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King Lear as a Bad-Tempered Old Man: Anthony Hopkins and David Hare Tackle Shakespeare
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12444 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
2,556 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Every midwinter, like the recurring solstice, London's biggest public theaters rise and treat the British public to a strange and noisy freak show. The main, indeed the only, attraction is a vociferous two-headed monster, which looks like Oliver Twist grafted onto the prophet Jeremiah in full cry. The burden of this creature's lamentation is the stinginess of the government and the Arts Council. It rends the air with auguries of gloom, doom, and the cultural demise of British theater - because the multimillion-pound grants to the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre may not be increased.
The RSC has done well with this circus, but the National has had to weather some harsh treatment from the press. Last year its director, Sir Peter Hall, did the Oliver Jeremiah number literally standing on a tabletop, and used rhetoric that was fierce even by the harsh standards of such protest. The wide coverage of this scenery-chewing performance became an embarrassment later in the year, when London's Sunday Times broke a scandalous story about Sir Peter. It asserted that he had used the grant money of previous years, plus the facilities of the National Theatre, to mount shows that later blossomed in the private sector of London's West End and on Broadway. Such transfers are normal enough; but Sir Peter was said to have arranged it so that he, as director of the shows, made more personal profit than the National Theatre. Since the National (and the taxpayers) had taken the financial risks, this did not seem quite right. The same report said that Sir Peter would soon be announcing his resignation. Angrily he denied it all - the profits, the resignation, everything. A few weeks later, he announced that he would indeed be resigning.
Suburban Leftism
The National is now working under a sort of interregnum, with authority shared between director Richard Eyre (who will formally succeed Sir Peter in 1988) and the playwright David Hare, whose work is as familiar to Broadway audiences as it is to London. Hare has also shown some skill and polish as a director, with his own plays and with the work of some others, usually writers who share his own brand of suburban leftism. But for the present season he decided to extend his range with one of the great works of English classical drama: Shakespeare's King Lear. In the event the production has not been nicknamed for the director. Like most major stagings of the play these days, it gives this distinction to the actor who plays the leading role: This is supposed to be Anthony Hopkins' King
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