1953 CBS Television Production

This adaptation, directed by Andrew McCullough and Peter Brook, starred Orson Welles as Lear; Beatrice Straight as Goneril; Margaret Phillips as Regan; and Natasha Parry as Cordelia.

J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen, in their helpful 1988 book Shakespeare on Television, quoted from a 1955 review of this production by Alice Griffin, who wrote that the “ninety-minute King Lear presented on the CBS Omnibus program … had, to at least one viewer, the greatest merit, although it also had the greatest faults” of the three Shakespeare productions Griffin’s essay was assessing. She thought that “it did evoke the grandeur and tragedy of Lear” but felt that “Brook did not seem to realize that three’s a crowd on the video screen, and his large cast, as in the scene of Lear’s boisterous companions, did not make the screen seem expansive, but rather accentuated its limited size.” Although she praised Welles’s acting, she considered “the adaptation by Mr. Brook … unforgivably bad; granted that time had to be cut, many precious minutes were spent on visual effects which contributed little to the play, while important speeches were omitted or reduced to a line or two” (239).

Tony Howard, in a 1997 essay titled “When Peter Met Orson: The 1953 CBS King Lear,” reported that “Welles went on to incorporate many elements of the TV production and adaptation in his 1956 stage King Lear. Brook, however, seems never to have discussed it again in public and his later versions rejected its heavy visual detail, its spectacular storm, the use of music, and the Tudor setting. … It was a transitional work, partly a Wellesian left-Democrat text from the 1930s yet also mapping out Brook’s growing concern with extreme irrational[ity]. It was their one collaboration, but both would try to direct Shakespeare for commercial television again, with unhappy results” (132).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (296–97), noted the many cuts, the very basic setting, the precise speech and rhetorical delivery, and said that this production soon becomes a “riveting” example of a live broadcast. He praised Orson Welles as Lear and Beatrice Straight and Margaret Philips as Goneril and Regan (296). He discussed various effective moments despite some slips, calling this version worth watching for Welles’s performance alone (297).

In an essay from 2017 titled “The Blinding of Gloucester: Trauma and Morality in Some Films of Shakespeare’s King Lear,” Robert C. Evans commented that the “1953 television version of the play … is important as one of the first (if not the) first production to pull no punches in staging Gloucester’s blinding” (102). He asserted that “[s]urely anyone who watched this televised version must have been caught off guard, even briefly traumatized, by the sheer, blatant, unexpected, and fully visible violence of the blinding” … [Apparently] “nothing like it had ever been seen before (certainly not on film). In a production staged within ten years of the end of World War II—a period that saw films and photos showing the horrors of Auschwitz and the Holocaust—the 1953 film was indecorously, honestly brutal in the way it depicted Gloucester’s blinding. Traumatic times,” Evans concluded, “had helped produce an unusually traumatic staging of this scene. Viewers were now forced to watch disgusting immorality and see for themselves the conduct that made the good servant feel that he had to try to act in a moral way” (106).

1970 Kozintsev Production

Directed by Grigori Kozintsev, this Russian-language version, originally titled Korol Lir, starred Jüri Järvet as King Lear (voiced by Zinovy Gerdt); Elza Radzina as Goneril (voiced by Nina Nikitina); Galina Volchek as Regan; Valentina Shendrikova as Cordelia; Oleg Dal as Fool; Karlis Sebris as Gloucester (voiced by Grigori Gay); Leonhard Merzin as Edgar (voiced by Emmanuil Vitorgan); Regimantas Adomaitis as Edmund; Vladimir Yemelyanov as Kent; Aleksandr Vokach as Cornwall; and Donatas Banionis as Albany (voiced by Aleksandr Demyanenko).

Interviewing Kozintsev for an essay published in 1973, Ronald Hayman quoted him saying about this production that “if Lear the individual is slightly shrunk, his kingdom is enlarged by the film to universal dimensions. In King Lear the whole history of human civilisation is summed up, from the pre-historic hearth to the modern irony and the modern understanding of the possibility of catastrophe and of what is necessary to stop this catastrophe. In the 19th century Victor Hugo said ‘The world is sick from hatred, hatred against hatred.’ I think that’s a very good slogan for King Lear” (12).

James M. Welsh, in a 1976 essay titled “‘To See It Feelingly: King Lear Through Russian Eyes,’” argued that “Kozintsev’s Lear … undertakes a bicultural transformation of its Shakespearian original and translates Shakespeare’s poetry into a coherent structure of unforgettable images. Its approach is traditional in that it does not undertake an interpretation of the play currently in fashion. Kozintsev,” he continued, “does not attempt to Kotterize Lear [an allusion to the influential and pessimistic critic Jan Kott], for example. Rather, he orchestrates a black and-white symphony of gore and blood-letting only insofar as is necessary to demonstrate through his visualization the disintegration of the King and his kingdom into a state of chaos and degenerate anarchy. His Lear is placed in a cruel and questioning universe, but it is not necessarily an absurd one” (154).

Barbara Hodgdon, in an essay from 1977 titled “Kozintsev’s King Lear: Filming a Tragic Poem,” wrote that generally “the film succeeds in balancing subjective with objective vision: in Kozintsev’s words, ‘the close shot catches the barely perceptible spiritual movement, while the general view shows the movement of historical time.’ Kozintsev is not trying to make performances alone tell,” said Hodgdon, “nor is he totally interested in man’s social world.” Instead she thought that “[a]lthough Lear begins his journey in a social context, Kozintsev’s emphasis falls upon his confrontation with an elemental world which, because it is so perfectly integrated into his film, ‘is not just the location for the action but is the root and cause of the action itself.’” According to Hodgdon, “At the beginning, the camera records this world as relatively neutral space: any formality we sense in composition comes from the spareness of the landscape itself rather than from emphatic camera treatment. We observe the bare land as a suggestive, sometimes prophetic background for the closeups of faces and figures associated with the social world of the play” (297). She added that “[b]y Part II, however, the landscape itself dominates the action; and the surfaces we see seem to have become as hard and unyielding as the ‘hard hearts’ of Lear’s daughters, as the ‘men of stone’ he accuses at Cordelia’s death. By the end of the film our vision has been so changed that at last we, like Lear, come to see it all from the reverse side of the coin: towns leveled to ashes, their social world a pallid smoke staining a landscape which has become the sole dramatic reality” (297–98).

In an essay published in 1978 titled “Grigori Kozintsev’s ‘King Lear’ (USSR, 1971),” Waldo McNeir argued that “Kozintsev nowhere relies on the presumptuous theory that the director is the auteur, or ‘maker’ in the Elizabethan sense, of the work. He handles Shakespeare’s greatest play with respect, preserving its structure intact with no wrenching of scenes; he lets the narrative line proceed inexorably. The most injudicious of his few cuts,” according to McNeir, “is Gloucester’s leap from Dover Cliff, which I do not believe was merely verbal description with the audience asked to imagine or ‘picture it in their minds’” (246–47). McNeir continued: “The interior sets in the film are suitably ‘early medieval’; the exteriors are much more expansive than a stage could successfully accommodate. … In some interior scenes in the Russian King Lear, for example, the scene in the hovel on the heath, one may object to the over-crowding as claustrophobic.” McNeir felt that “[a]ll the major roles are excellently cast, and well acted. Regan attains greater prominence as the more actively repugnant of Lear’s two wicked daughters, perhaps contrary to received literary criticism. Lear, old but still vigorous, dominates the tragedy but does not carry its burden alone; the protagonistic allies as well as the antagonistic enemies are important and necessary, for they give any version of the play perspective and balance. Above all,” he thought, “the action is in constant motion, or what’s a motion picture for? In philosophic terms, the film is neither ‘optimistic’ nor ‘pessimistic’ in a doctrinaire sense. In cinematic terms, it pictures movingly both man’s humanity and his animality as an undeniable dualism, an appalling but not totally disabling contradiction. This seems to me,” McNeir concluded, “congruent with Shakespeare’s intention in his King Lear. For these reasons, Kozintsev’s King Lear is one of the most satisfying and impressive transferences of a Shakespearean drama to the screen” (247).

Barbara Hodgdon, in a 1983 essay titled “Two ‘King Lears‘: Uncovering the Filmtext,” maintained that as “Kozintsev’s film continues, the shots establish, again within conventional and extremely fluid editing, the space of the court, placing each person absolutely within that space, showing the relationships of each family group in a linked series of near-tableaux that effectively freeze the people within this full, social mise-en-scene.” She asserted that “[c]lear distinctions—in casting and costuming—separate these aristocratic figures and those of the beggars; the images make social and political myths public and readable. But Lear himself appears displaced: he looks more like one of the peasants come in to warm his hands before the fire than a king. Fool also,” according to Hodgdon, “seems to belong to that other world, and the similarity between the two figures—the playful jingle of Fool’s bells in response to Lear’s laugh, the mask they briefly share, their ‘old child-ness’—undermines the discrepancy between them. Throughout the love trial,” she continued, “which is produced by Lear, the discourse focuses on balancing and linking action, reaction, and shifting points of view so tightly and securely that, although the narrative is clearly disruptive, what we see is Lear’s control, a notion that is further reinforced as the tensed visual rhythm of the exchange between Lear and Cordelia explodes into a series of tracking shots, reversing right and then left, as Lear, moving toward the camera and then with it, points to men, horses, dogs, falcons (they are, for him, equitable objects),” saying, “‘I’ll take that, that, that.’ The images derive increased authority and climax from the music that underscores Lear’s exit from the court and his ascent, intercut with high-angle shots of the peasants seen in the opening, to the top of a tower where, in a low-angle long shot, he curses and banishes Cordelia” (145).

Also publishing in 1983, Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, in an essay titled “Order and Disorder in Kozintsev’s King Lear,” wrote that by “[r]elying on Pasternak’s translation of King Lear, Grigori Kozintsev has sought to remain faithful to Shakespeare while interpreting the play as a drama of political and social dimensions. Not once,” this essay continued, “does the Russian director distort a single character or episode in the spirit of Marxist criticism of class conflict, as occurred in his adaptation of Don Quixote.” Instead, “Kozintsev’s artistic achievement consists in his ability to integrate the personal tragedies of Lear, his family, and the members of the court with the destiny of a divided nation. The director’s socialist outlook,” wrote Radcliff-Umstead, “requires him to question individual human values, as he stated in his essay on Shakespeare: ‘What exactly defines a person’s real value—possessions or spiritual qualities? Does it depend on his position in life? Or is he this value in and of himself, even though he possesses nothing? And what is the relationship between wealth and the genuine worth of a man?’” According to Radcliff-Umstead, “Kozintsev’s film attempts to answer those questions. Out of humiliating defeat Lear attained moral victory over vanity and became for the first time in his life a value in and of himself fully deserving of the love of Cordelia, Kent and the Fool. In this Shakespearean adaptation a Soviet director has presented a vision of spiritual and political struggle where loving recognition of individual value might recover society from disorder” (272).

In an essay from 1985 titled “Pictorial Imagery in Kozintsev’s ‘King Lear,’” Wayne Schmalz investigated visual imagery that “acts as a cinematic equivalent to Shakespeare’s poetry,” hoping “to show the way in which images anticipate and echo various parts of the action; how they come together or work in opposition to one another; how they elucidate character, situation, and theme; and how they prove to be central to the rhythm of the film. Some of the imagery,” he continued, “will be recognizable as coming directly from the play even though at times it will be used in new ways. Some of it will evolve from Kozintsev’s interpretation of the text and will be used to convey that interpretation.” Schmalz explained that “[a]lthough Kozintsev does not regard script of primary importance in adapting Shakespeare, he does not in this film devalue the role of sound. Music and sound effects are often so closely wedded to image that it becomes difficult to speak of one without the other.” Schmalz therefore tried to show “how sound rein-forces and helps define the pictorial imagery. Because King Lear is such an intricate fabric of intertwining images,” he sought “to select one image thread, trace its development through the film, then repeat the process with other threads, eventually showing how they all come together to form a rich and complex whole” (85).

