Shakespeare Fans discussion

Unfortunately, the performance has run its course (Oct 25 - Dec 3) but there's an interesting review (IMO) of it in the latest New York Review of Books (LXIII, #20) that made some interesting points about Glenda Jackson's (Lear) and the director's interpretation of the role:

What is unfolding here is Jackson's deeply intelligent reading of the dynamics of the play. The obvious way to think of Lear's journey is along a line from control to folly to madness. But Jackson gives us the sense of a Lear who is, in truth, already mad. She does not so much transform herself over the course of the play as transform herself moment to moment within it. She is magnificently unstable, switching and spinning in emotional pirouettes. And what she seems unhinged by is not the giving up of power but the experience of power itself....

It is one thing to read the play like this but quite another to embody that reading without making the whole thing incoherent and hollow. For if Lear changes from moment to moment, it can only be because there is nothing there to begin with, no fixed core of character to be revealed. This, precisely, is where the courage of Jackson's performance lies. She is willing to risk a Lear who does not have a character but who must, rather discover one.

I wonder if the production made a recording of one of the performances. I would have liked to have seen it.

Fascinating.

Have women played Lear before? I wonder. It's such a good idea!

If women are to be equal to men, then it makes sense that climate power will corrupt them too. A form of female patriarchy, in a way.

The most obvious comparisons might be that of Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth and Hillary Clinton....?

Candy wrote: "Fascinating.

Have women played Lear before? I wonder. It's such a good idea!

If women are to be equal to men, then it makes sense that climate power will corrupt them too. A form of female patria..."

Hi Candy - it may be that Glenda Jackson is the first female Lear, but there is no reason why Lear should not be a woman. The play now being read, Troilus and Cressida, has had a production with all the roles reversed - men played by women, women by men - that I have seen. It was a good production but the theoretical underpinning was for me not successful, since the play is about gender.

The issue you raise about women and power could go in a large number of directions. It is a truism that power corrupts and we could go on to say that it corrupts regardless of gender. To me that is a simplification. As we now have "patriarchal" social structures, it should be expected that women who rise to power within them - Thatcher, Hillary Clinton, and in my country, Helen Clark, have succeeded by being "more male than males", or at least by playing male roles, not by bringing any revolutionary or at least qualitatively different approach to political life.. Queens Victoria and Elizabeth I and II occupied positions based on inheritance, with their roles defined that way, so in that sense "don't really count".

As you know, my own belief is that the idea of "equality" is a red herring, especially as it is hard to know what people mean by it, and even if we did know, isn't the point. Power structures are the point, and the ones we live with now are not merely male dominated but defined as male preserves: that is how they came to be, and by extension that is why the world is the disturbing mess it is today. A woman occupying a position of power in that system - Margaret Thatcher, say - may bring a "feminine" touch to things but must still play the game by the rules she encounters in her rise to power.

Altering those rules means altering the whole political structure, and if that is happening anywhere in the world, it is in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and Germany. According to me, the results of that process will spread, and while corruption will presumably continue it will be different in kind.

Long-winded, eh? Sorry..

Not longwinded at all!!!

Wow, Steve you just articulated the situation as I see it so well. Yes, it is about power. And it comes down to power struggles for almost every situation or social or political issue. Not so much gender or breaking gender boundaries.

I also am not comfortable with the term "equality" for the exact reasons you describe.

It's all about the shift....