An article I’ve written for the Japanese audience on King Lear.

On seeing. Not seeing. Speaking and silence.

KING LEAR

“Perhaps I should be Servant 2”…

        It is a huge honour for me and the UK team to be making the ‘Ninagawa Memorial Production’ at Theatre Cocoon. I have an imperfect memory of seeing Ninagawa san’s Pericles on my birthday at the National Theatre in London and it made me reassess everything I thought I knew about Shakespeare. Every moment seemed so full, teetering on the edge of some epic poetic expression, connected totally to the body and to the imagination. When Yuko Tanaka’s Marina, imprisoned in the brothel wished she was a bird, she became a bird. I saw many more celebrated productions, including the ‘Kabuki’ Macbeth, as the Witches foretold Macbeth’s fate in a blizzard of cherry blossom. His image of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, bleeding silk crimson ribbons from her mouth, expressed both visceral horror, and a profound domestic tragedy about her inability to speak to her father now innocence had been lost.

        Coming to Japan to make theatre began as a pilgrimage. And after five productions for the Discover World Theatre series, in which we have been challenged and transformed as artists, it feels like coming home. We are so happy to be collaborating once more with so many eminent Japanese theatre artists, and the many beloved actors that we have worked with over the past ten years, and in particular Shinobu Otake with whom it all began in 2015 with Orpheus Descending. Shinobu san now follows a line of distinguished female actors on the world stage to play King Lear, here in Tokyo in 2025.

        1606: the year of King Lear’s first performances, was a febrile time in Shakespeare’s England. After a succession crisis, following the death of the childless Elizabeth I, James VI of Scotland, the son of Mary Queen Of Scots, became King of England. He set about unifying the Kingdoms of England and Scotland between whom there had been hundreds of years of distrust and conflict. A country that was henceforth to be known as ‘Great Britain’. This foisted upon the people of England and Scotland a savagely divisive identity crisis they didn’t know they had, along with a series of searching constitutional questions about the locus of sovereignty, indeed Kingship itself. And it posed searching questions about loyalty. To whom or what, should a subject owe their loyalty?

        The coronation of the new king, also brought to the surface simmering religious tensions between catholics and protestants that had lay dormant under the reign of Elizabeth I, who had declared that she ‘had no desire to make windows in to men’s souls’. That was apart from the jockeying for power and influence in the new royal court. Unsurprisingly, James survived two plots against his life in the first year of his reign. Which by report, made the King increasingly nervous, distrustful, thin-skinned, conspiracy obsessed and prone to fly in to a rage.

        It was in the November of 1605 that many of these social, religious and political tensions came to a terrifying head. A plot involving two and a half tonnes of gunpowder planted in the basement of the Houses Of Parliament by a cabal of disaffected Catholics, was intended to be ignited during the state opening of parliament. It would have killed the King himself, and hundreds of the most powerful people in Britain. The aim: to cause a power vacuum, induce chaos in the state and precipitate a constitutional crisis as a result of which, the conspirators would install a pro-Catholic monarch on the English throne. It was an attempt to set the clock back sixty years, a nostalgia to restore a halcyon moment in England’s recent past, that might never have existed in the first place.

        But the plot was discovered, the perpetrators rounded up and tortured, they were hung until nearly dead, cut down, castrated and had their hearts cut out in their last moments of consciousness. While by no means the driving force behind the plot, Guido Fawkes, the most ‘foreign’ sounding member of the plot, (with an ambiguous immigration status) became the name the state wanted to associate with this thwarted attempt at mass murder. A baying crowd in the grounds of St Paul’s Cathedral, just across the river from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, watched these brutal executions in their hundreds.

        ‘The gunpowder plot’, as it become known, was a terrorist act that that was famous for not happening. As James Shapiro observes, the subjects of the new ‘British’ state, including its most brilliant stage poet, had to imagine a tragedy. And the new Jacobean regime made every effort to help them to do so.

        Under a painting of gathering, louring clouds in a candle-lit room, in front of King James, Shakespeare’s Company played their new play. It featured a thin skinned monarch with a temper, who precipitates a constitutional crisis, which breeds panic and insecurity in the country. It begins with the Dukes of Albany (‘Scotland’) and Cornwall (the south of England) standing over a map of Britain (not England), and an attempt to end “all future strife…now”. The country is about to be divided by a King who has a succession crisis on his hands (all of his children are daughters and thus cannot inherit his land). It features plots and counter plots, the brutal public torture of one of the characters. Questions of loyalty, justice, the nature of Kingship and the execution of power abound. A play of silence and speaking, where words used in anger become savagely concretely, real. And it is wrapped in a domestic tragedy of wrecked love between an elderly father and his daughters, that figures throughout theatrical history have found so bleak and upsetting, that they have re-written the ending.