John Collick, in his 1989 book Shakespeare, Cinema, and Society, wrote that the “architecture of the castles [in this film] is low, indeterminate and incomplete” and that the “landscapes are flat and featureless,” commenting that Kozintsev tried to use this minimalist terrain in the same ritual way as the [Japanese] Noh [plays he admired], reflecting his interest in Buddhism (145). But Collick found the Noh imagery ineffective, arguing that it “becomes bogged down in a dangerously ahistorical imagery of character and inner self” that ignores “social and political relationships” (146). In fact, Collick argued that Kozintsev’s film, in reconciling the ruler with the peasants, cripples and lowest of the low, “attempts to absolve the responsibility of both the despot and the intellectual from the perpetuation of brutal totalitarianism in Stalinist Russia,” thus echoing earlier Russian artists who had adopted a similar stance, thereby moving “towards a resigned humanism … to reconcile himself, and his position, with a brutalised world” (181).

Discussing Kozintsev’s film in his 1991 book titled Still in Movement: Shakespeare on Screen, Lorne Michael Buchman wrote that the Russian director’s “Lear is both great and small, and Kozintsev’s exploitation of high- and low-angle shots, close-ups, and long shots combine to articulate this shifting stature.” Physically “diminutive,” his greatness exists mainly in his own mind, so that his eventual “feelings of rejection are painful because he is a man who has the capacity to recognize his small, unaccommodated stature.” Meanwhile, the “outside world is measureless, void of natural growth, rocky, and wasted,” full of “beggars and peasants whose rough clothes and dirty bodies symbolize humanity stripped of all pretensions” associated with Lear’s well-dressed courtiers who represent “a world that owes the worm its silk.” Kozintsev juxtaposes the comfortable but static inner world with the painful but changing outer world full of obvious suffering but also associated with movement and the potential for change (34). According to Buchman, “Kozintsev renders Lear’s vision of his land, the space of his kingdom, [as] another aspect of his blindness; he knows nothing about what really exists beyond his own sheltered environment.” But even that sheltered environment contains “the seeds of chaos” in the conflicts among the courtiers, especially Lear’s two daughters and their husbands and the two suitors for Cordelia. Therefore, “Lear must go outside to learn of his life inside” (37), and the storm scene in particular helps Lear grow, as the “prose of wind and rain” helps turn his own thoughts and words into “a ‘conversation’ between a suffering, enraged king and the angry gods.” Later, inside a hovel stuffed with a “multitude of naked wretches,” Lear finds not only one suffering figure in the face of Poor Tom, but an “overwhelming mass” of such creatures (56), so that the “‘poetry’ of Lear’s spiritual opening has roots in the ‘prose’ of real human beings in a space of misery.” In this film, “Lear’s discovery is not an abstract, philosophical, or theological one (another reason for Kozintsev’s having the King say his ‘prayer’ directly to other human beings and not to an invisible god), and Kozintsev takes pains to make the King’s learning process as visceral as possible” (56–57). Although “[m]asses of humanity have always surrounded the King,” only “now does he see them in terms, not of his own gratification, but of their needs as people, needs the King must tend to.” The crowded hovel both resembles and contrasts with the earlier crowded court, and Lear’s suffering is not the suffering of one mentally tortured individual but a suffering he shares with many other humans (57). Kozintsev’s Lear does not imply the “meaninglessness of life” but in fact signals, through Lear’s transformation, some real “hope for humankind” (122).

In a 1991 essay titled “The Use of ‘Mise-en-Scène’ in Three Films of ‘King Lear,’” R. B. Parker argued that “the chief stylistic difference between Brook and Kozintsev is that, whereas for the most part the former used montage and imagery expressionistically, the latter used them consistently as symbols. A major thread of symbolism for Kozintsev, inspired by his visit to the museum at Hiroshima, was the image of fire, both as the ‘ancient glow of patriarchal fire…. [which] gives off light … [and] warmth—the natural relationships between old and young—respect, love’ and as an emblem of man’s destructiveness.’ Thus,” according to Parker, “Lear questions his daughters not from his throne but from a comfortable seat by the family hearth (with the camera shooting through smoke and heat waves to convey the instability of his sentimental vision), and Gloucester too has a hearthside chair—in which he is eventually tied and blinded.” But “Goneril has no hearth … and gradually the image of fire turns destructive—in the torches of Lear’s train as he leaves angrily, then of the horsemen pursuing Edgar, [and] soldiers’ bonfires.” We then see “Edmund firing thatch as a sign for his men to burn a village, terrified animals bursting from a burning barn, flaming tar hurled at Lear’s fortress with catapults, the burning of Cordelia’s fleet, Lear’s delirious glimpses of burning buildings from the litter on which he is being carried to safety, his final arrest with Cordelia beside a burning palisade, and, at the end, shots of a gutted city with weary survivors trying to dowse and search the smoldering ruins.” Parker wrote that, “As in Brook, there are no battle sequences (Kozintsev says such spectacle too easily obscures the ‘inner action—fate, feelings, thoughts’), so it is this symbolism of fire that conveys the film’s main comment on human destructiveness” (83).

In another essay from 1991, this one titled “Representing King Lear on Screen: From Metatheatre to ‘Metacinema,’” Kenneth Rothwell, discussing Kozintsev’s Lear on pages 221–24, praised the film as a film, noting its probing examinations of faces (221). He summarized many specific details (223); admired its “skillful editing [of] all elements into a coherent design”; and stressed the meaningful use of silence (224). Rothwell commended the helpfulness of Kozintsev’s book about making the film; called this production “one of the great works” of the twentieth century; noted various influences on it; and reported that Kozintsev “was one of the first filmmakers to win a serious hearing from a wide range of Shakespeare scholars” (224).

Assessing Kozintsev’s Lear more briefly in his 2000 book titled Shakespeare on Screen (64–65), Daniel Rosenthal wrote that “[n]o one has illustrated King Lear’s dizzying fall from power with greater visual force than Grigori Kozintsev. No one has played the king on screen with more affecting restraint than Kozintsev’s Lear, Yuri Yarvet” in a film that Rosenthal described as “[a]usterely photographed in black and white” and one that emphasizes “a king’s relationship to the common people,” in which “we see Lear begin as his subjects’ god and end as their helpless equal.” His “shattering self-knowledge” that he has “shamefully neglected his people” is “registered in Yarvet’s huge, bright eyes, and quiet, agonized voice” (64).

Similarly brief were the comments by Douglas Brode in his 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies, who asserted that Kozintsev’s film is “supremely true to the spirit, if not the letter, of the Shakespearean source.” Brode felt that “Ionas Gritsus’s striking black-and-white cinematography immediately sets the tone for a tragic outcome without being so frigid or off-putting that we feel this kingdom is frozen from the start,” just as “Dmitri Shostakovich’s stirring musical score suggests epic dimensions without drowning the action in a tidal wave of emotional bathos.” Brode also admired the film’s “authentic” costumes and its setting in “an existing fifteenth-century castle” (211) while also noting its stress on “the ruler’s gradual sense that he is at one with the people he governs” (212).

Stephen M. Buhler, also writing briefly in his 2002 book Shakespeare in the Cinema: Ocular Proof (165–67), described Jüri Järvet, the Estonian, non-Russian speaking actor who played Lear, in terms of his “gaunt, aged face, his slight frame, and his sometimes manic intensity,” saying that his appearance made him an ideal representative of “the common state of humankind” (165). But he also noted that it is “Oleg Dal’s young Fool,” with his “wistful pipe playing—presented as a clarinet solo in Shostakovich’s score—[who] opens and ends the film.” Buhler felt that such “music suits a vision of the world that accepts death … even as it confronts the enormities that often inflict it.” In Buhler’s opinion, this Fool functions as “a figure for the artist: Shakespeare himself, Kozintsev and Shostakovich and Yarvet, whom the director described as having ‘spiritual grace’ … enough to embody Lear’s journey toward … acceptance, defiance, and vulnerability” (167).

In his 2004 book on King Lear (part of the Shakespeare in Performance series). Alexander Leggatt noted that Kozintsev “was in one sense not using Shakespeare’s text at all; he was using Boris Pasternak’s translation into modern Russian, so that he was taking the play not just out of its language but linguistically out of its period,” although some versions of the film do not make this clear and provide Shakespeare’s text in subtitles (88). Leggatt observed that Kozintsev goes out of his way to depict numerous poor people whereas Shakespeare presents only Poor Tom as perhaps their symbolic representative (91). Among other matters, Leggatt discussed the ways Kozintsev used water in his film to suggest “restoration and new life”; how his settings constituted “a generalized older period, essentially mediaeval but with occasional Renaissance suggestions” (93); and how he deemphasized “spectacles of wealth or power,” partly by dressing even his aristocrats in no obviously “remarkable” ways and by making even Lear’s court seem a rather “domestic” place (94). Leggatt remarked that “It is as though Kozintsev is impatient to get on to the hovel, and the poor people who shelter there; they are what really interests him.” Noting that the rather subdued storm scene disappointed his students, Leggatt commented that “It is not cosmic violence but man-made violence that concerns him. One of the seminal experiences behind the film was his visit to [a] museum at Hiroshima” (96), which for him suggested the universal relevance of Lear (97). But Leggatt added that “Kozintsev gives due weight to the cruelty and violence of the tragedy, but this does not lead in the direction of absurdity. For him … this is a story that ultimately makes moral sense, a story of learning and redemption” (97). Although noting that Dimitri “Shostakovich’s music gives the film some of its darkest colouring, especially in the war sequence,” Leggatt also quoted Kozintsev as saying that “the music also ‘gives rise to faith: the evil times will pass, they cannot do otherwise if such a voice is heard’” and added that this “quality of survival is also embodied in the Fool” (101). He concluded by commenting that “Through much of the film, the soliloquies are done in voiceover as the camera dwells on the unspeaking face, though this convention is occasionally broken.” According to Leggatt, this film’s “account of the play’s fundamental issues puts it for the most part with mainstream, traditional criticism. Only in its emphasis on the people, on the communal rather than the private dimension of Lear’s salvation, does it give a distinct twist to the left” (103).

Commenting quickly on the Kozintsev film in his 2008 Norton Guide (51–53), Samuel Crowl called it “dark and barren” but not with the “savage nihilism” of Peter Brook’s filmed Lear (51), which was issued in the West almost simultaneously with Kozintsev’s. Like many other commentators, Crowl thought that Kozintsev depicts Lear as a “powerful king” who eventually develops a growing relationship with the poor (52), remarking that he “doesn’t dominate his world; he represents it”; that he is placed in a “social and material context rather than in a mythic landscape”; and that his Fool does not ultimately disappear, as does happen in Shakespeare’s play (52–53).

Yvonne Griggs, in a 2009 book titled Shakespeare’s King Lear: The Relationship between Text and Film, argued that Kozintsev’s film “shares many of the structural, stylistic, thematic and ideological characteristics of the road movie, and has much more in common with the ambivalent road movies of the late sixties than with other screen versions of Shakespeare’s plays of the time” (62). She asserted that it “has much more in common with genre cinema and with the socialist ideologies which underpin Soviet cinema of this period than with the kind of art house status conferred upon it as a result of its acceptance into the canon,” presenting “a Lear that is accessible to a mainstream audience,” that is “devoid of the experimental elements” (63), and that treats Lear as an “Everyman figure” (65), with “peasants watching and waiting from the edges of the cinematic frame throughout the film as Lear’s journey towards communal acceptance propels the narrative onwards,” just as Cordelia is “constantly waiting out of shot for his return to the fold” (66). Meanwhile, Cordelia’s sisters are made to seem rather simplistically “evil” (71), while Lear is presented as “a diminutive, white-haired old man, barely distinguishable from the Fool,” who becomes Lear’s road-film “buddy” in Lear’s “journeys into the depths of insanity and despair” before he reemerges into a “decidedly Marxist-Christian fold” (74) represented by his reconciliation with Cordelia (75). But Griggs also argued that “the film’s final moments have more in common with the apocalyptic images of late sixties Crisis Cinema than with the kind of neat reintegration into mainstream society expected of the pre-sixties road movies” as Lear now embraces “the values epitomised by a Cordelia who is synonymous with the proletariat beyond the castle walls.” Ultimately, according to Griggs, “We are left to make our own assumptions as to whether Edgar is likely to restore order and if so whether he—or indeed anyone—can prove to be a virtuous ruler operating within an autocratic system” that has been seen to have such little regard for “the collective community” (77). According to Griggs, this Lear “may be offering a redemptive, uplifting message in one sense, but we cannot escape the violent, apocalyptic elements embedded in either the source text or, through its intertextual allusions, the apocalyptic road movies prevalent in Western cinema at the time of the film’s production” (78).

