DIRECTOR'S NOTE
Well, it's not for the faint hearted, that's for sure. Lear drags us across some very bleak ground, and just when we think we might have arrived, it throws us over the edge of doom. I think the play is unique in its punishment of folly, true folly, folly created by hubris, stubbornness, ungoverned willfulness, lack of sight.
Of course, blindness, both physical and notional, is essential to the play, in which the universe hangs in the air between the ideas of "nothing" and "never". In the first scene, when Lear asks Cordelia to give a loving speech just like her two sisters (only better), we see this:
| Lear: |
What can you say
To draw a third more opulent than your sisters?
|
| Cordelia: |
Nothing, my lord. |
| Lear: |
Nothing? |
| Cordelia: |
Nothing. |
| Lear: |
Nothing will come from nothing, speak again. |
Five "nothings - and from here, chaos.
At the end of the play, as Lear holds Cordelia:
| Lear: |
Thou'lt come no more.
Never, never,
never,
never,
never. |
Five "nevers" - and from here, oblivion.
And this is only a single observation in a play absolutely loaded with resonances and acute observations about everything from the infirmities of age to the meaning of life - "men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither; ripeness is all".
But it's also a play, a drama, and as such it is replete with plotting, civil war, torture, sex, murder, betrayal, love, forgiveness, humour (though bitter) and a good fight at the end. In some ways, it's like Dr. Who's Tardis - bigger on the inside. As we unpacked the action in rehearsals, we kept opening enormous caverns of significance, where the play seems to reach beyond its verbal confines.
Which really sums it up. It's a play bigger than itself. It goes too far. It challenges further. It asks us to consider all or nothing, like zero, the number of the Fool, nothing and everything at the same time. And the hope, the light in the distance, lies in the fact of our humanity - we witness and, because it isn't us, we see beyond the characters; we see that we need the good, the balance, the human kindness, the love and the true self-regard inherent in us all, because at the end of the play, we are all in this together.