The trouble with Lear is he always looks like our fathers. Maybe not today, but one day, you’ll watch a production of King Lear and realize he looks so like your father you can barely breathe. Goethe said, “every old man knows what Lear is about” and Anthony Hopkins said he drew on memories of his father and grandfather in preparing for the role. In W.H. Auden’s 1946-7 lectures on Shakespeare he drew a distinction between the earlier plays, which were about drawing characters so real you could believe you’d meet them on the street, and his later plays, like Lear. He said,
In the later plays, with people like Iago and Lear, you say, no I don’t think this is a person I might meet, but this is a state which in the life of man everybody at one time or another experiences. Nobody’s Iago all of the time. The representation of states resembles the effect we get from opera… Lear, in the opening scene, divides up his kingdom like a birthday cake. It’s not historical, but it’s the way we can all feel sometimes.
My point, roughly, is that Lear is always too close to home. There are no productions of Lear where you feel comfortable. The end holds no catharsis; the pile of bodies doesn’t contribute to a cleansing of the kingdom that will bring happier days. In the end, a fratricidal madman is left to pick up the pieces. No matter how justified his actions, they don’t inspire a sense of stability. Lear is one of the greatest achievements humanity has ever wrought, but it’s hard to get even me to watch a film of it.
Although there are many incredible versions on film, there are often more filmed theatrical versions of Shakespeare’s more difficult work than adapted versions. I love filmed theatrical Shakespeare plays, but in this series I want to cover adaptations as much as possible. Because the Lear story is not exactly commercially enticing, the landscape for Lear adaptations is a weird one; I’ll highlight four in this recommendations post that I think cover the types of adaptations out there, but there are more to be found if you find yourself on a Lear binge (binge Lear at your own risk).
King Lear (2018, BBC/Amazon Studios): There have only been a few adapted versions of the play that do the text fairly straight. Mainly, there’s this 2018 version and a 2008 version helmed by Ian McKellan. I am highlighting this version partly because it is the most recent and I really love it. One of the issues with talking about Lear is whoever plays Lear is usually doing it at the absolute height of their powers. So either the 2008 or the 2018 are well-worth watching, but the 2018 is just something special. Partly that’s down to Hopkins, who has spent decades avoiding theatrical roles like this one until he felt ready to take them on. Directed by Richard Eyre, this adaptation is set in a modern version of England that still retains an old England-style monarchy. It is stacked with the best actors England has to offer, including Florence Pugh, who plays Cordelia with pathos and grace. Hopkins is the real draw here, though. His Lear is heartbreaking as a man who cannot confront his own weakness, who tries to prepare for his death in the way he can accept and ends up destroying the family and kingdom he built instead.
Find it on Amazon Prime.
The Dresser (2015, BBC): Before Anthony Hopkins was willing to take on Lear, he tested out the role in The Dresser, also directed by Richard Eyre. The Dresser is a good example of how I’ve seen the Lear story treated across film and television. It is too unwieldy and tragic to take on a full adaptation, but to make Lear a lens or an aspect or an extended reference lends a layer of metaphor to the work. This is the case in HBO’s Station Eleven, which begins with a performance of Lear right before the world collapses due to a flu pandemic and the third season of the dramedy Slings and Arrows, which is about the mounting of a new production of Lear. The Dresser is set during the London blitz and centers around the mental deterioration and panic of Sir (Hopkins), who has been a great Shakespearean actor but is personally in decline. His dresser, played by Ian McKellan, is obsessively dedicated to readying Sir for his role as Lear, despite the bombs falling on London and the rapid decay of Sir’s mind.
Available on Starz.
King Lear (1987): Directed by Jean-Luc Godard from a script by Tom Luddy and Peter Sellars (the opera director, not the actor), this “adaptation” stars Norman Mailer as Lear (except it doesn’t) and Peter Sellars as a descendent of William Shakespeare. Also Molly Ringwald is in this as Cordelia and her essay on the experience of filming the movie is well worth reading. This film doesn’t claim to be an adaptation, rather styling itself as “a study, an approach, a clearing.” If experimental New Wave cinema is your jam and you like your movies to be a mass of seemingly unconnected images overlaid with heavy-handed quotations, this is going to thrill you (Richard Brody, of The New Yorker, put it first on his 2012 list of the best films of all time). I imagine that to film it and to act in it must have been a fascinating experience. I can’t say watching it was all that absorbing for me (partly because a grainy version on YouTube is the only way to do so), but I have always been partial to Godard’s more polished (is that the right word?) projects (please don’t come for me Godard boys), such as Breathless. But, also, the fact that this exists at all is worth talking about. It isn’t watchable, but there’s something here if you’re willing to dig for it (put that on Godard’s tombstone). There’s a great review of it here and reading the Wikipedia plot description is also really… insane. Perhaps this is the only Lear adaptation to have accepted Auden’s other assertion about Lear, that it is, at the end of the day, “not actable.”
Find it on YouTube here.
Ran (1985): Ran is Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Lear and it is my favorite proof point of the universality of Shakespeare’s plays. One method of adapting Shakespeare is to take the story and apply it to a different setting, in this case feudal Japan. Although this play retains none of Shakespeare’s language and many changes have been made to the story, the heart of this Lear remains the same. Scheming children, the fears of aging, the inability to resign power, all these themes and more are present in Ran. This adaptation particularly pays attention to the brutality of the world in which Lear’s children were raised, something I think is often lost in the play itself. When asked why he is being difficult with the whole vowing love and loyalty thing, Hidetora Ichimonji’s (Lear) son Saburo (Cordelia) states the simple truth, saying,
You have spilled so much human blood you cannot measure it. You have lived without mercy or pity. But Father, we, too, are children of this degraded age of strife; you do not know what we may be thinking - “my dear children,” you think. To me, Father, you are none other than a madman - a senile old madman.
Available to rent on Apple TV, Amazon Prime, and more.