In an essay from 2009 titled “On the Road: Reclaiming Korol Lir,” Griggs wrote that although, “historically, Kozintsev’s Korol Lir has fallen into the category of ‘canonized’ Shakespeare on screen,” she wanted to “argue that it should be regarded as a genre product: it shares many of the structural, stylistic, thematic, and ideological characteristics of the road movie, and has much more in common with the ambivalent road movies prevalent during its late sixties production era than with contemporaneous screen versions of Shakespeare’s plays” (97). She asserted that the “all-important establishing shots, accounting for around five minutes of dialogue-free screen time, focus upon the landscape as Lear’s people journey on foot or by makeshift transportation over this barren though densely populated terrain, emphasizing for us the significance of journeying in the film” (100). Later she suggested that ultimately “Korol Lir follows the narrative pattern established in the Shakespearean source text, but here the subtext is generated by Kozintsev’s socialist leanings: Lear rejects his former position of power, aligning himself instead with the values epitomized by a Cordelia who is synonymous with the proletariat beyond the castle walls. Kozintsev does offer closure of some kind, but it remains a tentative ending, leading us to ponder the apocalyptic potential of our future” (105).

In his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (301–4), Peter Cochran compared and contrasted this production with the 1971 Peter Brook film to the latter’s disadvantage, saying that the Kozintsev version immediately seems “epic” in the literal sense (301). He found Edmund “sexy”; thought this adaptation looks “professional” (302); and noted the unusually elaborate depiction of Cordelia and her troops (302). Saying that Gloucester seems less woman-hating here than in the play, Cochran also described various scenes (303) and called this production better than any other, partly because of superb acting, although he regretted its lack of humor (304).

Discussing the film in part of her chapter on Kozintsev in a 2013 volume titled Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Zeffirelli (116–34), Courtney Lehmann wrote that the project was “inspired by a visit to Japan, by encounters with Japanese art, and by an interest in atomic attacks on Japan during World War II” (117–19). She called the film an exploration of “the ongoing tragedy of human history” (119); noted that “the viewer’s perspective is stabilized by a well-paced sequencing of close-ups and reaction shots, panoramas and tracking shots” (120); and said that the movie marks “a final, sobering transition from the youthful, freewheeling agitational art” of Kozintsev’s early career “to the painful realism of a disillusioned, aging director” (123). Commenting that in the hovel “Yarvet’s Lear engages the beggars, fools and madmen softly and in earnest, as he willingly becomes a fellow denizen of their ‘houseless poverty,’” she praised “the extraordinary understatement that governs his performance” (124). Lehmann concluded by observing that, “[u]nlike Shakespeare, who allows the Fool to drop out of the play with no explanation, Kozintsev refuses to relinquish his hold, bringing him back in the film’s final scene. This resurrection, however, is conditional, for the Fool must cry in the end” (132).

Peter E. S. Babiak, in his 2016 survey of a hundred years of Shakespeare Films (93–97), suggested that Kozintsev’s use of Cinemascope allowed movies to compete with small-screen television (93); wrote that Kozintsev’s Lear at first seems “inane and silly” but later comes to resemble the peasants depicted earlier in the film; said the movie “focuses on the broader social impact of a dysfunctional polity” (94); and then offered detailed discussion of particular scenes. He wrote that “[d]epictions of brutality, mass starvation, and mass destruction are characteristic of the second half of Kozintsev’s film,” adding that its “first half … is concerned with Lear’s gradual loss of control, and how this loss of control is greeted with displays of restraint and formality which are in stark contrast with the latent rage and brutality of the second half” (95). Babiak argued that, as “Lear and Cordelia are surrounded and unable to break free of the running crowds, [the king] seems here a victim of the curse that he, himself, has wished on humankind while in his rage. The forces unleashed by the storm at his command have been turned upon himself” (96). Suggesting that this adaptation’s ending provides “no clear sense of resolution” (96) and that the film’s final emphasis is on “unresolved enigmas” (96–97), Babiak concluded that the movie might imply “a longer repetitive cycle” and might “reinforce a socialist view of history in which the proletariat pays for the mistakes of other classes,” although he conceded that “there are no easily identifiable analogues for the bourgeoisie in this film” and even suggested that the project might be relevant to the oppressive rule of Leonid Brezhnev, the then-dominant Soviet leader (97).

In his 2017 book The Shakespeare Films of Grigori Kozintsev. Michael Thomas Hudgens noted that the actor playing Lear was deliberately chosen to resemble a peasant and that although he did not know Russian (3) he eventually mastered the Russian text of the play (4). Hudgens recounted, throughout his long discussion of the film, many of Kozintsev’s own comments about the play itself and his own production. Many of those comments concerned Shakespeare and his times; many also dealt with Kozintsev’s life and career, including his earlier films and the effects of Russian politics on his life and works. Hudgens discussed the filmmaker’s collaboration with writer Boris Pasternak and composer Dimitri Shostakovich and the ways they, too, suffered under the rule of Joseph Stalin (4–13). He also explored such topics as why Kozintsev chose black and white rather than color; the film’s emphasis on “real materials”; how the main setting was chosen; Kozintsev’s friendship with Peter Brook; and the ways Kozintsev used cameras (13–16). He quoted extensively from Kozintsev’s diary; discussed specific moments in (and aspects of) the film (such as the division of the kingdoms episode); and offered his own comments on the play and film (16–24). He surveyed specific features of various actors’ performances (25ff); extensively summarized the film’s plot (25–29); recounted the career of the actor who plays Lear and some specifics of his performance (29–33); and did the same both with the actor cast as the Fool (33–40) as well as other actors, while quoting extensively from the script (40–49). Discussing the storm scenes at length and providing much plot summary (51–62), Hudgens used the same methods to describe the aftermath of the storm (63–83), with extensive quotation from Kozintsev. He closed by detailing the final editing of the film, including the addition of music (83–88).

In an essay published in 2019 titled “Is Shakespeare ‘Translatable’? Cinematic Adaptations by Kozintsev, Kurosawa, and Feng Xiaogang,” King-Kok Cheung compared and contrasted the Kozintsev and Kurosawa versions of King Lear [see the entry on Ran], stressing their differences (179–80ff), especially in the storm episode (180ff). Generally, Cheung argued that “the more a director tries to make the play follow his or her logic—whether moral, religious, or philosophical—the less Shakespearean is the production. King Lear stubbornly resists formulas” (184). Nonetheless, Cheung ultimately praised different directors’ versions of Shakespeare plays (188).

Samuel Crowl, in an essay also published in 2019 titled “Lear’s Fool on Film: Peter Brook, Grigori Kozintsev, Akira Kurosawa,” compared and contrasted this film with Brook’s (39) and wrote that Oleg Dahl, as the Fool here, “seems trapped between boy and man” (40), noting that he is continually associated with the “bells on his ankles and the plaintive wail of the clarinet” (40). Crowl thought that this Fool resembles Dostoevsky’s “village idiot” (41); discussed Shostakovich’s music (41–42); and suggested that the Fool here “becomes the collective voice of the film” (42).

1971 Peter Brook Production

This controversial adaptation, directed by Peter Brook, starred Paul Scofield as King Lear; Irene Worth as Goneril; Cyril Cusack as Albany; Susan Engel as Regan; Tom Fleming as Kent; Anne-Lise Gabold as Cordelia; Ian Hogg as Edmund; Robert Langdon Lloyd as Edgar; Jack MacGowran as Fool; Patrick Magee as Cornwall; and Alan Webb as Gloucester.

Roger Manvell, in his pioneering 1971 film Shakespeare and the Film, quoted extensively from notes taken by one of the producers (136–43); praised Scofield’s thorough knowledge of his role as Lear; emphasized this Lear’s “great age”; said that “Scofield’s Lear represents power on the edge of disintegration and decrepitude” (143); quoted extensively from the shooting script; and also described plot developments in some detail (144–52).

In an essay from 1973 titled “Our Darker Purpose: Peter Brook’s King Lear,” William Chaplin argued that “Brook’s refusal to exaggerate the play’s hope and thus its civility, his firm control of emphasis on the amoral, life-obliterating rhythms in the play’s deepest spirit, becomes this film’s most troubling and memorable achievement.” But Chaplin added that “through facing the logic of cruelty and sacrifice, reverence for life emerges: that is as deeply in Shakespeare’s play as it is in the Oresteia. Failure to understand this results in a drastic misreading of the play and of Brook’s film; it allows people who do not like cruelty to imply that the film’s cruelty is gratuitous—merely the expression of a modern style. Surely it is not” (181).

John Reddington, in a 1973 essay titled “Film, Play and Idea,” wrote that in “this film Lear is seen to emerge from animal disgruntlement to achieve human anger, from boredom to achieve pain, from monolithic pride to achieve irony and pity. This process of becoming involves each person in the play, because Lear’s life and actions demand responses which are commitments as well as revelations of the self.” According to Reddington, “A less courageous and less hurt man than Lear, the film implies, might have induced no more than occasional bitchery in his two eldest, nothing more than affection in his youngest. We would all prefer to be lukewarm; greatness insists on good and evil whatever the cost to itself. So everyone here,” he continued, “daughters and servants alike, finds himself moved along toward the logical extremes of his personal argument by association with Lear, who, moving fast himself, hurries everyone else to his own conclusion, absurd, mean, wicked, sad, or sublime. The soldiers chase him down in the surf, but he’s ahead still, putting some people in mind of sacrifice, others in mind of rope and poison” (371).

In an essay from 1976 titled “One King Lear for Our Time: A Bleak Film Vision by Peter Brook,” Lillian Wilds discussed Brook’s cuts to Shakespeare’s text and his use of various techniques—including editing—before concluding that the film’s “ending uses also … the kind of visual imagery that supports Brook’s theme, and it is also an example of deliberately obtrusive camera work to create alienation to block out stock response when we are most likely to succumb to tragic identification and to make us apply reason rather than emotion to what we have seen.” According to Wilds, one important “alienating device is the fade-to-white that ends the final action, blots out the final image, ends the film, and brings it full circle The closing action is filmed in silence, as were the opening shots.” She continued that Lear’s eyes, which “were shifting and dangerous in our first view of him, now glaze over as he is dying. We see him profiled in close up—his head huge on the wide screen, falling backwards in slow motion out of the frame. The shot is repeated with Lear’s head again falling from the top of the screen.” After describing further shots, she wrote that “[m]eanwhile the screen has been imperceptibly fading to white. Suddenly the image is completely gone, and the silent emptiness of the white screen rounds out the theme of negation of empty nothingness, with which the film began” (163–64).

Normand Berlin, in an essay published in 1977 titled “Peter Brook’s Interpretation of King Lear: ‘Nothing Will Come of Nothing,’” asserted that “[b]ecause Brook has relentlessly reduced Shakespeare’s play, depoeticized it, erased its rich substance—pomp and costume and music—squelched whatever was positive in it, we are forced, I believe, to consider his King Lear, despite some effective moments, a self-indulgence. There is no denying,” Berlin continued, “that his impulse to rescue Shakespearean production from academia is praiseworthy—for there is no greater sin than making Shakespeare boring. But it is equally sinful to present too radical an approach, especially one which obliterates Shakespeare for the sake of a limiting pre-conceived idea.” Berlin thought that “[b]etween the boringly conventional and the destructively radical—a very wide territory—Shakespeare, both ageless and contemporary, can be produced freshly. It takes imagination and respect. Not reverence, but respect, an old-fashioned word that can beautifully serve film, the exciting, still-new medium for Shakespearean production” (303).

In his 1977 book Shakespeare on Film, Jack Jorgens wrote that “Brook warily avoids sentimentality in order to heighten the bleakness of the role and the power of the scenes between Lear and Cordelia and Lear and Gloucester. Thus he totally eliminates Edmund’s reformation and attempt to save the lives of Lear and Cordelia.” Lacking “compassion,” this Edmund instead displays “satanic relish in the grim irony that he should be killed by his brother” in a death that Jorgens grimly and graphically describes (240–41). According to Jorgens, this film’s “dim or washed-out, grainy black and white images [are] almost never … composed for beauty. Close-ups and shallow depth of field give the film a solipsistic feel as brutal faces, often fragmented by the frame, confront one another or stare into the camera. The poetry,” he added, has “been cut to the bone” and, far from offering “traditional theatrical emoting and eloquent singing of the lines, the actors flatten and understate everything, [and] speak in slow, gruff whispers. Their deliveries force each word to strike percussively and then reverberate.” Music is mostly absent; silence often prevails; unusual camera shots provoked some critical objections; and so “much of Shakespeare’s exposition is stripped away, so many of the climaxes are sudden violent paroxysms, and so lean is the subplot, that the ‘naïve’ spectator may well become lost.” Traditional realism is rejected (244); cruelty is emphasized (245); Scofield’s Lear is a tyrant (245); and the film’s tone is typically humorless (248). All these traits made this adaptation immediately a subject of strong debate.

