King Lear Director's Notes

Director's Note

“We wish that we could pass this play over and say nothing about it. All that we can say must fall far short of the subject; or even of what we ourselves conceive of it. To attempt to give a description of the play itself or of its effect upon the mind, is mere impertinence: yet we must say something. — It is then the best of all Shakespeare’s plays, for it is the one in which he was the most in earnest. He was here fairly caught in the web of his own imagination. The passion which he has taken as his subject is that which strikes its root deepest into the human heart; of which the bond is the hardest to be unloosed; and the cancelling and tearing to pieces of which gives the greatest revulsion to the frame. This depth of nature, this force of passion, this tug and war of the elements of our being, this firm faith in filial piety . . . this is what Shakespeare has given, and what nobody else but he could give.”
William Hazlitt
Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817)

"The power of Edgar's disturbing statement -

'We that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long'
Edgar - King Lear 5.3

- a statement that rings like a half-open question – is that it carries no moral overtones at all. He does not suggest for one moment that youth or age, seeing or not seeing, are in any way superior, inferior, more desirable or less desirable one than the other. In fact we are compelled to face a play which refuses all moralizing – a play which we begin to see not as a narrative any longer, but as a vast, complex, coherent poem designed to study the power and the emptiness of nothing – the positive and negative aspects latent in the zero.”
Peter Brook
The Empty Space (1968)

William Hazlitt describes King Lear perfectly; Peter Brook gives it a point-of-view: “[a] poem designed to study the power and emptiness of nothing.” It’s as if Brook were describing Samuel Becket’s plays: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, Krapp’s Last Tape . . .

"Never, never, never, never, never."
Lear - King Lear 5.3

- Tim Ocel, Director of King Lear