saw it, we stayed with him in the unassuming little rented house which was his billet for the run. We talked about the play until three in the morning. ‘What I’ve come to realize doing it this time,’ he said, ‘is that you don’t play the part, you just let the words speak through you.’ Many of the most important words are about the mind losing control of itself; if the actor tries too hard to control them, the effect will seem contrived or will be lost altogether.

The language does the work, not least through the changes that Shakespeare rings on the word mad. Studying ancient Greek at school, I had learned about the optative mood whereby a verb is formed in order to express a wish. Lear uses a negative optative, expressive of the wish for something not to happen:

O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!

Keep me in temper: I would not be mad!

I prithee, daughter, do not make me mad.

O, that way madness lies: let me shun that:

No more of that.

But the onset of madness comes to seem inevitable. Afflicted with what the loyal Earl of Kent calls his master’s bemadding sorrow, Lear shifts to the future tense: O fool, I shall go mad! And then the process is complete. He is, as another character says, madded by the cruelty of his daughters:

Why, he was met even now

As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud,

Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow weeds,

With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,

Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow

In our sustaining corn.

At school, we studied the play in the scholarly Arden Edition, edited by Kenneth Muir, the grandly titled King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. Taking his cue from these lines, Muir adopted the stage direction of an eighteenth-century editor: Enter Lear, fantastically dressed with wild flowers (Shakespeare’s original texts are sparse in their stage directions, usually confining them to unadorned entrances and exits). For all the beauty of Shakespeare’s floral bouquet, this romantic dressing-up seemed to me wrong: the topsy-turvy of the play would have been better reflected by a stage direction that read something like Enter Lear, mad, wearing a crown not of gold but of smelly weeds.

But what manner of madness was this?

Our teacher explained that the Elizabethans believed that excessive rage or grief could drive you over the edge into insanity. In the case of Lear, however, particular emphasis is given to his age:

I am a very foolish fond old man,

Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less,

And to deal plainly,

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

I have been lucky enough to discuss the nature of Lear’s imperfect mind with several actors who have played the role. One night over dinner, Simon Russell Beale told me about his approach. He is the son of Lieutenant-General Sir Peter Beale, an army medic who became Surgeon-General of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces. Several of his family members pursued medical careers. He explained that while he was preparing to embark on playing Lear for Sam Mendes at the National Theatre, he spoke to his nephew, who was training in geriatrics at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. He learned about various forms of dementia and was put in touch with a specialist in the disease of the brain known as dementia with Lewy bodies.

He discovered that a checklist of its symptoms mapped uncannily on to the development of King Lear’s behaviour in the play. Changes in thinking and reasoning, often manifested by eruptions of rage: Lear’s sudden, irrational decision to disinherit Cordelia because she will not play the game of flattery. Confusion and alertness that varies from one time of day to another, or from one day to the next: Lear is sometimes lucid but at other times does not know where he is or what time of day it is. Visual hallucinations: Lear has many of these, from monsters to mice. Trouble interpreting visual information: as the play progresses, he has increasing difficulty in recognizing familiar faces. Memory loss: Lear has moments of forgetting –

I will have such revenges on you both,

That all the world shall – I will do such things –

What they are yet I know not –

– but he does not undergo the fade into oblivion that is Alzheimer’s disease. Furnished with this diagnosis, all that Russell Beale had to do was add some of the physical symptoms of dementia with Lewy bodies – a hunched posture, balance problems, rigid muscles, a tremor of the hand. In describing his approach, he stressed that dementia with Lewy bodies was not a ‘blueprint’ for the character, but that it had given him a way into the part of the aged king who says I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

McKellen, by contrast, found no signs of dementia in the part. For him, Lear’s madness almost becomes a victory: ‘I don’t look on Lear’s madness as being a frailty. Rather, it’s a sign of his strength. It’s almost a way of fighting back. I don’t, therefore, connect it with what I know of dementia. Lear enters mad, as the stage direction has it. We may not quite be able to totally get into that world. But he’s in a world of his own making. I never really think he’s a victim of some mental disability … he discovers his weaknesses and then embraces them, and recognizes that love is more important than power. He becomes gentle. Yes. For me, my absolute favourite scene in the play is when he awakens after that sleep. And there – I don’t like using the word madness, but there is this other-worldliness, isn’t there? He almost thinks, am I still dreaming? Have I died and gone to heaven? Are you an angel?’ He quoted the immensely moving lines,

I am bound

Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like molten lead.

‘Don’t tell me that’s dementia.’

The essence of Lear for McKellen was the character’s attempt to understand his physical, mental and emotional state, to come to terms with what it is to be a father, and indeed, what it is to be a human being. His periodic short-term memory loss (I know not / Where I did lodge last night) is just a part of the ageing process. ‘So,’ McKellen concluded, as he poured another glass of wine, ‘I don’t really relate it to my notions of what dementia is, where you’re losing it. You’re losing it. You’re losing it the whole time. I feel, on the contrary, Lear is gaining it, gaining it, gaining it. But he does behave in some quite peculiar ways. I mean, it’s a little strange for an old man, a former king used to being robed, to start taking his clothes off in a storm in the middle of the night.’ That last point does suggest the behaviour associated with advancing dementia, but McKellen did not need to make the link in order to play Lear’s physical and mental nakedness with profound courage and conviction.