In an essay from 1980 titled “Conventions for Dialogue in Peter Brook’s King Lear,” Paul Acker asserted that “the types of dialogue-associated shots which Brook most often employs are three in number: (1) two-shots, medium close and full front; (2) two shots in opposing profiles; and (3) the shot-reverse shot. In Brook’s film,” Acker continued, “many variants of these three basic types are explored, consistent associations are generated for each, and experiments in each expand our conceptions of screen dialogue; rather than, as is more usual in such adaptations, making us feel that these conventions are being variously usurped, truncated or arbitrarily employed.” Acker concentrated on the last of the three shots, “the shot-reverse shot, as it has been the object of much critical discussion of late, and as it occupies a particularly important role in Brook’s version. But to deal briefly with the first two types, we might first observe that the two-shot is perhaps most often associated with intimacy, as between two prominent members of the Hollywood star-system. In Brook’s film the shot is used primarily in contexts of complicity” (220).

Barbara Hodgdon, in an essay from 1983 titled “Two ‘King Lears’: Uncovering the Filmtext,” described how, in a crucial early sequence, “Brook reserves the long shot for establishing or re-establishing the physical context of the space and the locus of Lear’s authority. There are only five long shots: two are of Lear’s throne—seen first from the back and then later, head-on—the third is of Cordelia, sitting alone; all three are stable, without movement, and vary in length. The last two,” Hodgdon continued, “swell out from tighter shots to show Lear’s, and then Kent’s, exits from the chamber. Throughout, the camera remains steady and sure; movement is minimal, occurring as a tight, slow pan over faces until, as Lear’s plan is frustrated, action erupts within the image. As each daughter rises to speak, mid-close-ups and close-ups privilege faces and eyes as well as language; at other times, the frame edge splits a face, cutting off the characters’ complete vision as well as ours. Yet even when we are allowed to examine their faces.” Hodgdon thought, “the actors’ performances, which suppress the obvious gestures, smiles, and looks that provide clues to thought and feeling, raise ambiguities suggesting possible misinterpretation as much as ensuring understanding. This initial shock of the close-up of Lear’s face floating on blackness,” she contended, “keys the point of view of the sequence. From here on, it is Lear who controls the seeing; the fragmented views of the others capture his vision, the fractured quality of his spiritual condition. This Lear is an individual presence, not part of a larger social world but its entire authority. Occasional returns to an objective view of his figure in long shot or mid-close-up function not so much as an omniscient point of view but as a way to re-establish that dominance.” According to Hodgdon, “The only other point of view within the shots is Cordelia’s (her back is toward the camera some of the time here, thus associating us with her). The tensions between Lear and his youngest daughter and the consequent cutting apart of the kingdom are specifically—and briefly—articulated in six abrupt alternations of point of view” (146).

Michael Mullin, in another 1983 essay—this one titled “Peter Brook’s King Lear: Stage and Screen”—wrote that when “[v]iewed as the end point in a collaboration among artists who lived with the play and tried to interpret it during the 1960s, Brook’s Lear on film is an important document in the play’s critical history. By no means a ‘performance’ of the play, the film gives us a raw, sometimes hysterical demonstration of what the ‘subtext’ (to use a 1960s buzzword) had come to mean to Brook.” Mullin claimed that “Brook’s outrage at the war in Vietnam and his own alienation from establishment culture screams out through the film. No sentimentality! No humor! No redemption! As the film recedes in time, its value as a reading of the play will become clearer. As it is,” Mullin continued, “it is a valuable document in the play’s history because it brings us close to Brook’s vision and to the acting of Paul Scofield, Irene Worth, and Alan Webb. As a work of art, it communicates vividly what great actors and a great director thought about Shakespeare’s play as the 1960s drew to a close. Nihilistic, bleak, hopeless, ugly, full of horror and lacking pity, like Picasso’s Guernica the terror of modern times is the subject, and Brooks’s film has used Shakespeare as the medium.” According to Mullin, “Whether the film expresses Shakespeare’s intent or not is a question beside the point. If the audience is to be the judge, then whether the brutal, chilling Lear embodied by the film is now true, was true for the 1960s, or will become true tomorrow depends on how we see our world. If indeed what Brook saw in Lear is the only part of the play that can speak truly to our times, then we have lost hope. If not, then Brook’s Lear is a troubling reminder of the despair and anger of the 1960s. History will decide, and it will be a harsh verdict, if Peter Brook proves to have been right” (195).

In an essay from 1986 titled “Violence and Vision in Polanski’s Macbeth and Brook’s Lear,” William P. Shaw wrote that Brook considered violence “a symptom of more deeply rooted personal and social disturbances. It is the visible eruption of irrepressible tensions and hostilities, destructive forces which emanate from the deep pool of human greed, selfishness, and pervasive malignity.” According to Shaw, “Brook captures this on film through his editing, his interpretation of key characters, and especially his stylization of violence. In the process, though. Brook adapts, rather than interprets, Shakespeare’s text in order to formulate an even darker vision than Shakespeare’s. Brook’s vision portrays men and women as predators. In his Lear, there is little love, less hope, and no redemption. Brook projects a world without a soul, a world in the process of self-destruction.” Shaw asserted that the “characters in Brook’s Lear … tear at one another’s minds the way the characters in Polanski’s Macbeth tear at one another’s flesh,” with Brook using adaptations of Shakespeare’s text to “deflate physical violence while inflating and darkening the psychological consequences of communal violence. To achieve this, Brook severely edits Shakespeare’s Lear to fit his grossly pessimistic preconceptions. In both Polanski’s and Brook’s films, then, the stylized treatment of violence creates an exaggerated, darker, and less complex vision of humanity than we find in Shakespeare’s plays” (213).

Anthony Davies, in his 1988 book titled Filming Shakespeare’s Plays (143–52), wrote that Brook’s Lear “broke away from cinematic tradition—and from a substantial Shakespearean tradition—by rebelling against its romanticism” and focusing on “the grotesque” rather than on tragedy and showing the influence of the skeptical playwright Samuel Beckett and equally skeptical critic Jan Kott. The result was a work of cinema that “provoked a more profound critical division than any other Shakespearean film” (143). Davies discussed such matters as Brook’s mostly still camera shots (145); its general rejection of music; its similar rejection of “the orchestrated fluidity of conventional cinematic expression” (148); its allegedly narrow interpretation of the play (149); and its alleged “failure to develop character” (150). Davies himself said that the film’s appeal was mostly intellectual; that it could be accused of lacking “cinematic development” and aesthetic interest; and that it suffered from an overall lack of passion (151).

Discussing the Brook adaptation in his 1991 book Still in Movement, Lorne Buchman noted moments, during the storm, when Brook “pull[s] us out of the immediate experience of the hero’s crazed psyche, with the paradoxical effect of enhancing that experience through … contrast.” Such shifts of perspective, he said, were typical of the film in other places and in other ways (62).

In another discussion from 1991 (“The Use of ‘Mise-en-Scène’ in Three Films of ‘King Lear’”), R. B. Parker asserted that in Brook’s film the “human way of life is exactly such as would be ‘dictated by climatic conditions’ (to repeat Brook’s key phrase). Faces are lined and weathered, and for the most part aged. Costumes make more use of furs than those in Brook’s stage version, with Lear in particular looking like a bear aroused from hibernation, as his white cropped head and stubbled chin are thrust out angrily from a great hump of black fur. The ‘castles,’” Parker continued, “are mere palisaded forts with sod roofs, great, creaky wooden gates, and muddy courtyards crowded with rough carts and plunging horses. As travellers arrive, they rush to get near warmth. There is a sense of ravenous hunger as they chew and gulp while speaking; and Lear’s knights crowd noisily around crude benches and tables in Goneril’s hall then hurl them into the courtyard on Lear’s cue, when he upends the table at which he and Goneril have quarreled” (78). Turning to the camera work, Parker wrote that “Brook makes heavy use of close-ups, right from the first shot of Lear’s immobile face, with its lackluster, suspicious eyes; and many of these close-ups are of people quarreling, often showing them as opposing profiles. This pattern culminates in the storm scene where, by a quick alternation of profile shots, Lear seems to argue madly with himself. Even closer shots,” according to Parker, “show only parts of the face, particularly, though not exclusively, the eyes …. Others show a nose, a chin, the back of a head, so that the effect is simultaneously one of physical disintegration and fragmentary perception. Far from looking into the soul, most of Brook’s close-ups convey alienation in both the observer and the observed” (79).

Todd S. Gilman, discussing “The Textual Fabric of Peter Brook’s King Lear: ‘Holes’ in Cinema, Screenplay, and Playtext,” explained different methods used by Brook for “foregrounding the playtext’s themes,” including “that of editorial suppression,” which “operates primarily … by emphasizing the themes through drastic cuts. Optimism is obliterated, and this suppression places the themes of negation, blindness, banishment, and related ideas of loss, absence, and dismissal, in textual relief.” According to Gilman, “These cuts highlight the play’s themes, however, not simply by virtue of the resultant emphasis on what remains in the screenplay, but also because the extensiveness of the cuts creates gaps or holes in dramatic meaning. Brook’s excessive cutting ‘suppresses,’ then, in a more general sense by rendering the screenplay a gap-ridden, fragmented, disrupted shadow of the Shakespearean source. The spectator is made acutely aware of the bleak themes because the gaps act as an assault.” Thus, “Through the choice of cuts as well as through their prominence, Brook bombards his audience, especially those familiar with the play, with the sense that something is missing; that the screenplay is uncomfortably incomplete and unbalanced” (299).

In an essay from 1994 titled “Two-Dimensional Shakespeare: King Lear on Film,” Peter Holland called Brook’s Lear “strongly interpretive” (58); noted its emphasis on actors directly addressing the camera (64–65); and discussed in detail the kinds of shots Brook uses (66–68). Much more detailed was Alexander Leggatt’s fine discussion of the Brook adaptation in his 1994 book on King Lear in performance (105–17). Leggatt commented on such matters as the way the film differed from the 1962 stage production from which it grew; the ways it boldly departed from “traditional readings of the play”; the ways it “kept more or less to Shakespeare’s words”; and the ways the text was simultaneously pruned, added to, and sometimes rearranged (106).

Choosing a setting that combined both “Innuit and Lapp cultures” and thereby creating “a world that is distinctive and yet free of period” (106), Brook also substituted “strange electronic noises” for music; featured mostly “quiet delivery of the lines” (as when Lear first speaks with his daughters [107]); and sometimes made it hard for viewers to make sense of the images. Leggatt explored numerous comparisons and contrasts between this film and the one by Kozintsev that only slightly preceded it; quoted from befuddled and/or outraged critics; and remarked, on his own, that especially in the storm scene the “difficulty is that so much attention goes to playing with the medium to create a generalized sense of breakdown that if there is a specific human drama in Lear’s encounter with the elements, we miss it” (109).

Continuing with his analysis, Leggatt observed that “in general the jerky, fragmented quality of the film blocks any sense of progress towards understanding”; that the “evil characters are softened and humanized”; that the depictions of both Gloucester and Cornwall differ from the stage versions (114); that Scofield, as Lear, comes across as “a strange creature with a low, grinding voice” and is “older” and “more stiff and bent” than he had been on stage, with a “narrower range” of character that makes him seem “hard, dry and tough,” with a “cynical” sense of humor, although he is obviously hurt by his daughters’ behavior. According to Leggatt, Brook’s film is negative from the start; strongly emphasizes darkness (including all-black screens); offers “a radically fragmented vision”; and can fairly be described as “an absurdist Lear, a challenge to readings like Kozintsev’s.” He quotes some negative reviews; notes that the film was a box-office failure (116); and concludes that “For me the central difficulty is that the film’s special world and its peculiar atmosphere—cold, bleak and inimical to humanity—are created with such authority and power that they crush the characters and the action. Certain passages are gripping … but we spend more time admiring the clinical authority of the director than reacting to the characters. It is a legitimate experiment, an expedition to the cold outer reaches of the play; but it leaves too much of the play behind” (117).

