My Shakespeare

Episode
King Lear
Broadcast Info
2014 (45 mins)
Description
Actor Christopher Plummer originally played the role of King Lear under the direction of Sir Jonathan Miller, who has directed the play six times. Plummer explores how the work might have been staged during Shakespeare’s time and acclaimed actors Sir Ian McKellen and Simon Russell Beale give their insight into playing the part of the troubled King.
King Lear is almost universally acknowledged as one of Shakeapeare’s greatest tragic roles - and it is the last of his 4 great tragic plays. Christopher Plummer played the role under the direction of Sir Jonathan Miller (who, we discover, has directed it 6 times!). He performed it at Stratford Ontario and then at the Lincoln Centre in New York.
Lear was, apparently, a real English King, who lived 800 years before Christ. And the story that he divided his Kingdom amongst his daughters and in the process disinherited his favourite, is supposedly, true. Certainly it was in the Chronicles of English History that Shakespeare often used as his source material.
This supposedly "true" story does have a happy ending, but Shakespeare’s play flies in the face of that history and his dreadful and tragic dénouement has been shocking audiences for 400 years.
Actors like Ian McKellen and Simon Russel Beale, who have played the role, help us to understand this often difficult character - After all he starts the play by behaving in a way that is hard for us to sympathise with. At the same time, Christopher examines what inspired Shakespeare to write a play about a Kingdom divided and disunited - at an delicate moment in or history when a new King (James ) from Scotland was trying create what has become the "united" Kingdom
We examine how the famous storm scenes might have been performed and produced at Shakespeare’s own theatre - and how they represent the "storm" going on in Lear’s own mind. We seek psychiatric "help" to uncover how Lear’s mind begins to unravel under the almost self inflicted pressures that the play show us.
This heartbreaking tragedy of old age was one of Shakespeare’s later plays, written at the end of his astonishing career. The fact that gives it a tragic and not a happy ending might reflect something of his own mature cynicism - the powers of good fail and the gods do not really prevent the evil that kills Lear and his favourite daughter. But Christopher reveals that beneath the surface of the undeniably dreadful conclusion and cosmic emptiness, the spirit of Lear and possibility of love somehow survive.
Genre
Literature; Writing

How to cite this record

The Open University, "My Shakespeare". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/86000 (Accessed 10 Jan 2025)