What did I learn from the contrasting approaches of Russell Beale and McKellen? That Shakespeare’s plays still live four hundred years after his death because he shares with the good physician the art of minute observation of human feelings and human bodies. But also because, again like the good physician, he never reduces a human being to a mere set of symptoms, labelled with a diagnosis. He respects the wild complexity of the whole person, with sympathy and without harsh judgement. He rejoices in human endurance, even as he pities the disintegration and sorrow that come with age.

Though Buzz Goodbody was irreplaceable, the spirit of her distinctive approach to Shakespeare lived on: not only in these later studio productions of Lear, but also in The Other Place itself. Without her example, Trevor Nunn could not, I think, have created that tin shed’s most renowned production, the Ian McKellen-Judi Dench Macbeth. When it transferred to London, The Place was no longer available, so it went to another black box, the Young Vic, where I saw it on a May evening.

It begins with organ music. The stage is a black circle, with an acting area barely bigger than a suburban living room. The actors sit around the circumference on low wooden blocks. The three Weird Sisters gather in the middle of the room and begin to moan. King Duncan kneels and prays in Latin. Throughout the opening scenes, whenever he is not on stage, he is there on the edge, praying.

Banquo is at first more striking than Macbeth. The bloody captain speaks like an automaton. He has shell shock. One Weird Sister is a charming old lady, another limps and channels a disconcerting mix of punk and Down’s Syndrome. When the messenger says, The king comes here tonight, Judi Dench screams because she thinks he means that the prophecy has been instantly fulfilled and her husband is already king. Then she kneels and invokes the night, reeling backwards on the word cruel. As at Goodbody’s Lear, the audience is ranged on three sides and from the get-go we know that we are witnessing something special. There is heavy silence, and then the birdsong lull of the temple-haunting martlet. Macbeth plays with Banquo’s son Fleance – fondles his neck. McKellen speaks his lines staccato, uneasy. And then the blood.

But wherefore could I not pronounce ‘Amen’?

Macbeth is choking at this moment; Lady Macbeth goading, capable, but there are little glimpses that prepare us for her unravelling in the sleepwalking scene. And the knocking at the gate is so, so loud. A small pool of light descends and the Porter appears in it, then suddenly all the lights come on – the same coup as Goodbody’s lights out upon the blinding of Gloucester, but in reverse – and we are dazzled as embarrassed members of the audience are picked out, identified as farmer, equivocator and tailor with French hose. When Macduff enters, the direction is counter-intuitive: it is in the most matter-of-fact voice that he says,

O horror, horror, horror!

Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee!

The old man with Ross, describing unnatural sights, is blind.

Macbeth is crowned in bright light, with solemn music and ill-fitting borrowed robes. The banquet begins and he passes round the loving cup. At each pass, he turns to his servant (one of the three murderers) to wipe it, and as he does so he asks about the murder of Banquo and Fleance. The ghost of Banquo does not appear. Only Macbeth sees it. He has a fit, spitting gouts of saliva. This Macbeth is a man of the senses. In private he fondles his wife’s breasts and probes her mouth with his tongue.

The Weird Sisters blindfold him and leave the stage, so the apparition of Banquo’s descendants, the line of kings stretching out to the crack of doom, exists only in his mind.

A murderer rocks Macduff’s son on his knee. The boy says he has been murdered. We don’t understand until he falls with bloody knife wound in his back. When Macduff is told, he keeps saying all, the unbelieving numbness of emotion too powerful for further words or tears.

In the sleepwalking scene, she whimpers. The sound continues for what seems like eternity. At the time, you only see Lady Macbeth; in retrospect, you begin to wonder by what art of breathing Judi Dench has accomplished this. She dies to an offstage wail. Macbeth’s reaction is spoken with great deliberation. The first pause comes a beat later than the moment when you expect it (I love, by the way, that Macbeth’s last loyal follower sounds as if he has the name of the devil):

SEYTON The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH She should have died hereafter:

There would have been a time for such a word tomorrow [pause]

and tomorrow [pause]

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time:

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.

Then Macbeth arms. Five planked fruit boxes are gathered centre-stage. McKellen stands on them. The other actors, around the circumference, get to their feet. They become Malcolm’s army. McKellen says, I ’gin to be a weary of the sun. He is lit by a single suspended spot, which he grabs and sets swinging around the auditorium. It revolves for the rest of the battle – darkness otherwise – lighting sections of the audience. We see fear in each other’s faces.

Macduff enters with blood on his hands, a look of horror, a sense of the cycle of blood starting again. Malcolm leads off, Ross last, picking up the crown. Lights and three curtain calls. It has been accomplished in just over two hours, with no interval.

We have seen into the heart of darkness.

McKellen and Dench