Further commentary on the Brook King Lear in 1994 came from Kenneth Rothwell in an essay titled “Representing King Lear on Screen: From Metatheatre to ‘Metacinema,’” in which Rothwell quoted conflicting critical assessments of Brook’s film (216–17); emphasized its status as a film (217–18); thought it may have been influenced by a 1953 television version (directed by Brook) starring Orson Welles; regretted both the cutting of the play’s optimistic subplot and also the film’s general pessimism (219); and argued for the influence of Alfred Hitchcock’s dark thrillers (220).

Commenting on the film in his 2000 book Shakespeare on Screen (62–63), Daniel Rosenthal declared that “Peter Brook set Shakespeare’s bleakest tragedy in one of the coldest, most barren landscapes ever seen on film.” Describing Scofield’s Lear as “bear-like” and noting that his courtiers are also covered with “thick furs to ward off blizzards and freezing rain,” Rosenthal wrote that “[m]ore than in any other Shakespeare film, the scenery (Jutland, in Denmark), weather and production design dictate the story’s emotional impact,” enhancing our sense of the “inhumanity” of the evil characters but also making it “less shocking than it is on stage,” since this is a “savage” environment in a savage film. Thus, the film explicitly depicts (as Shakespeare does not) the deaths of all three sisters; lacks even “a single bar of music”; and, for all these reasons, “numbs, rather than moves you, extinguishing even the faint glimmers of hope that Shakespeare surely intended to be drawn from the courage and humanity of Edgar, Kent and, belatedly, Albany.” According to Rosenthal, “Impressionistic and sometimes symbolic camerawork often make it hard to concentrate on the language”; [c]haracters appear at weird angles and moments within a given scene; Scofield’s voice is “a parched, echoing growl” and “his portrayal of dementia contains no trace of sentimentality.” This, Rosenthal concluded, “is a deeply idiosyncratic interpretation, but you have to admire Brook for adhering to it with such disconcerting commitment” (62).

Douglas Brode, in his 2000 book Shakespeare in the Movies, wrote that critics were divided about Brook’s film, judging it either “a mess or a masterpiece” (206). Brode himself blamed Brook for “directing Paul Scofield” to speak various important passages “in a monotone [that] sets up a performance style without soul,” so that “Lear approaches stasis” and seems “dehumanized … from the moment we meet him.” We therefore “watch this Lear clinically, and the experience becomes as cold and clammy as the performance.” Perhaps even worse, Cordelia comes across as “nasty, willful, sharp-tongued, sullen, bitter, and moody rather than being Shakespeare’s zesty, spirited woman of integrity. On the other hand, Goneril (Irene Worth) and Regan (Susan Engel) are transformed into glamorously sexy” harridans (208), while “Gloucester, Kent, and Lear, by contrast, aren’t noble victims but pathetic losers, lacking the skills necessary to survive in a corrupt universe. The acting,” Brode wrote, “is at the same time stylized and minimalist and keeps us distanced from the characters.” Moreover, “[m]uch of what transpires is unintelligible to all but the diehard Shakespeare buff,” partly because of cutting that struck him as “less arbitrary than purposefully perverse. It appears intended to reshape, even reverse, Shakespeare’s aim for Brook’s ambition.” All in all, Brode thought that “Brook undermines Shakespeare and presents a world without decency,” in addition to using “zoom lenses, arty angles, handheld cameras, and close-ups at inappropriate moments” (209). He did, however, think there “is one great performance: Jack MacGowran’s Fool. He is subtly satiric toward the film’s villains and wonderfully warm with his abused master” (210). For the most part, however, Brode seemed to agree with other critics who considered the film “a mess.”

Martha Tuck Rozett, in an essay from 2001 titled “The Peter Brook-Paul Scofield ‘King Lear‘: Revisiting the Film Version,” wrote that “[w]ith its gestures to silent film and other early cinematic techniques, Brook’s Lear is one of the last great black and white films made in an age of technicolor, and its bright snow and firelight, its dark interiors and bleak landscapes, its recurring journeys on horseback and in rattling carts, its bear-like fur coats, its fractured closeups, all remain in the mind’s eye long after the fragmenting of text is forgotten” (42).

Stephen Buhler, in his 2002 book titled Shakespeare in the Cinema, explained the tone of Brook’s film by writing that it “brings to cinematic life an Eastern European reading of the play and of Shakespeare. Brook,” he reported, “was profoundly influenced by the writings of Czech scholar Jan Kott” (138), whose dark vision of Shakespeare helped color his own. Referring to the film’s “nearly overwhelming bitterness,” Buhler noted that “Robert Lloyd’s Edgar shares in his illegitimate brother’s resentment toward the older generation’s rule”—an attitude common in the 1960s. Buhler also observed that “Brook employs several distancing and disorienting techniques throughout the film, most notably during the scene on the heath,” adding, however, that “[w]hat almost compels the audience to care, despite the stylistic irruptions and apparent moral void, is Paul Scofield’s towering portrayal of Lear himself” (139).

In brief comments in his 2008 Norton Guide (13–14, 158–59), Samuel Crowl called the Brook Lear a “bleak and savage film shot in grainy black and white,” with “minimalist lighting, off-center camera angles, black screen moments … and frequent use of a jumpy hand-held camera” (13). He noted that much of Shakespeare’s poetry is cut; emphasized the “Beckett-like” dialogue between Lear and the Fool and between Lear and Gloucester; and commented that the “film is a brave experiment but easier to admire than defend” (13). Reporting that this adaptation was popular neither with audiences nor with critics (13), he agreed with other analysts by explaining that it was influenced by Jan Kott’s grim book Shakespeare Our Contemporary and by [Samuel] Beckett’s Endgame, with their emphasis on the “grotesque,” “absurd,” “nasty,” and “brutal” (158–59).

In her 2008 book Filming Shakespeare, From Metatheatre to Metacinema (172–77), Agnieszka Rasmus suggested that Brook’s film illustrates an old association between cinema and death, especially in its use of black and white, shadows, allusions to silent films, and particularly the absence of any soundtrack (172). She said the characters, at first, seem almost dead, with a pun on “no” / “know” strongly emphasized in Lear’s first speech (173), and added that Lear’s face at first seems lifelike and then closeups distance us from him (173). Noting that faces are often shot in fragments and that the storm is almost entirely black (174), she thought the conclusion of the film may echo an earlier film of Lear from 1916 (175) and reported other influences on the film, criticism of it (176), and its radical emphasis on meta-theatricality (177).

Yvonne Griggs, discussing the Brook version in her 2009 book Shakespeare’s King Lear: The Relationship between Text and Film, while inevitably making some points already made by others, noted that the “play’s subplot is immediately sidelined: we have no sense of Gloucester as a similarly domineering father-figure, nor any indication of Edmund’s motivations since the opening dialogue involving Gloucester, Kent and Edmund is cut, as are Edmund’s later soliloquies.” She wrote that “Gloucester is constructed as a frail old man rather than an astute ‘politician’; Edmund, devoid of motivation, emerges as a symbol of the corruption at the heart of Lear’s kingdom, whilst Edgar, despite defeating his brother, is denied his moment of glory in the closing moments.” But she did assert that “Brook’s editing and cinematography become arguably as eloquent as Shakespeare’s verse,” suggesting that “he explores the protagonist’s internal conflict as a projection of catastrophe, mirroring the late sixties preoccupation with apocalyptic fears” (42). Citing “the same absurdist moments, the same explorations of nullity, the same examinations of the fragility of humankind as Shakespeare’s King Lear,” she explained Brook’s unconventional camerawork as an attempt to mimic “the multiplicity of Shakespeare’s versification and the sense of fragmentation and inertia central to the image system [Brook] creates for his reconfiguration of King Lear” (45), saying that Brook wanted “to establish an interactive relationship with the audience, to engage with it at the level of intellect rather than emotion, and in so doing create a hero who is less tragic as an individual yet more so as a character representative of flawed humanity.” According to Griggs, Brook wanted to break “the narrative surface to remind us that what we are watching is a construction of reality. Often, Brook’s characters speak to camera when delivering lines of dialogue rather than soliloquies, forcing the audience into a discomforting viewing position” (50). She observed that “Paul Scofield does not present us with a frail, petulant old king but with a strong, aggressive ruler” (59) and that “Brook engineers audience empathy both for Cordelia and her sisters: his point is that, in the initial stages at least, all three of them are more ‘sinned against than sinning’” (60).

Nenad Jovanovic, in an article from 2011 titled “Brook, Lear, and the Modified ‘Verfremdung,’” criticized a practice he considered widespread: “the phenomenon of failing to see a film properly due to being overly eager to read it. Needless to say, analyses based on such premises are rarely satisfying”. He wrote that in Brook’s film the “juxtaposition in the storm scene of shots showing opposite sides of Lear’s face, for example, is far from being a randomly chosen discontinuity, as some commentators have seen it. In the scene, Brook changes from shot to shot the direction of the line of interest, which stretches from the eyes of the most important character in a shot to the object of his attention.” According to Jovanovic, “A film director’s respecting ‘the rule of the line’ is to facilitate the spectator’s orientation in the filmic space. Violating the rule causes an opposite effect. Quite knowingly, Brook does precisely this to give the spectator a sense of his protagonist’s disorientation. The [alleged] chaos in [Brook’s] editing room … is, in fact, carefully controlled” (49).

In his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (297–301), Peter Cochran, saying this production begins very slowly (297), blamed Brook for massive, inappropriate cuts in the text (298–300); said Brook distorts Edgar and Edmund, making them both cynical; regretted the literal monotony of Scofield’s performance; and mocked some of the poor direction. He regretted further cuts and alterations (300–301) and condemned the turgid ending (301).

Peter E. S. Babiak, in his 2016 overview of a hundred years of Shakespeare films (115–19), discussed the influence of Jon Kott’s thinking on the Brooks adaptation (115); said Brook’s Lear presented “a world that has just barely become civilized,” with “characters just perceptively removed from their animal origins”; wrote that Brook “gives the audience a view of a reality which is fragmented and fractured from itself” (116); and discussed various scenes in detail. According to Babiak, “Brook employs juxtaposition of contradictory images consistently throughout the film to suggest a disparity between the perception of the characters and the realities that they perceive” (117). After discussing many particular shots, he concluded that the “central dynamic of Brook’s King Lear is founded on a dichotomy between people and narcissistic isolation versus people in altruistic connection” (118) and that the “final inter-cutting of two stylistically disparate shots serves to temper Brook’s nihilistic vision with a hope of people having overcome their narcissistic impulses and formed genuine connections with one another” (119)—an unusual suggestion that Brook’s adaptation might be less dark than is often assumed.

In an essay from 2017 titled “The Blinding of Gloucester: Trauma and Morality in Some Films of Shakespeare’s King Lear,” Robert C. Evans examined this adaptation’s blinding scene in detail and then compared and contrasted it with the same scene in the earlier Brook production from 1953, concluding that “the mere fact that Gloucester says nothing in the 1971 film after his first eye is scooped out, but instead screams out in terrified, terrifying pain, can make the later film seem darker, more relentless, more depressing. But the sudden black-out is,” according to Evans, “the later film’s master-stroke. It is almost literally unforgettable. In that sense it creates a deep psychic wound of its own” (109).

Samuel Crowl, in an essay from 2019 titled “Lear’s Fool on Film: Peter Brook, Grigori Kozintsev, Akira Kurosawa,” discussed Brook’s film’s emphasis on cruelty; noted that it offers “few establishing shots” (35); and suggested that it deliberately “seems to alienate the viewer” (35). He commented on its alternations of stillness versus activity (36) and observed that this film’s “Fool makes [its] only music” (36). He provided details of the performance of the actor playing the Fool (36ff) and commented that this Fool’s “melancholy humanity draws us to him” (38).

