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Lear
Edward Bond's version of Lear's story embraces myth and reality, war and politics, to reveal the violence endemic in all unjust societies. He exposes corrupted innocence as the core of social morality, and this false morality as a source of the aggressive tension which must ultimately destroy that society. In a play in which blindness becomes a dramatic metaphor for insight, Bond warns that 'it is so easy to subordinate justice to power, but when this happens power takes on the dynamics and dialectics of aggression, and then nothing is really changed'.
104 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 52 reviews
October 11, 2015
I *really* hope the seminar is going to show me the genius of this thing, because I don't see it.
haha pun
haha pun
November 27, 2021
ne anlattın sen aga
January 7, 2022
Author in his preface: 'Animals only become aggressive – that is destructive in the human sense – when their lives, territory or status in their group are threatened, or when they mate or are preparing to
mate.'
Me: Looks at chimps jumping around in crazed euphory on a carcass of one of them, cats hunting for nothing but pure pleasure in 95% of cases, crows ganging up on owls the very second they see them, leaving only bloody mush behind. Whispers: 'Should I tell h-'
Discovery Channel: Shakes its head and does a shushing sound.
Me: nodding 'Right, right.'
Author: proceeds with some socialist mumbo-jumbo, capitalists-bad-socialism-good, writing some creepy-pasta-worthy gory fanfic on King Lear.
My Eastern European ass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B777...
mate.'
Me: Looks at chimps jumping around in crazed euphory on a carcass of one of them, cats hunting for nothing but pure pleasure in 95% of cases, crows ganging up on owls the very second they see them, leaving only bloody mush behind. Whispers: 'Should I tell h-'
Discovery Channel: Shakes its head and does a shushing sound.
Me: nodding 'Right, right.'
Author: proceeds with some socialist mumbo-jumbo, capitalists-bad-socialism-good, writing some creepy-pasta-worthy gory fanfic on King Lear.
My Eastern European ass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B777...
February 4, 2020
Postmodern brilliance. But then, I've been studying Bond for over 35 years, so I can see why some people new to him might find him disturbing. Of course, that's entirely his thing. That's the point. Take what you will from it. Recommended.
August 18, 2013
Quite amazing and yet very disturbing.
October 8, 2015
That was a weird story, but at least the ghost was cute.
May 21, 2017
This is as much disturbing as it is fascinating.
September 4, 2020
Its like a Marxist Tarantino movie on a modern Shakespeare stage.
April 9, 2021
The stereotype of Edward Bond seems to be that he is an austere humourless Marxist. I read an interview with him a little while ago where he was complaining about a recent production of one of his plays, railing about the fact that it had no humour. This seemed to challenge the stereotype in that he identified himself with humour, but entrenched the stereotype in that he complained about the lack of humour in a railing and humourless way. Before reading Lear I didn’t know Bond’s work, other than seeing a couple of films where he was credited as scriptwriter. And I admit to liking the idea of Bond: I don’t think being an austere Marxist as necessarily a bad thing, although a lack of humour would be; that he seemed to be creating a British Brechtian-political theatre is intriguing. Does it work? Or, at least, does Lear work? It has to be admitted, there isn’t much humour (and there was always humour in Brecht). It is austere. Maybe it isn’t particularly subtle, but it probably wasn’t trying to be subtle. It should be noted Bond’s Lear isn’t a version or engagement with Shakespeare. The attraction of King Lear is that Bond was able to create a ‘mythic’ character in a ‘mythic’ time, he could create a Brechtian parable, a parable that deals with power and violence. But while being set in a past, it is also ‘timeless’: the soldiers, for instance, have modern guns: the mythic time encompasses both the past and the present. But while I find the methods intriguing, I’m not so certain about the results. It shows a society structured by power and violence…and then shows it again…and again. Lear might be overthrown by his two daughters; then they conspire against each other and against their husbands – power is corrupt and brutal and continues to be so. Considering Bond is a Leftist, there is a surprising lack of any alternative. Maybe Lear learns from his downfall…or maybe he doesn’t. I imagine a good performance could be powerful, but it isn’t so much a play with something to say, but a play that has something to shout…and it shouts it time after time.
