Missy - King Lear ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

 

I think I’m glad we did Lear so early. There are a few plays that hurt my feelings enough that I don’t watch them, and this is one. 

King Lear is a morality play done by a nihilist. No one (Edgar notwithstanding) is lovable. Cordelia is right and Kent is loyal but the ugly humanity and worser natures on display in this story make it hard to swallow. 

That being said: this is the best Lear I’ve ever seen and I’m giving it 5 stars. 

I’m more than mildly surprised by that score but as a production it’s just about perfect. 

The casting, settings, sound design and cinematography are outstanding. 

Every delivery is believable, comprehensible, and sincere.

I was talking to my daughter about why I don’t like watching Lear and found myself describing him as both a diva and a little bitch. She remarked that I’d just sworn more than she had ever heard at one time. That is not quite, but nearly, true.

The truth is of course that the bleakness and cruelty in Lear makes me uncomfortable and I prefer to be comfortable in my leisure time.

The Hopkins decision, or possibly director Richard Eyre’s decision, to put Lear measurably into dementia or with one foot solidly in the land of senility, makes me much more comfortable.

All the other King Lear’s (plays and stories) told during Shakespeare’s  time have happy endings. I certainly sympathize with the impulse. Lear’s last line about looking at Cordelia’s lips, as if she might still be breathing, allows for that hard to smother hope. It’s not a happy play though, and it’s easier to imagine that he is still out of his mind than that she somehow survived her own assassination. 

Special shout out here to Edmund (John MacMillan) for making a potentially cartoon villain completely buyable. I love how much is shortcutted here by portraying the bastard son as nonwhite. The culturally saturated offhand dismissal of a bastard son in Shakespeares time and the casual racism of our own having a powerful overlap.

He is pissed off and vengeful for a lifetime of abuse and disregard as his subtext works exactly. 

Plus I’m not familiar with Macmillan’s work but anyone who can hold their own with Hopkins and Thompson in the room is top notch. That dude has chops!

I’m going to try to watch some of his stuff.

I am also going to watch RAN (the Kurosawa Lear adaptation) and maybe do a supplemental blog post here.

King Lear - 5 stars for production and decision making

Mom score - 0 for no moms at all

Missy - Heck yeah Shakespeare or All the Worlds a Stage

 Despite Mariam’s generous description I am entirely an enthusiast and not a scholar. Case in point, our first selection provides ample evidence of the exceptions to my generalizations, that Elizabethan plays are light and fluffy. 

The list that we are following starts with Hamlet. Hamlet is anything but light and fluffy and it is Elizabethan. 

This monster of a play (clocking in at over 4 hours its Shakespeare's longest) is the uber Burbage, carpet chewing, philosophically drenched, power house that survived, and world toured, and kept on giving, up to this very day. 

Everyone gets a chance to see Hamlet if they are at all Shakespeare inclined and even, frequently, if they aren’t. It’s one of the plays you are likely to be assigned if you take a theater class in high school or college, it’s right up there with Much Ado. Its also a school and community theater staple. I've seen some very good and some really should have skipped it versions.

I love Hamlet and our guide must too as it’s first on his list. 

However, he has selected the Branagh Hamlet and that opulent spectacle really is  the FULL 4 hour chonky boi. 

Here is the Branagh trailer.

I think it’s too much for a diving off point, though I have recommended to Mariam that if she likes the Zeffirelli/ Gibson version (my recommended starter Hamlet) she should go back and watch the Branagh. 

The Hamlet Wikipedia article puts our fist selection in some context: “ In 1990 Franco Zeffirelli, whose Shakespeare films have been described as "sensual rather than cerebral",^[256] cast Mel Gibson—then famous for the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon movies—in the title role of his 1990 version; Glenn Close—then famous as the psychotic "other woman" in Fatal Attraction—played Gertrude, and Paul Scofield played Hamlet's father.^[257] “

I like this version, and I think it will give us an introduction to the plays as blockbusters rather than an intellectual exercises  

We are going to be audiences and not analyzers here. I think that people tend to forget or maybe gloss

over the fact that Shakespeare is fun, that his work has lasted not merely for his stunning command of 

the language but because his characters speak to us. 

Here is the Zeffirelli trailer (you will see quite a difference in mood).

I’m super excited about this project. I’ve roped some of my family into watching with me and I can’t wait to get into that headspace of Shakespearean language and wit. 

Onward to Denmark.