Discussing the Brook King Lear in his 2019 overview of adaptations first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company (74–79), John Wyver commented on the setting and costumes (which he said were designed to imply a plausible world) and wrote that the “fragments Brook works with, sometimes cut at a frenetic pace, include abstract shapes and indistinct images, intimations of the void at the heart of the play in screens that are simply black, as well as characters speaking in profile or from behind, and extreme close-ups counterpointed by wide, almost empty landscapes” (90). He reported that this “film has stimulated the most extensive critical literature associated with any RSC adaptation” and observed that in this production, “[f]ar more intensely than in his other adaptations for the RSC, or in the films that he made both before and after King Lear, Peter Brook pushed the possibilities of the screen simultaneously to draw the viewer into a enveloping, entirely coherent world of cruelty and heartlessness, suffering and insanity, and at the same time, at every moment, to reveal the creative construction of this world so as to force the viewer to reflect and to take responsibility for their relationship to it” (91).

1971 Edwin Sherin Production

Directed by Edwin Sherin and starring James Earl Jones as King Lear, this production (televised on PBS) also featured Douglass Watson as Kent; Paul Sorvino as Gloucester; Raul Julia as Edmund; Rosalind Cash as Goneril; Lee Chamberlin as Cordelia; Ellen Holly as Regan; Rene Auberjonois as Edgar; Tom Aldredge as Fool; Robert Stattel as Albany; Robert Lanchester as Cornwall; and Jean-Pierre Stewart as France.

In their 1988 anthology Shakespeare on Television, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen surveyed and quoted from several early reviews. Thus, one reviewer wrote that “Jones restrained his power altogether too much [but] was interesting and at times moving.” Another said that “Jones’ Lear sets standards that his fellow actors … can only sporadically approach. Jones’ performance tends to set to rest all the old bugaboos about ‘Lear’ not being actable. The rest of the production digs them.” Coursen himself called this production “ungimmicky, coherent, [and] often powerful,” asserting that “[c]amera work allowed both for effective closeups and for an appreciation of Director Sherin’s excellent blocking. Elements which might clash were blended into a cohesion I have never before seen on the tube,” and Coursen considered Jones “particularly brilliant in his efforts to keep Lear from weeping” (245).

Maurice Hindle, in his 2007 book titled Studying Shakespeare on Film, reported that this stage performance as part of the New York Shakespeare Festival had been recorded live, noting that an “evening performance was shot under arc lights and captured on tour cameras in a lively range of one, two, three and wide shots, with (more often than not) expertly managed shot/reverse shot sequences catching some of the best dramatic exchanges.” Hindle thought the performance “has many high points, though the close shots of Jones’s Lear frequently reveal a vitality and business of movement unconvincing for an ‘old and reverend’ man” over eighty. Agreeing with another critic that the women performers seemed “‘wooden,’” Hindle on the other hand called the dialog between Lear and the Fool “scintillatingly witty and well-timed” and commented that “the great virtue of the DVD is that it conveys the excitement and atmosphere of a live stage performance being enjoyed by a live audience, who sometimes even clap [for] the entrances and exits of actors” (70).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (304–5), said that the live audience helps us realize that the play is often quite funny. He extolled James Earl Jones’s talent as an actor (304); commented on the powerful scene with Cordelia’s body (305); reported that the whole text is performed and that the live performance enhances the horror; and praised the performances of the actors playing Lear, Kent, the Fool, Goneril, and Regan (305).

1974 Tony Davenall Production

Directed by Tony Davenall and starring Patrick Magee as King Lear, this television production also featured Patrick Mower as Edmund; Ann Lynn as Regan; Beth Harris as Goneril; Wendy Allnutt as Cordelia; Robert Coleby as Edgar; Ronald Radd as Gloucester; and Ellis Jones as the Fool.

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (305–6), called this production “mildly lit, neatly designed,” but not inventively directed (305). He termed the acting as “competent but understated,” especially Patrick Magee as Lear; mocked the final scene; and said the text had been badly cut (306).

1982 BBC Shakespeare Production

Directed by Jonathan Miller, this production starred Michael Hordern as King Lear; John Shrapnel as Earl of Kent; Norman Rodway as Earl of Gloucester; Michael Kitchen as Edmund; Gillian Barge as Goneril; Brenda Blethyn as Cordelia; Penelope Wilton as Regan; John Bird as Duke of Albany; Julian Curry as Duke of Cornwall; David Weston as Duke of Burgundy; Harry Waters as King of France; Anton Lesser as Edgar; and Frank Middlemass as Fool.

Discussing “The Production” (19–34) in the 1983 booklet the BBC issued to accompany this adaptation, Henry Fenwick reported that Jonathan Miller had directed the play twice before—once on stage, and then once for BBC television with a reduced text—and wanted to use this new BBC production partly to preserve his previous ideas and partly to change and develop them (19). In all three productions, Michael Hordern played Lear and Frank Middlemass played the Fool, partly because Miller thought the Fool’s sharpness befitted an old man and that having both the Fool and Lear played by old men made for interesting comparisons and contrasts (20). Middlemass agreed that a boy could not speak as frankly to Lear as the Fool does (20); he saw the fool as “the king’s conscience or the king’s common sense, and significantly, of course, when the king loses his marbles the fool disappears, [so that] when the brain goes, the Fool goes!” (21). Miller encouraged Middlemass to treat Lear harshly almost immediately (21) and placed the Fool silently into the very first scene to imply already his bond with Cordelia (22).

Hordern, as Lear, said that in this production he tried to act kingly in the opening scene, whereas in previous productions he had acted more as a father (22), while Miller called Lear “rash and impulsive and foolish and vain.” But he added that he “did feel that it was worth emphasising the panoply of kingship in order to emphasise the inadequacy of the king. I think that Shakespeare is always interested in the idea of the disparity between the office and the officer, the magnitude of the office and the inadequacy of the incumbent.” He cited the interaction of various themes: “the theme of nothingness, the theme of clothes, the theme of loss and growth through loss, and of redemption through suffering. The theme of recognition I hadn’t been quite so aware of—the theme of recognising and failing to recognise: people appear in disguise and are not recognised, and that is often regarded as a drawback of Shakespeare’s plotting but actually it is a topic of the play again” (23). He also thought that the relatively complete text used in this production helped reveal the “symphonic structure of the play” (23–24).

Colin Lowery, the set designer, created four different designs, all of which were eventually abandoned in favor of a set of “ultimate simplicity” (24) with an emphasis on single colors and exterior shots inspired by the artist named Christo, known for wrapping huge objects in fabric (25). Lighting designer John Treays and costume designer Raymond Hughes played important roles in this production; lighting in particular was used to significant effect, especially in the use of “soft lighting,” which is easier to achieve from a distance than close up (26), while the decision was made “to desaturate the picture of colour far more than would normally be done.” Teays explained, “it is difficult to create a grotty atmosphere on television with normal saturation—everything tends to come up far too colourful. … Certainly with tragedy the less color the better.” Fenwick added that the “directive was to go for a late-Renaissance look and to soften the silhouette” (27). The costume designer did use some ornamentation and some color (some examples of which Fenwick described in detail), which help in some cases to enhance characterization (28). Miller was pleased with the minimalist set and thought that similar sets could be used for other tragedies by Shakespeare, and he also liked the way the basic set emphasized the more elaborate costumes (29).

John Shrapnel, playing Kent, described him as an old family friend who tries to help Lear see more clearly the error of his ways. Fenwick wrote that “Kent, Shrapnel points out, is there through all the phases of Lear’s recovery, merely in attendance, commenting on it, finally apparently to die after the action of the play is over, rather as Horatio threatens to do after Hamlet’s death” (30). In fact, Shrapnel thought that Kent would ultimately “die from heartbreak” (30). Anton Lesser, as Edgar, discussed the ways Edgar evolves in and through his various disguises, beginning as a kind of academic brother, then becoming the powerless Tom, then becoming a kind of “‘Christlike warrior,’ and then, finally, ‘the next king.’ Each disguise is a different facet which he must either shed or live through in order to find, as we all have to find, some sort of core or real self” (30–31). Miller insisted that by killing Oswald, Edgar becomes “the avenging angel, the actual bringer of retribution”—an interpretation to which Lesser objected but nonetheless used (31). Lesser eventually came to think that by killing Oswald Edgar was killing his own flaws (31).

Norman Rodway, as Gloucester, saw his character initially as “a man who preserves the status quo, [a] manipulator, a politician.” He recounted how, as the blinded Gloucester, he was actually incapable, for eight hours, of seeing and of how he in fact became increasingly disoriented for that reason (32). Meanwhile, Miller, describing Edmund and other Shakespearean characters like Edmund, said: “I think Shakespeare himself probably found them attractive to some extent: he was very equivocal about them. The fact that he gives them such amusing lines to speak means to some extent that he sympathises with people who are able to question the official and the inherited and the traditional—but at the same time he was enough of a creature of his time to know that such men are dangerous, attractive and intolerable.” Commenting on Lear, Hordern remarked that “He’s a dreadful old man …. Let’s face it, he’s a bloody awful father and he’s just not used to being crossed either as a father or as a king. …” (33).

In their innovative 1988 anthology Shakespeare on Television, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen gathered, surveyed, and quoted from various reviews published in 1982. A writer for the Los Angeles Times called the BBC production “stark, clean, chilling” and “utterly compelling” and considered the storm scene “brilliant,” while a writer for the Washington Post praised Hordern’s Lear but found “too much self-pity in his madness” while additionally considering “Anton Lesser’s Edgar’s feigned madness as a gibbering, drooling idiot … also a mistake.” Nonetheless, this reviewer considered “the essential drama … developed clearly” and concluded by calling this production a “clearly conceived and well realized Lear.” A commentator for the London Times wrote that Hordern was “a Lear of kingly hubris and destructive vanity but with a pathos that constrained us from assigning blame” (287) and thought that Frank Middlemass as the Fool gave “the worn wit of an aging jester a sharpened edge and heightening the intimacy between man and master” and called the cast in general “splendid” (288). Writing for the Times Literary Supplement, another reviewer noted the production’s “visual bareness” and said that thanks to such bareness “[o]ur attention is directed to watch [the acting] intently, to concentrate our minds wonderfully on what is going on,” so that the “play’s story is clearly put forward, and despite its length never drags.” Nonetheless, this writer thought that “there is still too much of the unexplained and the unnecessary which distracts the viewer from the action” and felt that this “Lear is not sufficiently regal; there is no apparent majesty in him. … Above all,” this writer continued, “it is puzzling why so much weight is placed on the first two acts, which run for nearly an hour and a half”—a decision that had “the effect of breaking up the continuous action of the first three acts, [so that] the second half of the play is rather rushed, with more cuts, and a distinctly episodic feeling about it, as against the much fuller and better integrated first half.” Yet despite these problems, the review found Hordern’s Lear “quite astonishingly good” but also condemned Middlemass as “a tiresome and unwitty, miscast Fool.” The review added that although the BBCs Kent, despite his “unfetching appearance” and “predictable yokel’s accent,” was “convincing,” the production was damaged by too “much stumbling and mumbling elsewhere in the cast.” Jonathan Miller was criticized for “too much intrusive, directorial heavy-handedness to allow us to concentrate on the words themselves, or to feel that we are getting beyond a messy set of domestic and family squabbles,” and Miller’s Lear in general was called “hasty and inconsistent,” with actors isolated “from the emotional life implied by the words they speak” and an absence of “[m]any large-scale stage actions called for in the dialogue” (288). According to this reviewer, “Most of the vigorous movement that makes Shakespeare’s scripts so dramatic seems to have been suppressed, and only action that wouldn’t move out of the fixed camera frame remains.” Moreover, this writer thought that “Miller rejects conventional film and video technique and relies instead on the unmoving frame into which he brings more and more actors, usually at very close range. Many scenes resemble football huddles as three, four or even five speakers stand cheek to cheek and nose to nose for minutes on end.” In addition, this writer thought that the “undifferentiated black-and-white costumes generally serve to reduce the variety and complexity of characters in this Lear.” The reviewer even found himself “winc[ing]” at certain scenes and asking, “what prompts them? We can’t tell from the words being said, and we can’t tell from any chain of consistent actions or meanings presented earlier in the play” (289).

