King Lear

Synopsis: Live audio recording of Peter Brook’s production of King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company with Paul Scofield in the title role.
Language: English
Country: Great Britain
Medium: Audio
Recording date: 2 Dec 1964

Notes: An extract from the production from Act IV vi ‘But who comes here...You get it by running’ is available to listen to on site at the British Library Sound Archive.
Reviews: Review by Kenneth Tynan reprinted in Tynan, Kenneth. A View of the English Stage (St Albans: Paladin, 1976), pp. 343-8. Tynan writes ‘I now see a clue to Mr Brook’s cruel unsparing egalitarianism.: his production is amoral because it is set in an amoral universe. For him the play is a might philosophic farce in which the leading figures enact their roles on a gradually denuded stage that resembles, at the end, a desert graveyard or unpeopled planet.'

Paul Scofield	Lear
Diana Rigg	Cordelia
John Laurie	Earl of Gloucester
Alec McCowen	Fool
Brian Murray	Edgar, later disguised as Tom o’Bedlam
Barry MacGregor	King of France
Clifford Rose	Duke of Albany
Ian Richardson	Edmund
Irene Worth	Goneril
John Church	Captain
John Harwood	Curan
Ken Wynne	Old Man
Michael Burrell	Doctor
Michael Murray	Duke of Burgundy
Michael Williams	Oswald
Pauline Jameson	Regan
Peter Blythe	Herald
Tom Fleming	Earl of Kent
Tony Church	Duke of Cornwall

SHAKESPEARE