"KING LEAR"
On Stage
Orson and William
By J. L. Pimsleur
Orson Welles, after about seven years of work and play in Rome, Florence, the Riviera and other points cosmopolitan, finally let himself be persuaded by producers Martin Gabel and Henry M. Margolis to take a sabbatical and briefly return to New York. Their idea was to run a limited engagement at the City Center, with the hope of popularizing Mr. Welles' worthy project for (reintroducing a repertory theatre to New York. For his first play Mr. Welles chose "King Lear," which opened Thursday evening, starring himself and featuring Viveca Lindfors and Geraldine Fitzgerald. But if the goings on during preview week at the City Center were any indication of what Mr. Welles has in mind for the future, it's best that he forget the whole thing.
"King Lear", that tragedy of two old men who learned too little too late, is not, in this reviewer's opinion, Shakespeare at his very best. In the first place, Lear never completely emerges as the tragic character he is supposed to be. He is too much to blame for his own fate. A man can't beat himself over the head and then revile the Gods for treating him so cruelly. Moreover, Lear is too unintelligent and insensitive to be a great dramatic hero. He cannot even understand the words of his fool, whose meaning is so true and clear to men like Edgar and Kent. He is too full of that weakening admixture of egotism and self-pity which delude him into imagining himself the wise and mighty ruler he never could have been.
Even at the end there is a serious question as to how much he has really learned. Is he ever made aware of the tragedy which his pretense and self love have brought upon all those who surround him, or does he merely conclude that he made the simple mistake of picking the wrong girls— that Cordelia would have been more flattering to his ego after all. Even Gloucester knew better than that. But the play has its other drawbacks. Characters like Regan, Goneril and Edmund are rather obvious villains, one-dimensional individuals, not very subtle. Finally, there is a bit too much bombast and overbearing action in such as the mad scenes and the blinding of Gloucester's eyes ("out vile jelly").
If the production of "King Lear" is handled with dignity and style, its flaws are swept away and lost in the power of Shakespeare's poetry. Unfortunately Mr. Welles insisted not only upon emphasizing everything banal and bombastic in the production but, what is far worse, he added his own peculiar kind of pomposity which makes the play utterly unbearable. All sense, all awareness of Shakespeare's art, is overwhelmed by the spectacle of Welles flinging himself about the stage with reckless abandon, now growling his histrionics, now in Wagnerian hysterics. But Welles's acting is the best part of the activity.
His staging is terrible. All sequence is lost as sets are revolved with dizzying rapidity. The lighting is an insult to the intelligence of the audience. Wells has staged about half the play in such an ultra-subdued purplish that it is at times almost impossible to discern what is transpiring on stage, as if the audience couldn't understand that a scene was supposed to take place at night unless Mr. Welles turned all the lights out.
The casting is quite bad. Viveca Lindfors, beautiful and talented though she be, is not Cordelia. Her very noticeable Scandinavian accent is a definite intrusion making it difficult for the audience to catch her lines. And Geraldine Fitzgerald's lisp hampers the effectiveness of Goneril's invective. Mr. Welles direction is also undistinguished. Lester Rawlins plays Gloucester more like a doddering Polonius than like the Earl. Robert Fletcher and John Colicos though are capable enough as Edgar and Edmund and the rest of the cast have no trouble remembering their lines.
Word must be made of the ''background music" with which Mr. Welles has seen fit to embellish his (not Shakespeare's) "King Lear." The uninspired composition by Marc Blitztein, with a tape recorder "sound score" arranged by Professors Luening and Ussachevsky, add absolutely nothing to an understanding or enjoyment of the play. It is just another one of those irrelevancies and encumbrances which Mr. Welles insists upon tacking onto his productions, apparently to be "different." The music is just loud and distracting enough to make it doubly difficult to hear what should be happening on stage. And it seems to vary between what sounds like background support for science fiction films and an accompaniment for the Lone Ranger. At one point during Act 3, when the galloping horse motif is turned on, one would fully expect Lear's henchman Kent to blurt out something like "Kimosabay," if one could hear what was going on at all. Theodore Cooper's scenery has not a single redeeming feature in the entire production.
We sympathize wholeheartedly with Mr. Welles in his desire to establish a classical repertory theater company here if only because, in his own words, "the great works of dramatic literature are nowadays not given as many performances as they deserve." But it seems to us that in this Wellesian production of "King Lear," the most expensive undertaking of City Center's long and distinguished career, Mr. Welles has not to his own self been true.
Since he is far more dedicated to being "original" than artistically faithful, he always runs the great risk of hybridizing those classics which he seeks to preserve. So his own special brand of Shakespeare—from his film versions of "Macbeth" and "Othello" —to his current "King Lear"—are usually a case of too much Welles and too little Shakespeare, and are always a matter, In Herb Black's words, of "painting the lilly".
At least, however, when Mr. Welles is involved in a production, one knows where to fix responsibility. For in "King Lear" the costumes were based upon drawings by Mr. Welles, the scenery upon designs after sketches by Mr. Welles, and Mr. Welles produced, directed and starred. So when it comes to a defense of the current production of "King Lear" at the City Center, the full burden of proof will have to fall upon Orson Welles.
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