In an essay from 1986 titled “Two Lears for Television: An Exploration of Televisual Strategies,” Hardy M. Cook wrote that “Miller’s actors perform in ensemble, consistent with his view of the play that the family is a metaphor for the state. Michael Hordern graciously defers to the other members of the cast, who all give subdued performances consistent with many of Miller’s beliefs about how Shakespeare should be acted for television.” According to Cook “Miller uses a relatively static camera which records fairly long takes of the actors—generally in medium two-shots, three-shots, and four-shots, as opposed to Elliott’s shorter takes [in a film from 1984] and dominating one-shots” (179–80). Cook contended that “Miller’s televisual strategies enable viewers to watch Shakespeare on television in a manner that is similar to the theatrical experience. … Miller’s style accomplishes this through a greater, uninterrupted, continuity of dramatic space and time; a more active relationship between the spectator and the object; more choice about where and how to direct one’s attention while viewing a production; and a greater weight given to the spoken word” (186).

In the second edition (2004) of Alexander Leggatt’s study of performances for King Lear, he noted that “Miller defended his choice of a Renaissance setting for this play on the grounds that Christianity and sovereignty are both seventeenth-century themes.” He sought to emphasize not a conflict between humans and nature but between humans and society, so that his production is “bare of literal images of the natural world” (119). Noting that in “Miller’s production we are in a Christian world” and that “the updating is frank and decisive,” Leggatt seemed bothered by some of the anachronism, commenting that the “Jacobean costumes are rich and elaborate but generalized, almost standard-issue uniforms. The predominant colour is black” (120), and although “the production is in colour, … the costumes, though full of different textures, are uniformly black, varied by grey and brown tones in the interior and exterior scenes respectively.” Edgar and the Fool are given some touches of color, but this “device is used so sparingly that the attention drawn to the Fool and Edgar seems disproportionate.” Observing that “Miller and his lighting designer decided to desaturate the picture of colour by an unusual thirty per cent,” Leggatt noted that “[m]usic is also used sparingly” (121). Commenting on the filming, he remarked that the camera “remains still for long periods, concentrating on [characters’] faces” (122) and that often “two characters address each other in profile, from either side of the screen, [while] a third character appears full-face in the background between them.” But he thought that the “closeness necessary to bring the watchers into the shot is sometimes unnatural, and one is all too aware of a director’s decision” (123), so that the effect is often unnatural. He commented that even in “the storm scenes the focus is strongly on the actors” and that the “battle, so important for Noble and Kozintsev, is simply not” present in the BBC production, while the “fight between Oswald and Edgar is over in seconds.” Leggatt thought that there “are moments when a more full-out playing might be useful: Edgar’s Tom impersonation reduces him too often to a weak, clenched whimper.” But he added that “the domestic scale of the play is well served. Gloucester’s family really seems a family,” and “Hordern’s account [of Lear] puts the first and heaviest emphasis on the father, not the king. His entrance … is without pageantry or music. We hear only footsteps on the wooden floor and the rustling of costumes” (127). Leggatt concluded that the “BBC production uses its medium intelligently and is full of perceptive, sometimes brilliant insights. But as the Fool lectures more than he clowns … so this production may be too correct, too intelligent, not quite vulgar enough” (130–31).

In a 1994 essay titled “Representing King Lear on Screen: From Metatheatre to ‘Metacinema,’” Kenneth Rothwell noted the influence of a previous stage version; commented on Miller’s determination to avoid a kingly Lear; praised “Hordern’s thoroughly professional and competent performance in this startlingly original conception of the old king”; admired Frank Middlemass’s acting as the Fool; but wondered if the production had gone too far in rejecting Lear’s regality (226–27). He also stressed Miller’s intention to exploit television fully (228).

Describing his own 2008 essay “Revisiting the Olivier King Lear on Television” in an end-of-the-book abstract, Anthony Davies wrote that he “argues against the validity of comparing Michael Elliott’s TV King Lear with the films of Peter Brook (1971), Grigori Kozintsev (1969), and Akira Kurosawa (1985). Rather [he] examines in some detail the editing priorities in the opening scene of the play to illustrate the lucid narrative line of Elliott’s production.” Davies asserted that “Elliott’s editing—despite its reliance on montage—is less a self-conscious device than Jonathan Miller’s long takes in his production for the BBC TV series” (1982). While Elliott’s settings “have been criticised for the incongruity of some realistic detail, the camera’s capacity for capturing the subtleties of the performances, pre-eminently Olivier’s, gives this production an enduring appeal.”

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (306–8), admired this production’s subtlety and intelligent direction (306–7); noted the dark, plain set; and commended Michael Hordern’s inventiveness as Lear (307). He praised the fuller-than-usual storm scenes (307) and admired the performance of this Fool and the terrifying blinding of Gloucester (308).

In an essay from 2017 titled “The Blinding of Gloucester: Trauma and Morality in Some Films of Shakespeare’s King Lear,” Robert C. Evans, after discussing the blinding scene in detail, noted that when “Regan (speaking casually, as if she were talking about matching drapes) suggests plucking out the other eye, Gloucester goes into a frenzy; he stamps his feet and shrieks out words not written by Shakespeare but effective nonetheless: ‘no no no no no no !!!!!’ This shrieking is so traumatizing that one of the men behind the chair (not, interestingly, the one who earlier had been looking down) suddenly rushes forward and tries to prevent Cornwall from proceeding.” Evans reported that as this man “and Cornwall struggle, the other man from behind the chair tries to restrain a now very angry Regan. Before Cornwall can even fully withdraw his sword to fight the virtuous servant, Regan grabs a dagger, runs around the back of the chair, and stabs the servant in the back,” so that she “nearly matches—if she does not in some ways surpass—her husband’s capacity for immoral behavior” (111–12).

1983 Michael Elliott Production

Directed by Michael Elliott, this adaptation starred Laurence Olivier as King Lear; Colin Blakely as Earl of Kent; Anna Calder-Marshall as Cordelia; Jeremy Kemp as Duke of Cornwall; Robert Lang as Duke of Albany; Robert Lindsay as Edmund; Leo McKern as Earl of Gloucester; David Threlfall as Edgar; Dorothy Tutin as Goneril; John Hurt as Fool; Diana Rigg as Regan; Brian Cox as Duke of Burgundy; and Edward Petherbridge as King of France.

In their pioneering 1988 anthology Shakespeare on Television, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen surveyed numerous reviews from 1983. One, in the London Times, called the Elliott production “resolutely theatrical and studio-bound” but was intrigued by Olivier. Another, in the Christian Science Monitor, called Olivier’s performance “magical” and his Lear “pitiable,” admiring the way Lear’s madness was played “and the delicate strength of his final gentle lucidity.” This reviewer found “[a]rticulate precision” in Olivier’s whole performance; praised other cast members (such as John Hurt); and wrote that the “acting [is] helped … by a considerable and powerful use of the close-up,” concluding that “Olivier’s Lear is surely an instant classic.” A third reviewer, while admiring the range of Olivier’s voice, doubted that King Lear could be “squeezed into a small box” but nonetheless called much of the acting “spectacular” and “beautiful” (299) and the diction lucid (299–300).

A fourth commentator called Olivier’s king “one of the very great Lears”; a fifth praised the rest of the cast (especially Blakely and Hurt) as “uniformly brilliant” but considered Olivier’s Lear too subdued but nonetheless “still a rare and profound performance.” Although a writer for the Washington Post praised Olivier’s “forceful and fascinating performance” in a “determinedly full-throttle production,” a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times thought the “realistic settings” looked “phony.” Stanley Wells, an important scholar writing in the Times Literary Supplement, praised Elliott’s “sensitive production”; noted the ways its setting recalled nineteenth-century stagings; and said that this effort was “clearly designed to enable Olivier, who has not been fit enough to appear on the stage for some years, and who has not acted in Shakespeare since 1974, to play Lear for the first time since 1946. Inevitably, the focus of interest is on his performance, though a very strong supporting cast has been assembled.” Wells was a bit disappointed by the performances of John Hurt and Robert Lindsay, but he admired most of the other actors and wrote that “Leo McKern passes from choleric geniality to powerful suffering as Gloucester.” He found Olivier’s Lear initially simply “foolish rather than tyrannical; there is much reasonableness in his attitude; and he has immense charm: a quality not often associated with Lear, but which gains our sympathetic indulgence from the start.” He thought that “Olivier’s voice is occasionally hoarse, and there are a few fluffs” but said that the aging actor could “scarcely have given a more touching” performance (300).

Steven Urkowitz, writing in 1983 in the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, said that the Elliott production featured “a superbly chosen company … at the height of their powers” (2) and declared that “[e]very aspect of televised drama works magnificently in this performance —acting, direction, scenic and costume design, camera-work, music, choreographed stage fighting, literary interpretation of Shakespearean poetry, subtle control of dramatic illusion and audience response.” He thought that all of the performers find surprising life and variety in the characters they play. “Unafraid to show us their ugliness or weakness, they are believable when they rise to ferocity, grace or grandeur,” even in small roles. He did find the storm scene a bit distracting because the sound effects made it difficult to hear all of Lear’s words, and he also suggested that for “viewers familiar with the text, too many intrusive changes appear in the screenplay” (2), especially at the end. On the whole, however, he added to the chorus of praise this production elicited.

In a 1986 essay titled “Two Lears for Television: An Exploration of Televisual Strategies,” Hardy M. Cook compared the Elliott production with the one recently directed by Jonathan Miller for the BBC. He wrote that the “acting styles in these two Lears differ in many significant ways. Michael Elliott conceived of his Lear as existing in a mythic world with characters who appear somewhat larger than life. Naturally following from this is his emphasis on individual performances. There is little doubt that the casting of Olivier in the title role of what was officially billed as Laurence Olivier’s King Lear was the principal reason for the production.” Cook thought that “Olivier had a splendid cast to back him up, and the members of that cast turned in some memorable, indeed unforgettable, performances. The mise en scéne and editing of this production call attention to these individual performances with a preponderance of closely framed one-shots and rapid cutting—the effects of which are to accentuate the faces of the actors and the slightest nuances of expression that flicker across them. However, I intend to consider in a moment what this strategy denies us on television” (179). Nonetheless, Cook felt that viewers “should also be aware of what we are missing in a production of Shakespeare that is directed using montage techniques” (185).

Originally discussing this version of the play in the 1991 first edition of his book on performances of the drama (132–43), Alexander Leggatt found it in “many respects … strikingly old-fashioned” and called it “less fully tuned to the television medium than the BBC version is. It draws to some extent on the 1946 Old Vic production, which Olivier directed and starred in” (132). He observed that outside scenes in this new version generally show “a haze in the air; the sun is filtered through mist, and mist hangs on the hillsides. This,” he commented, “is a technical device to conceal the fact that we are in a studio,” but “the device is obvious enough that there is no serious intention to fool us” (133). Other details contributed to a sense of realism, so that in “creating such a solidly physical world the production is actually responding to an aspect of the play’s language, in which we are never far from the animal kingdom,” which is visible in slight details. Therefore, “[c]osmic though its implications may be, the experience of the play is grounded in practical everyday reality, and one of its concerns is the business of survival: what to eat, what to wear, where to find shelter.” Realism is reflected even in such matters as “Kent’s disguise, which is usually token and conventional [but which] really is a [convincing] disguise here” (135). According to Leggatt, “The use of realistic detail takes the production closer to the conventions of the feature film than to the spare, stylized television idiom evolved by Miller for the BBC series. The duel between the brothers,” for example, “is pure Hollywood,” and while the “bridging passages” Miller added to the BBC version “are few and quick,” Elliott’s, by contrast, “are more extended and realistic.” Leggatt commented “[b]oth television versions [the BBC’s and Elliott’s] follow the text closely, taking nothing like the liberties of the Brook and Kozintsev films. But of the two the Olivier version makes more attempts to open the play out in a cinematic way, to fill out background and action.” But Leggatt felt that the “trouble is that these attempts are tentative: a television production is trying to be a feature film, without having quite the resources. Music is used much more heavily than in the BBC version, but it does not have the quality of the Shostakovich score” found in Kozintsev’s film (138).