April 30, 2021
it's modernist drama......you either vibe with it or you absolutely don't. i enjoyed it quite a lot. it basically takes the template of Shakespeare's drama to show the workings of structural violence and the corruption of power. using Lear's descent into madness and his development in the context of this approach is actually genius and i liked what he did with the character.
i think the best thing about this play for me personally is the ending though. it's actually....hopeful. Bond spends the entire play depicting extreme brutality and individuals in the grip of an apparently inescapable oppressive social order, but then the moral is NOT "yup, guess that's just the way it is, there's nothing you can do". it's more like, asking the question of what can actually be done still. where could a starting line for change be. that's nice. in 2021 i am tired of nihilism and any poetics that doesn't resort to it is one i can get behind.
however, yes, the graphic violence is debatable. i, uh. am not sure whether i would actually want to see this performed, (or whether it actually works in favor of Bond's goal of critical audience engagement.....i think his reworking of the plot alone would do that just fine. but that's an interesting conversation all on its own)
i think the best thing about this play for me personally is the ending though. it's actually....hopeful. Bond spends the entire play depicting extreme brutality and individuals in the grip of an apparently inescapable oppressive social order, but then the moral is NOT "yup, guess that's just the way it is, there's nothing you can do". it's more like, asking the question of what can actually be done still. where could a starting line for change be. that's nice. in 2021 i am tired of nihilism and any poetics that doesn't resort to it is one i can get behind.
however, yes, the graphic violence is debatable. i, uh. am not sure whether i would actually want to see this performed, (or whether it actually works in favor of Bond's goal of critical audience engagement.....i think his reworking of the plot alone would do that just fine. but that's an interesting conversation all on its own)
January 4, 2018
I am sure Trump got his idea of building the Mexican Border Wall after reading this book. Too much bloodshed and cruelty on stage. The plot, though very disturbing, manages to alienate the audience from the very beginning, thereby , making the play a fine specimen of epic theatre. However, thought provoking though it was, I enjoyed reading Shakespeare's King Lear more .
October 28, 2018
Vahşi, acımasız ve sert bir oyun. İçinde empati kurabileceğim bir karakter olsa muhtemelen çok daha çarpıcı olabilirdi. Ancak bu haliyle bile inanılmaz derecede gergin bir atmosferi var zaten. İronik bir sona sahip olması da okuyucuyu eşi olmayan bir hisle baş başa bırakıyor.
November 11, 2018
Çok güzel,,, Allah belanı vermesin,,,
April 25, 2021
Putting the wall fetish aside, this is a really disturbing and fascinating adaptation which maintains your interest throughout. Full of metaphorical backstabbing and deceit, this play explores corruption, blindness and the growing tensions which inevitably destroy their society. An absolute gorefest with a side of the gothic in the form of ghosts, a very enjoyable read and one that I would be VERY intrigued to see performed in the flesh.
September 6, 2023
3,5/4
I liked the author's approach and systemic violence, and views on power and how these two notions are linked
The characters are easily recognisable, and even if you never read King Lear by Shakespeare before it is still understandable
But something was missing in my opinion, i don't really know what - still a nice read only if gore details and story line are kot disturbing to you thought !
I liked the author's approach and systemic violence, and views on power and how these two notions are linked
The characters are easily recognisable, and even if you never read King Lear by Shakespeare before it is still understandable
But something was missing in my opinion, i don't really know what - still a nice read only if gore details and story line are kot disturbing to you thought !
March 11, 2024
that was something
March 3, 2026
Bond’s Lear:
I felt this version of Lear was more violent than Shakespeare’s; maybe it is due to Lear being blinded instead of Glouster. It came across as starkly political, and lacked the parallel subplot of Edgar and Edmund, used to great effect, in my mind, by Shakespeare. And the language lacked the eloquence of Shakespeare, but, to be fair, Shakespeare’s language is rarely rivaled.
Palfrey's POOR TOM continued here:
"Five fiends have beene in poore Tom at once" IV. i. 61).
Or does he escape his specimen bottle, if only for a moment, glimpse the men around him, perhaps recognize them, and share the blessing around: a blessing for the King, another for the Duke, a third for the terrified Fool?
Or consider this:
‘Humph
Goe to thy bed and warme thee' [Quarto: cold bed] (TLN 1828-29)
These words cue Lear, but do they address Lear? It so, are they a savage irony, in the way of Lear's later imprecation for the blind Gloucester to use his eyes? Are they solicitous, taking their cue from the "poore naked wretches" speech, which the Tom-actor has just heard? Is it perhaps Edgar's voice, plaintive upon sight of the draggled king? Or is it Tom's, seeing the same thing, and saying that you do not belong here in my open? Are the words rebuking and dismissive? Or are they spoken to the fiend, a pitiful ery to be left alone?
Again and again Tom's script gives no answers to such questions.
Even apparently direct answers are nothing of the kind:
Lear. Did'st thou give all to thy Daughters? And art thou come to this?
