I have long had mixed feelings about King Lear. I admire its cosmic grandeur and sublime poetry but balk at its structural unwieldiness and dramatic implausibility: like Coleridge, I find the spectacle of Gloucester’s suffering “unendurable” and there is something gratuitously cruel about Edgar’s refusal to reveal his identity to his father. I’ve never regretted omitting it from my book The 101 Greatest Plays yet I still remember a shocked head of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford greeting me with the words: “I hear you’ve dropped Lear.”
Whatever my personal doubts, the play has a mythic quality that has appealed to dramatists, composers and film-makers including our own Peter Brook, the Russian Grigori Kozintsev and the Japanese Akira Kurosawa whose Ran is enjoying a rerelease to mark its 40th anniversary. Seeing Ran again after all this time was an overwhelming experience. It would be absurd to say it is better than Lear but it addresses many of the problems I have with Shakespeare’s play.
