SOURCE: Brantley, Ben. “Every Inch a King, Every Moment a Revelation.” New York Times (12 September 2002): E1.

[In the following review of the 2002 Stratford Festival production of King Lear directed by Jonathan Miller, Brantley compliments the clarity, intimate tone, and quick pace of the production, but reserves his highest praise for Christopher Plummer's Lear.]

The words are spoken lightly, a punch line of sorts in a bantering exchange with a fool. Yet even as it leaves the old man's mouth, the phrase seems to return in reproachful echo: “Nothing can be made of nothing.” The smile on King Lear's face melts into cloudedness. Where has he heard those words before?

A stillness descends on the stage of the Festival Theater here as the title character of King Lear, fully embodied by the wonderful Christopher Plummer, savors his own bewilderment in an early scene in Shakespeare's bleakest tragedy. It is a brief silence, yet it feels outside time.

A window has opened into one man's mind, and for just a moment you share completely his troubled, inchoate sense of his past and his future. “Nothing will come of nothing,” Lear has said earlier, just before banishing his daughter Cordelia. Now, in Mr. Plummer's abstracted expression, there is a premonition of what lies ahead for King Lear, and its frightening name is “nothing.”

The existential value of nothing has been a quantity that all productions of King Lear, especially those in the anxious years of the past half-century, have had to assess. Most high-profile stagings have chosen to emphasize the cosmic, like the 1962 version from Peter Brook, who turned the play into a yawning gray landscape through which Beckett's tramps might have roved.

Jonathan Miller's involving interpretation, the centerpiece of the Stratford Festival's 50th season, instead makes nothingness an intimate experience. This production doesn't start with a philosophical proposition but with one man's all-too-familiar descent into the twilight of old age.

With the journey being led by Mr. Plummer—who has an uncanny gift for projecting subtlety to the back of the balcony—King Lear becomes harrowingly personal. His performance evokes both the fading gaze you might catch in the eyes of a dying grandparent and your own instinctive, angry resistance against the mortal decay of your body.

It goes without saying that Mr. Plummer's doing Lear is a big deal. He is probably the most accomplished classical actor in North America, and Lear is the grandest and most troublesome of all major Shakespearean roles, a summit that many have attempted but few have conquered. Critics from Charles Lamb to Harold Bloom have even stated that live performance can only corrupt a masterpiece better read than played.

Mr. Plummer and Dr. Miller (the former “Beyond the Fringe” member and onetime artistic director of the Old Vic in London) show no signs of being intimidated. They insist on the human scale of King Lear, both as a character and as a play.

There is scarcely a piece of scenery in this Lear, which is performed in Elizabethan costume (designed by Clare Mitchell). And while the production has been superbly lighted by Robert Thompson, atmospheric mood cueing is minimal. The principal burden of interpretation falls squarely on the performers.

It is a burden that Mr. Plummer bears with uncommon grace and even more uncommon modesty. This is, after all, the fellow who won a Tony portraying John Barrymore, that most dazzling of hams, in a one-man show that seemed to fit him like a custom-made fedora. But Mr. Plummer is an exotic phenomenon, an actor whose extraordinary natural presence is matched by his intelligence.

It would have been too easy for him to have turned on the volcano to create an elemental Lear. As it is, Mr. Plummer certainly gives Lear the majesty of someone accustomed to ruling. But he also creates a character who from the first scene is afraid, whether he acknowledges it or not, of encroaching senility. Mr. Plummer makes you see that in such fear, and in senility itself, lie a strength and a logic all their own.

The production signals a conventional frailty in Lear in the opening scene by having him stumble on his entrance and repeatedly forget the name of Burgundy, one of Cordelia's suitors. Possessively clutching a map of the kingdom he plans to divide among his three daughters, Mr. Plummer's Lear suggests a self divided between a hunger for power and the terrifying suspicion that he is no longer capable of deploying it. The balance between these two instincts will shift affectingly as the play continues.

This Lear moves in and out of focus, as if his mind, steeped in intimations of mortality, were calling him elsewhere. Part of him still wants to be a chief player in the game; the other part has already resigned from it. In this context his decision to let go of his lands makes sense, but so does his belief that he will still be treated as a king, as well as his titanic anger when this proves not to be so.

When Goneril (Domini Blythe) comments, “You see how full of changes his age is,” the observation is entirely justified. It also reflects the exasperation with which grown children are too apt to deal with their aging parents.

As Lear's elder daughters, Lucy Peacock (as Regan) and especially Ms. Blythe are excellent in capturing an imperiousness and impatience their characters share with their father and in showing how those qualities inevitably translate into their treatment of him. When Regan tells her father, “You are old,” her contempt is chilling.

Sarah McVie falls into the predictable trap of making Cordelia too noble and stalwart to be true. And Maurice Godin and Evan Buliung, as Edmund and Edgar, are respectively too arch and too passive to bring the essential weight to Shakespeare's most complex pair of brothers. James Blendick, a Stratford regular, is excellent as the elderly Duke of Gloucester, whose own movement from fatuity to insight parallels and anchors that of Lear.

If not every performance is ideal, Dr. Miller keeps the action moving at a clip that for once does justice to the narrative strength of Lear. And the overall clarity of the production—in diction, exposition and dramatic logic—is remarkable.

There isn't a line that Mr. Plummer speaks that hasn't been thought through and then distilled into a crystalline emotional reading. I have never seen such an accessible Lear, and his emotional intensity toward the other characters helps to illuminate them as well. Lear's relationship with his Fool (Barry MacGregor), as a filial substitute and the one person with whom he can relax, has rarely seemed so spontaneous.

The production's greatest pleasure, however, comes from Mr. Plummer's taking you step by step through his Lear's enormous changes in temperament and insight and justifying every turn on both an intellectual and gut level. This is true when Lear is talking to the elements in the storm, and not in Promethean defiance but with a conversational ardor that finds the sense in his insanity. Or discovering, to his delighted amazement, the gift of happiness in his reunion with Cordelia. Or muttering feebly to himself in nonsense syllables when the world has become too much to bear.

Though Mr. Plummer can be the grandest of grandstanders, he tends to play down his actorly magnificence here in favor of a Lear with whom everyone must identify. It's a bold choice, and there may be those who object that Lear has been too domesticated. On the other hand, I have never seen an audience so saturated in tears at the end of King Lear as this one was.

On seeing Lear, now deprived of absolutely everything except life itself, over the corpse of Cordelia, the Earl of Kent (Benedict Campbell) famously asks, “Is this the promised end?” In this Lear it is impossible not to feel that the question is universal.