STAGE AND SCREEN
THE THEATRE
" King Lear." By William Shakespeare. At the Old Vic.
ONE of the least disputable remarks that Lamb made about the English theatre was that " Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on a stage." He was speaking of the character, but his judgement is true of the whole play. It is almost the best of the tragedies to read, for in reading one can take its inflated language and psychological absurdities in one's stride ; it is even a good play to read about ; but it never avoids coming to grief when it is presented in the theatre. Yet it seems to have for all actors the fascination of the inaccessible—as is borne out by the well-known remark, on the analogy of the saw that no one can be a rider until he has taken half a dozen falls, that no actor is worth anything until he has made a fool of himself as Lear.
If any production could have made the play seem effective, this—if the strength of the cast is anything to go by—would have been the one. Mr. Gielgud is Lear, Miss Jessica Tandy Cordelia, Miss Cathleen Nesbitt and Miss Fay Compton Goneril and Regan, Mr. Stephen Haggard the Fool. Even the smaller parts are filled by actors who might be taking leading parts in other productions. With one exception, they all act admirably. The exception is Mr. Haggard, who makes little of a part which has possibly not been so miscast since Macready gave it to a girl in 1838. But despite the fact that the other parts are all excellently performed, the play seems as a whole no less essentially ridiculous than it has in any other production. The absurdities of the first two-thirds of the play are to a considerable extent concealed by the brilliance of the acting and production ; but with the entrance of Edgar as Poor Tom —admittedly the most difficult scene in the play, if not in the whole of Shakespeare—the illusion of credibility is summarily broken. Once the play has lost its hold, what follows—in this case two acts and three scenes—is merely a waste of the audience's time. It is not my intention to suggest that this is a production that is not worth seeing. It is, on the contrary, the best production of King Lear that I have ever seen, and I admired its brilliance from the first line almost to the last. Anyone who believes that the play is really fitted for the stage may well count this production among the best
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