“Generally speaking,” Leggatt thought, “Miller keeps his actors in a studio while Elliott puts his in a series of pictures.” He considered their performances “for the most part solid accounts of the familiar view of the characters” but remarked that “at times they quiver with emotion in a manner that suggests the stock Shakespearian acting of the 1940s and 1950s.” Sometimes, according to Leggatt, the performances are stereotypical: “Jeremy Kemp’s Cornwall is obviously belligerent; you just have to look at him to know he’s a villain,” and “John Hurt’s Fool is sane, bitter and sensitive, but not essentially comic,” so that he, like the BBC Fool, “functions as a conscience, not as an entertainer.” Leggatt thought that “[w]hen the conventional readings are filled out, it is more by the striking personalities of the actors than by any fresh thinking in the interpretation,” adding that “Of all the supporting performances, Rigg’s is the only one that uses lightness, precision and irony. Against her, the other actors look a bit stodgy”—except for Olivier’s Lear, whose comments about his performance suggest that “he was not aiming for anything cosmic or portentous,” so that Leggatt finds “nothing solemn in his approach.” But Leggatt found Olivier’s “energy … considerable, the technique as brilliant as ever; only in the wayward memory” (evident in some paraphrasing of lines) “is there a sign of failing resources” in the aging, aged actor (140). Remarking that “the wind we hear under the last few speeches … suggests that the world is still bleak and dangerous. And within the formal framework, we have seen a life end not with serene acceptance but with a continuing struggle.” Leggatt concluded that the “production that surrounds Olivier’s performance is largely conservative and conventional, solid rather than exciting; but the central performance, like the play itself, is dangerously, unpredictably alive” (143).

In a 1994 essay titled “Representing King Lear on Screen: From Metatheatre to ‘Metacinema,’” Kenneth Rothwell saw the relevance of this production to Olivier’s own life and career; noted the “timelessness” suggested by the set (228); complimented Olivier’s “canny stage business”; admired Olivier’s voice (229); but ended by doubting the production’s complete success (230).

Five years later, in his 1999 history of Shakespeare on film, Rothwell wrote that the Elliott production, like others made for television, “is actor-centered” but said that “Elliott encoded visual signposts expressive of the spiritual turmoil,” such as a set resembling “Stonehenge itself.” He wrote that “Olivier’s prodigious acting skills remain intact,” as evident in his “uncanny gift for rolling vowels, and in the body language” he often uses (70). Unlike Leggatt, who thought the final tone of this Lear was somewhat ominous, Rothwell suggested that “in the last moments when Olivier appears in full color, close-shaven, pink-cheeked, cherubic, robed in white, in his new cleanliness ready to be reborn, he takes the Lear figure close to heavenly enthronement” with an “ethereal Cordelia thrown in for good measure” (197).

Describing his own 2008 essay “Revisiting the Olivier King Lear on Television” in an end-of-the-book abstract, Davies wrote that he “argues against the validity of comparing Michael Elliott’s TV King Lear with the films of Peter Brook (1971), Grigori Kozintsev (1969), and Akira Kurosawa (1985). Rather [he] examines in some detail the editing priorities in the opening scene of the play to illustrate the lucid narrative line of Elliott’s production.” Davies asserted that “Elliott’s editing—despite its reliance on montage—is less a self-conscious device than Jonathan Miller’s long takes in his production for the BBC TV series (1982). While Elliott’s settings have been criticised for the incongruity of some realistic detail, the camera’s capacity for capturing the subtleties of the performances, pre-eminently Olivier’s, gives this production an enduring appeal.”

In his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (308–10), Peter Cochran extolled Michael Elliott and commended the cast (308) but found much of the music too obvious. Noting that Olivier plays an elderly Lear and praising his performance in general (309), Cochran also admired the scene at Dover; noted the use of realistic details in the setting and props; but once again censured the intrusive music (310).

Robert C. Evans, in an essay from 2017 titled “The Blinding of Gloucester: Trauma and Morality in Some Films of Shakespeare’s King Lear,” wrote that “[p]erhaps the most shocking aspect of the 1983 blinding scene (besides the eventual blinding itself) is the sheer ferocious contempt with which Regan treats Gloucester. She spits in his face; pulls out a chunk of his beard; and then finally, angrily crams her face within inches of his as she demands to know why Gloucester sent Lear to Dover” (113). In fact, Evans continued, “[i]f there is anything especially traumatizing in this version of the blinding of Gloucester, it is almost certainly Regan’s very active role, which she thoroughly enjoys. The BBC Regan had moved in this direction but had not gone quite as far. If the 1983 Cornwall seems almost melodramatically crazed, the 1983 Regan seems almost hysterically sadistic. In this version of Lear, a beautiful woman is shown to be a merciless interrogator, an active inventor of additional tortures, and a self-possessed (and quite literal) back-stabber. Her sheer immorality is shocking” (115).

1998 Richard Eyre Production

This version, directed by Richard Eyre, starred Ian Holm as Lear; Paul Rhys as Edgar; Finbar Lynch as Edmund; Timothy West as Gloucester; David Burke as Kent; Barbara Flynn as Goneril; Amanda Redman as Regan; Victoria Hamilton as Cordelia; David Lyon as Albany; Michael Simkins as Cornwall; Adrian Irvine as King of France; Nicholas R. Bailey as Burgundy; and Michael Bryant as the Fool.

Discussing this production in the 2004 second edition of his 1991 book on King Lear in performance (144–68), Alexander Leggatt noted that it was “closely based on a stage production” performed in a small theater, thus “allowing an intimacy equivalent to the intimacy of television” (144). He provided much discussion of the set, the costuming, the special effects, and other matters (144–49) and observed the “prominence of the scenic devices,” the use of the “voice-over soliloquy” (149), and the ways such soliloquies are “used to tighten scene transitions, as a voice from one scene overlaps into the first visual images from the next, or a voice-over begins the next scene before the previous one is quite finished.” Leggatt thought that the rapid “pace and urgency” of this adaptation “are bound up with a pervasive anger. There is,” he commented, “a surprising, even dangerous amount of shouting in this production, as though all the characters, not just Lear, are under a pressure that leads to regular explosions” (150). He commented that “[m]ass entrances—the opening court procession, Gloucester led to his blinding, Lear and Cordelia under arrest —are taken at quick-march tempo,” and in “the final scene the action becomes physically explosive. The camera—which has behaved sedately enough till now, recording the action without calling attention to itself—seems to go out of control as it films the brothers’ duel, swaying about and changing angle erratically.” The production’s general rapidity may have been influence by the fact that “[w]hat was three and a half hours on stage … is two and a half hours on the screen,” partly because “[t]his version is heavily cut, more so than either of the other television versions [Jonathan Miller’s and Richard Eyre’s] we have looked at.” Therefore, “the political dimension of the play is severely curtailed,” as is its concern “with social justice” instead, this Lear is mainly “concerned with his Fool.” Leggatt thought that “[i]t is hard for the play, even in this cut version, not to make us think about poverty, suffering and injustice. But we have lost many of the specifics.” Similarly, he wrote that even though this “is also a play about madness,” in this production “even that dimension is somewhat reduced. We focus on Lear’s madness as personal suffering, rather than as a vehicle for satiric insight.” Although in some productions the Fool himself goes mad, “Michael Bryant’s Fool is sane and lucid. More striking,” Leggatt said, “is the reduction of Poor Tom,” who, in this version, unusually seems less mad and less emphasized than in other adaptations (152). “In politics and madness,” Leggatt wrote, “King Lear is a play that goes to the edge, and over. This production can be accused of pulling back” (153).

Commenting on such matters as an emphasis on “hurt family feelings,” the use of “abstract settings,” a “preference for reaction shots over long takes” (155), Leggatt also offered detailed assessments of the performances of the production’s actresses. He was particularly impressed by Lear’s efforts, near the conclusion, to make renewed emotional contact with Cordelia, writing that eventually “Lear succeeds: in one of the production’s most poignant reaction shots, he gets Cordelia to smile. That done, they turn and defy Edmund together. The death of this Cordelia is not,” according to Leggatt, “the breaking of a butterfly: it is the snuffing out of a vital, passionate spirit, and it has seldom seemed so outrageous.” Leggatt was as impressed by this production’s Fool as he was by its Cordelia (161), also remarking that this “is a highly emotional Lear, with a short fuse and an unpredictable temper. But, being volatile, he can achieve sudden insights into himself even as he attacks others.” He did regret that the “cutting in the television version removes some of the range of the Lear-Gloucester scene, so that it seems less central than it has in other productions,” but he remarked that this omission “only throws into higher relief Lear’s reunion with Cordelia” (166). Leggatt felt that in its final image of bodies heaped indiscriminately into a cart, this “production finally makes a decisive breakout from its sealed, ahistorical world into history, our history.” He suggested that this image implied that “all these relationships [depicted earlier in the play], as painful and vital as they have been, and all the closely realized individuals who have been created for us with such care, come to one common end” (168).

In his 2002 book Shakespeare in Space (54–57), Herbert R. Coursen praised the actors for “command[ing] both the verse and their characters” (54), saying that “Holm gives a biting performance as Lear. He has always been a king and he has lived without a wife for a long time. His emotions have atrophied, even as his intelligence has sharpened. He controls his environment completely” until he no longer finds the word “death” amusing. Coursen did find the “storm scenes … too rain-swept,” commenting that the “lines are hard to hear unless you know them already” (56), and he also regretted the fact that “Eyre excises much of the Fool. Here, he is another older man, but Michael Bryant’s is a moving characterization, showing that another way of living a life during the same span of time can grow toward wisdom.” This Fool, according to Coursen “is particularly powerful as he tries to continue to function—to serve Lear—even as he is dying.” Coursen also noted that “[m]uch of Edgar is gone, including all of his asides, but those,” he wrote, “are welcome deletions. Some people, however, must wonder what he is doing with Gloucester. Is the allegory into which he coerces his blind father Edgar’s revenge for Gloucester’s disinheriting him? That motive makes sense, and, without the mawkish rationale, it does here.” But Coursen faulted the decision to cut some of the king’s final speeches—speeches that “would have underscored Lear’s new status as a seer into things—ironic, of course, in view of his own role in endangering Cordelia a few scenes later.” But those speeches, he concluded, “may have been deemed too long and complicated for today’s audience or, in the instance of Lear’s misogyny, too offensive” (57).

Michael A. Anderegg, in his 2004 book Cinematic Shakespeare (172–74), found Ian Holm’s Lear “acerbic, malicious, ill-tempered, and physically unimposing,” saying that “he gives very little in the way of easy sentiment. This is a Lear who, in one sense, deserves what he gets” (173). In this production, he wrote, “All space is abstracted, all time indefinable,” although he did add that “[b]y avoiding the construction of a detailed, three-dimensional space, the production foregrounds the performers” (173).

In his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (315–17), Peter Cochran praised Holm’s energy and forcefulness; admired the way this Goneril acted (315); thought things got off to a confusing start; and regretted unfortunate cuts and cheap costumes (316). Questioning details of the setting and costumes but especially faulting the final scene (partly because it featured too few people), he concluded that in this “hit-or-miss production” the hits and misses were roughly equal (317).

1999 Brian Blessed Production

Directed by Directors Brian Blessed and Tony Rotherham and starring Blessed as King Lear, this production also featured Hildegard Neil as The Fool; Jason Riddington as Edmund; Phillipa Peak as Cordelia; Claire Laurie as Regan; and Caroline Lennon as Goneril.

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (313–15), thought that this version got off to an odd start, lamented the limited range of Blessed’s ability as an actor, and soon found him annoying (313). Saying that Blessed underplayed the mad scene, Cochran also faulted various scenes with Goneril and regretted Blessed’s own involvement in this undertaking (314–15).

2008 Trevor Nunn Production

This production, directed by Trevor Nunn, starred Ian McKellen as Lear; Romola Garai as Cordelia; William Gaunt as Earl of Gloucester; Jonathan Hyde as Earl of Kent; Philip Winchester as Edmund; Sylvester McCoy as the Fool; Frances Barber as Goneril; Monica Dolan as Regan; Guy Williams as Duke of Cornwall; Ben Meyjes as Edgar; Julian Harries as Duke of Albany; Peter Hinton as Duke of Burgundy; and Ben Addis as King of France.

In his 2010 book Contemporary Shakespeare Production (170–72), Herbert R. Coursen, regretting the ways some of Cordelia’s words are cut from this production’s opening scene, criticized various other as well. He praised the ways Lear, Goneril, and Regan are performed and the way the “competition for Edmund” is portrayed (170) and particularly admired the hovel scene. He thought the final “reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia is moving”; found the battle of Edgar and Edmund “exciting” and convincingly “dangerous”; and in general considered this production “very good” (171).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (317–20), objected to some inconsistencies in the various kinds of religion this production implies; described various details (318–19); reported that the Fool is shown being hanged (319); and praised the way Lear is reconciled to Cordelia (319–20).

Bibliography