Edgar. Who gives any thing to poore Tom? (TLN 1830-32)
Tom’s answer flips the agency on its head. He answers as the abandoned child, rather than the discarded father-unless the voice that answers isn't Tom's at all, but the hostage-taking fiend's ("who gives anything to that little creep ...?"). The king sees him as a fellow lost patriarch;…
It is never clear whom Edgar addresses, or where or whether there is a switch of address. The audience onstage, like the audience offstage, can do little but be a mute witness to Tom's histrionics…
Uniquely, his songs have much the same effect. It seems that song was one of the most memorable aspects of the part's first performances: William Carroll has documented how representations of Poor Tom were “radically transformed" after Shakespeare's play, such that the figure was immediately identified with singing. But it isn't that Tom is some kind of Autolycus-figure, entering in song, breaking into melody as his trade or calling card. He isn't a ballad monger.
His relation to song is instead scrupulously keyed to his suffering: the songs come as fragments, barely recognized, and less the sound of freedom than of unsleeping vocative competition or taunting, as though he constantly has an Ariel in his ear, a jangling, banging tinnitus, with tabor and pipe keeping him from sleep and issuing in this aural overflow…
We might even say that Tom exists-virtually, literally-at the end of the line. Think of that ghostly space at a line's end, alive with memory and imminence; think of the possibilities glimpsed or intuited but unspoken; imagine living at that space, in it, as it: and find Tom. He is at that prosodic no place, allegory of a life marked by privation and waiting.
Frame 9
Tom's voice is beyond rhetorical orders. His speech is more like a shattered mime—a mime shattered into sound—than an understood illocution. What with one ear can sound like the lexicon of multitudes, string upon string of curling, suspended life, can with another ear seem nothing but an inarticulate white noise, or the cry of a dying bird or mam-mal. It can seem like no sound at all, and rather a wound, an image, as the words manufacture their very own body, understood by no one anywhere, horribly stillborn. The words are dropped so as to die, voided and then avoided; or they are heard instantaneously as frozen silenced muteness, and instead of listening we simply look, and wait for him to stop, and be silent, and disappear.
It is as pure surplus that Tom is often heard in performance, as his barrage of words is received en masse, a single, barely decipherable speech act, signifying little but a hunted form of suffering or schizo-phrenia. This is much to do with the visual assault of his presence. Tom's words have to catch up with, in a sense translate, this more primary and immediate reality: the vision of him, his face and limbs transfixed to the gaze, a body suddenly exposed. The combined effect is a kind of garrulous mime: the words not only generate, but somehow are histrionic physical gestures. Face and voice combine to form a single compound violence.
Consequently, much of Tom's allegory-rich suggestibility comes not from words, but from his startling physicality….Tom is Adam, and the hovel the flooded Garden…
And Edgar? Talk about being an existential renter: because what else is he right now, crunched somewhere inside Tom's pyrotechnic dis-play? Who can say what he is thinking? He certainly cannot. He is given nothing, not the tiniest aside, still less a parting soliloquy, to assure the audience that he knows how big and strange this moment is, or that he might have things under control.
***…he bursts into accusation when his father appears, as he bursts into accusation when his father appears, gruesomely haloed in his torch.
.
This is the foule Flibbertigibbet
Here comes his father in the guise of a fiend:
Hee begins at Curfew
Never a peaceful sleep in that house:
And walkes at first Cocke
We were always woken early:
Hee gives the Web and the Pin
Lessons were torture:
Squints the eye
The teacher malevolent, candlelight dim:
And makes the Hare-lippe
His ghoulish face distorted as it loomed:
Mildewes the white Wheate
Breakfast was mean:
And hurts the poore Creature of earth.
You made us to mar us. (TLN 1895-99; italics mine)
We might say that Tom has never been more necessary than now, when Gloucester arrives, and it is only through Tom that Edgar can let loose his barbs. The Edgar-actor has little more to go on than we do. And Edgar has little more to go on than his actor. He is clamped inside Tom-Granville-Barker calls it an "arbitrary bondage" - guarded by him, armored by him, in some implacable way prevented by him. Life is at once ratcheted to barely bearable intensity and tantalizingly on hold.
[*FN3. Harley Granville-Barker: "Edgar also is drawn into Lear's orbit; and, for the time, to the complete sacrifice of his own interests in the play, "Poor Tom' is in effect an embodiment of Lear's frenzy, the disguise no part of Edgar's own development." Prefaces to Shakespeare, Vol 1 (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1930), 273-74. But compare Granville-Barker's later observation:
"Through the ravings of Poor Tom we can detect something of the mind of Edgar with its misprision of the sensual life-of his father's life, is it?" (319).]