        The play endures because it holds a mirror up to our own restless world. An ageing population hoarding wealth and power, while a younger generation waits impatiently in the wings. America, as a kind of elderly, global King Lear gives away its power, and in to the vacuum swarms bad actors, followed by panic and radical geopolitical uncertainty*. A new age of kingship and empire building on the global stage dawns, with colossal power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. This brings in to clear focus Shakespeare’s central tragic theme: that it is inescapable that vast power, the power of life and death over others, is wielded by mere human beings. Flawed, scared human beings with devils (and angels) in their hearts, over-reaching self-deceivers who tell themselves that they can control more than they think they can control. That they can control the weather. Even when they know they can’t.

        Shakespeare seems to understand a feeling that abounds in me. One of hopelessness, of a numb despair, an inability to do anything about it. An inability to step outside it. To perceive the moral truth of where we are, he suggests, requires a state of mind that starts to feel like madness. And is often defined so by state authorities. In his ‘madness’ Lear steps outside of his own pursuit of power and status, to “feel what wretches feel” (not to think what they think but to feel what they feel**), and in doing so realises that he has “taken too little care of this”. Without needing eyes, he can feel how the world is, how justice really works. “Plate sin with gold / And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; / Arm it in rags, a pigmy’s straw does pierce it”. He feels simple human empathy with the blinded, weeping Gloucester: “We came crying hither / Thou knows’t the first time we smell the air / We wawl and cry…When we are born we cry that we are come / to this great stage of fools”.

        Like Hamlet, Edgar pretends to be ‘mad’ to protect himself, but by feeling ‘nakedness' in his ‘performance’ as the beggar ‘Poor Tom’, he too starts feel empathy with his fellow human beings. At the end of the play we are left with an ambiguous image of Edgar as the putative new King of this ‘gor’d state’. Perhaps ready to make a difference. Maybe ready to be corrupted by power, now he has given away the moral ‘superpower’ of ‘feeling’, through the lens of his ‘madness’. Shakespeare appears ambivalent on the question of whether you can have both. And perhaps illuminates the reason why there is so much flagrant and ostentatious abandoning of morality, that is curiously central to the way in which our age’s new Kings wield power. It seems we are excited to abandon our morals, the release it offers has a certain aphrodisiac quality***, we love them for this release, because holding on to morals and human empathy whilst at the same time living in the world, is difficult, and can start to feel like ‘madness’. We seem to be endlessly loyal to ‘Kings’ that tell us we should pluck out our eyes, and see what we do not see.

        So what are we to do? Shakespeare peoples the stage imagery of King Lear with silent watching faces. Silently watching their leaders commit acts of hubris and vanity, and increasing barbarity. We are left to guess at their feelings, as they stand inert. Like me, privately knowing that shooting civilians queuing for water in Gaza is monstrous, but not knowing how to act to do anything about it. As The Duke Of Cornwall is about to scoop out The Duke Of Gloucester’s other eye, a character called ‘Servant 1’ bravely steps out of the wall of blank faces and seeing eyes, exclaiming “better service have I never done you / than now to bid you hold”. Of course he’s killed****. But it is interesting to me that Shakespeare gives us ‘Servant 1’ but writes no lines for ‘Servant 2’. Another one of this play’s great silences. Perhaps I’m supposed to be ‘Servant  2’.

        I’m probably just another Fool on this stage of fools, ‘whipped [by the world] for speaking true… and whipped [by myself] for lying’. Attracted by the prospect of plucking out my own eyes, to not see, and to live in this ‘mad’ world, in blessed ‘sanity’. Take Lear. Even after everything he has endured, in his final moment, he chooses not to see the corpses of his two older daughters, as they are laid at his feet: just as present and just as dead as Cordelia. It is too much for him to bear, so he chooses not to see it. Human tragedy indeed.

        King Lear speaks directly and obliquely to this restless moment, of panic and radical insecurity. A new age of Kings, where eyes are wasted on most of us. But Shakespeare in this darkest of tragedies, offers us some brittle hope in a kind of ‘madness’, where we might be mad enough to conclude that we ought to tell our Kings, as they joyfully embark on some new genocide, “better service have I never done you / than now to bid you hold”.   

PB

————————
* -  It is easy to imagine a high ranking Democratic Party staffer, quoting Regan’s lines to Lear from II.ii at Joe Biden “O sir, you are old / nature in you stands on the very verge / of her confine, you should be led / by some discretion that discerns your state / better than you yourself”

** - perhaps a distinction that progressive parties in the West would do well to pay attention to.

*** - Which accounts for the ‘love’ so many feel for their dictators.

**** - It’s the LAST thing Cornwall wants to hear. You think he doesn’t KNOW it’s really bad to pluck out another person’s eyes???!!!