Peter Brook's Orson Welles' "King Lear". I KNOW!

 In 1953, over a decade before he would direct my Dad around a big white box in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a twenty-eight year old Peter Brook (looking justly proud, below right) was invited by New York based television host Alistair Cooke (below left) to direct a seventy-three minute long adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear for his show Omnibus, starring Orson Welles in perhaps his biggest ever nose. 

 

 My excitement at learning of this from the interview with Brook in the Welles documentary Magician was tempered only by my suspicion that, if the results of such an incredibly exciting collaboration had actually been any good, I would surely have heard of it before now. But – as with Welles' hour-long Hamlet – someone was good enough to put the whole thing on youtube, and I've now watched it, and it's definitely any good.

 

 Here's the famous windmill scene. 

 King Lear doesn't actually have a windmill scene, but back in 1953 Peter Brook clearly hadn't yet been sold on the idea of theatre as an "Empty Space". Possibly influenced by his star, he decided to liven up the play's desolation with giant gears and shipwrecks. This looks unlike any Lear I've seen before, and that's always welcome.

 

 Almost as interesting as the talent involved in this production is its timing. 1953 was the year Waiting For Godot had its world premiere, so Beckett's absurdist minimalism hadn't had a chance to influence interpretations yet, and this seems a very nineteenth-century apocalypse – broken rather than bare – with Welles providing a hearty, eye-rolling, utterly undiagnosable playing of Lear's madness to match it.

 

  I pity the Fool.

  

"Orson suddenly took off with tremendous passion," Brook explains in Magician: "Television was the medium for great freedom, and experiment... Both of us believed that you don't hang onto any idea, but the moment you've had an idea, and you begin to try it, that leads you to think of something else," which presumably is how we get to King Lear covered in seaweed and handing out starfish...

 

... which, by the way, I love! Lear "fantastically dressed in flowers", as per the stage directions, should look odd. Already then in his career Brook was adressing how to defamiliarise an audience to the canon, how to revitalise the oddness of its poetry. If this scene – one of my favourites in Shakespeare – is also a bit "one note" (and Welles seems to be doing more blind acting than Gloucester, who's actually meant to be blind) at least Lear-as-Oracle is not a note I'd heard played before.

 

 Some of the production also looks stupid in a way that might not be intentional: here's a model shot of that windmill for example, and I can't tell if Lear's initial, pear-shaped, modernist clobber at the top of this blog is meant to be a nod to Ubu Roi...

 

... or just a very bold opening statement, in harmony with Welles seeing how fat he can make himself. It's not a look that lasts however. Lear's travelling clothes in Act Two are a lot more traditionally Tudor, and he wears them well. Has his nose gotten smaller? Or is that just distortion from however this was recorded (presumably pointing a film camera at a television screen)?

 Perhaps the most Wellesian thing about this adaptation, as with his radio Hamlet that ditched Ophelia, are the massive cuts: a whole subplot, including the characters of Edmund and Edgar. Now if you don't know the play. you don't know what you're missing, but rewatching King Lear at the Globe earlier this year, surrounded my students, I was struck by just how much those two specific characters had attracted me to the play when I was thirteen. Despite Alistair Cooke refering to the subplot in his introduction as "the bane of every schooboy" for most teenagers, I suspect nasty brother Edmund's sexy-and-he-knows-it performative villainy, and nice brother Edgar's self-shunning, self-scarring, world-building self-abasement are the biggest revelations of any first encounter with the play. And the trouble is, if you lose them, what you're left with is quite hard to care about for quite a while...

 

 Util the Fool comes in, and then it's anybody's guess. Centuries ago, productions of the play would cut the Fool completely, a creative decision heavily mocked in the twentieth century despite the huge number of twentieth-century productions that still seemed to have no idea what to do with him. The tenor of the times appeared to be to either make him a dirty old man – safe, but senseless, as Lear refers to him as "boy", and in many not necessarily wholesome ways the Fool is also a surrogate for Lear's youngest daughter – or have him played as fey, but not outrightly camp, so any jokes about "holding your peace" or having "nothing in the middle" fall absolutely flat while all the extras are instructed to laugh uproariously in that way that makes people hate Shakespeare forever. And for a while, this production does seem that.

 But then the Fool climbs under a table and starts issuing heckles unseen, and that got my interest. And then Regan snogs her servant Oswald, and that really got my interest: In Edmund's absence it seemed this previously no-account jobsworth was now to be promoted to the role of suave ladykiller and commander of an army, despite losing a fight to a middle-aged Kent in Act Two. In better news, although we lose Edgar, this production keeps his alter-ego "Poor Tom", played here by the artist who introduced a teenage Welles first-hand to Expressionism and the Theatre of Cruelty at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and who would later be the Iago to his Othello: Micheál MacLiammoir...

 

 Poor Tom is actually served very well by being presented as a character in his own right: this production isn't scared to spend its precious running time dwelling on the rich backstory and personal mythology that Edgar for some reason made up for him, and one can enjoy lines like "Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness" coming out of nowhere, without having to worry about Edgar's "process" behind such startling invention. It's also great to see Welles' Lear in awe of a wretch played by Welles' mentor.

 

 Another nice piece of staging I'd never seen before: the show's final scene takes place in Lear's throne room, the same space as the opening scene. Well played then, everyone, considering. Sure, Welles doesn't always remember his lines, and his moustache blows off in the storm scene, but that's what happens if you use real wind. Enjoy...