THEATER ABROAD: The Storm Inside

One thing was sure from the moment the curtain rose: this King Lear was not the lean, commanding character of Shakespearean tradition. Brought to the stage of Britain’s Stratford Memorial Theater by Cinemactor Charles (Mutiny on the Bounty) Laughton last week, King Lear was an eye-rolling, tongue-lolling, hand-scrabbling, dirty old man. Above a billowing green gown that looked like a collapsed circus tent (but still could not hide the hefty Laughton paunch), the famed suet-pudding face was almost obscured by a wild halo of home-grown white whiskers and an unkempt shoulder-length mane of home-grown white hair. For the Bard’s buffs, the sight and sound of Lear as a whimpering, elderly brat, a Captain Bligh without backbone, was something of a shock.

The shock soon gave way to pleased surprise. As the performance unfolded, Laughton’s Lear never forgot that his was a family tragedy; even the first-act simpering made sense, for it showed a fool-father truly stupid enough to be gulled by his ugly daughters, Regan and Goneril. Then, as the king wandered mad through the storm, deserted by his daughters, the performance departed the norm again. Laughton’s king was strangely calm and compelling. Rarely was he moved to the familiar, passion-torn shrieks of other Lears. His fantastic monologues with himself sounded almost conversational: “Let the great Gods, that keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads, find out their enemies now. Tremble, thou wretch. . . .”

Later in the Laughton version, Lear’s return to reason was a slow and convincing process. As the madness ebbed, the head stopped bobbing, the eyes grew steady, the back straightened. Every gesture showed a man returning to reality, to learning, understanding, forgiveness, until he is himself forgiven.

Even the thundering storm that heralds Lear’s madness was muted in Laughton’s performance. He played the scene almost in silence. The idea came to him, he says, during a hurricane-tossed Atlantic crossing. “Sitting in my cabin, I suddenly realized that in a storm you stop noticing the noise; as it stays at a high level, your hearing threshold falls. I tried out the Lear speech and heard it echo sharp and clear in my mind. That’s the way it should be. The storm’s inside Lear.”

Not all the critics agreed with Laughton’s interpretation. The News Chronicle found him “not at all unlike a mixture of Charles Darwin and Longfellow . . . weak and frail and human . . . hardly ever majestic, towering or superhuman.” But the Times thought “Mr. Laughton’s performance a superb essay in stage pathos.”

Whatever the critics think, Actor Laughton is convinced that his is Shakespeare’s true Lear. With his wife, Elsa Lanchester, he studied the play in a facsimile of the First Folio all last winter, finally concluded that the author had scored it like music. Voice inflections, pitch, rhythms, everything seemed indicated by what would otherwise be pointless punctuation and irrational typography. “Elsa noticed it first, and I think she was the first to treat it that way. But it works! It works! Shakespeare tells you how to say every word.”