King Lear (1971, dir. Peter Brook)

At its most basic, my measure of a King Lear production or film adaptation is rather simple: does it make me cry at Lear’s reunion at Cordelia, and at the final scene? 

Peter Brook’s film doesn’t—but why? 

I’m going to quote Roger Ebert: 

“It is important to describe him as Brook's Lear, because he is not Shakespeare's. "King Lear" is the most difficult of Shakespeare's plays to stage, the most complex and, to my mind, the greatest. There are immensities of feeling and meaning in it that Brook has not even touched.” 

King Lear is severely cut. A standard production of King Lear is about 3 hours (my favourite version, featuring Don Warrington, is 3 hours 10 minutes) and Peter Brook’s film is 2 hours 11 minutes on Prime (though IMDb says it’s 2 hours 17 minutes). Apart from removing many lines from the main plot and reducing the Gloucester subplot to its minimum, he rearranges lines and changes many details in the story. Above all, he reduces—or flattens out—the extremities of the play. 

Shakespeare’s King Lear is a play of extremes. On one side are the extremely evil, beyond comprehension: Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, Edmund. On the other side are the extremely good, equally incomprehensible: Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, the unnamed servant who kills Cornwall. We are constantly told—and rightly so—that people are not black and white, that we shouldn’t create characters who are wholly evil or wholly good. But Shakespeare pulls it off as he knows that there is unmotivated hate, just as there is senseless goodness, and he pushes to the extreme these two concepts in King Lear, to powerful effect.

In the film, Peter Brook makes Cordelia (Anne-Lise Gabold) more ambiguous as he omits her reasons for saying “Nothing”; presents Kent (Tom Fleming) as a hothead; and reduces the villainy of Goneril (Irene Worth) and Regan (Susan Engel), making them more sympathetic at the beginning as he gets Paul Scofield to play Lear as an erratic, irrational man, increasingly difficult to live with. Portraying Lear is a delicate balancing act: in some way, his hateful, misogynistic curses are awful, revealing something dark in his character; but at the same time, there is a reason that Cordelia loves him and Kent remains loyal to him; Lear is a figure of pity, but sometimes also a figure of greatness. I don’t quite see that in Paul Scofield’s performance in the 1971 film. 

Roger Ebert argues: 

“[Brook’s] approach was suggested by "Shakespeare Our Contemporary," a controversial book by the Polish critic Jan Kott. In Kott's view, "King Lear" is a play about the total futility of things. The old man Lear stumbles ungracefully toward his death because, simply put, that's the way it goes for most of us. To search for meaning or philosophical consolation is to kid yourself. 

[…] the Brook-Kott version of "Lear" is certainly fashionable and modern. But it gives us a film that severely limits Shakespeare's vision, and focuses our attention on his more nihilistic passages while ignoring or sabotaging the others.” 

That perhaps is why the film doesn’t quite work for me. I also think that the final scene loses much of its impact because Brook quickly kills off Edmund (Ian Hogg), cutting the speech “Some good I mean to do/ Despite of mine own nature”, and gives us a flash of the hanged Cordelia before Lear appears with her dead body. It is an incomprehensible thing about art that even though we all know the story of King Lear, even though we all know what happens at the end of the play, we still get that feeling akin to hope when Edmund reveals his plot—as though this time Cordelia would be saved—and we still feel shocked when Lear appears carrying her body and saying “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you men of stone/ Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so/ That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone forever!”. All of that effect is lost in the 1971 film. It also doesn’t help that Brook makes lots of jump cuts in that scene, perhaps aiming for a sense of fragmentation like the state of Lear’s mind, but to me it breaks Lear’s speeches and the scene into pieces, destroying their emotional impact. 

What do you think about the 1971 film?