Edgar is held inside Tom, forced into deflection, seeing and not-seen, excited in a state of waiting. And what is worse: just like his father, with his wistful address to his lost son ("I had a Sonne, Now out-law'd"; TLN 1946-47), Edgar is possessed by love and hurt that are expressible only through apostrophe. For surely this is the key to Tom's parting chant, with its darkly poignant infantilism:
Childe Rowland to the darke Tower came [Quarto: towne]
His word was still, fie, foh, and fumme
I smell the blood of a British man. (TLN 1966-68)
Tom resists Gloucester's thrice-spoken demand for silence ("No words / No words / hush" (TLN 1965) as the child is led by the smell of blood and climbs the "darke Tower" to where the ignorant "Brit-tish man" lays. The song perhaps harks back to childhood in the castle; perhaps it echoes a fanciful dream. But above all Tom's rhyme, charac-teristically, will not be bound by the occasion. He does not stop when Gloucester tells him; his voice floats beyond the moment, across the gap and into the scene that immediately takes the stage: where Bastard and Cornwall vengefully plot the very same British man's destruction. The scripting is devilish and heart-breaking. Because these are apostrophes to apparent absence-to the son, to the revenge-that are in fact terrifyingly imminent.
There mis a marked difference between every one of Tom's appearances.
In his first scene "Edgar" barely gets a look in. Tom carries all before him, is the focal point of endless questions: indeed, he or it in many ways is the question. It is little wonder that the Quarto text notates the king's party's next appearance on stage thus: "Enter Gloster and Lear, Kent, Foole, and Tom" (III. vi). The stage direction is no error. Tom is. Edgar has vanished.*
But the second Tom-scene is different. He struggles to get Lear's attention. And as Lear ignores Tom, Edgar re-emerges: as though issuea precisely from Tom's loneliness or his redundancy.
In the Folio version Edgar seems to say goodbye to Tom halfway through the scene: "poore Tom thy horne is dry" (TLN 2032). We might hear in this a reemergent Edgar, perhaps quoting a proverbial lament: the horn is the vessel in which the beggar-man carries his drink; and it is his voice, his music.
Taken as one (drink, voice, music) the horn compacts or perhaps compensates for Tom's elusive virility. A dry horn speaks the emptying of inspiration, and so the need to move on to find refreshment. The horn must be filled; a new patron found. But for Edgar, it seems, the lament is valedictory. His Tom is done.
At the end of the scene everyone else simply leaves the vagrant be-hind, without so much as a word. There is a litter prepared for Lear, and "welcome, and protection," promised at Dover. "Come, come, away," says Gloucester, and the king's party departs (TLN 2049-56). But what of Poor Tom? Where does he go? He is left by his maker (Edgar), apparently because he is alone and disregarded: no longer noticed or useful, and so dispensable. Secretly, surreptitiously, Edgar leaves Tom. Then less secretly, and with far more carelessness, everyone else leaves Tom too. No one sees this happening, of course, because no one can see the difference between Tom and Edgar. But in Shakespeare sight is not always the measure of truth or existing. Has Tom then vanished? Is he annihilated, rendered null, by this withdrawal of attention?
But it so, what happens if we decide to renew our attention?
Edgar's next appearance takes place only in the Quarto text. He is alone, marooned on stage after the others leave. Edgar is trying manfully to cheer himself up, to be a loyal subject and faithful godson, to frame a catechism whose repeated uttering might carry him across present doubts and turmoil:
Exit [Lear, Gloster, Kent, Fool
Edg. When we our betters see bearing our woes, we scarcely
think our miseries our foes.
Who alone suffers, most i’the mind,…
The speech happens between two scenes - one in which Gloucester leads the king and his party away, the next in which Gloucester is hauled in to be tortured by Cornwall and Regan.
This interstitial placement is crucial. Perhaps Edgar's soliloguy expresses something quite different from anything in the Folio text; or perhaps it provides a text for the dizzying transvertebrations to come.
***The decisive couplet is this:***
He childed as I fathered, Tom away;
Marke the high noyses and thy selfe bewray (III. vi. 117-18)*
He has been badly fathered (poorly treated by Gloucester), just as Lear has been badly "childed," or cruelly treated by his progeny. Conversely, Lear has been made a child ("childed"), and Edgar has been made a father ("father'd"). So who has Edgar been made a father to?
One answer is about to become apparent: he will father his own father, caring for the blind man's life like a parent might a toddler. Another answer is Tom, insofar as he is Edgar's own creation. But if Tom is Edgar's child, then the chiasmic inversions of the phrase also insist that Edgar is Toms child. Each is responsible for the other's creation and sustenance; each seeks to mold, prescript, discipline the other; each cares for the other;
[***FN Harold Bloom sees this couplet as the key to the play, and the Edgar-role as aflicted by
"an excess of love!" Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1999)]
The inextricable complicity of Tom and Edgar is reinforced by the couplet's ambiguous address. "Tom, away" might be a dismissal, an admonition for Tom to leave and for Edgar to resume his "just proof." Equally, it might speak a renewed girding of the loins— "let's go!" — with Tom retaining his role as the disguised Edgar's barrier-breaking avatar.
Decisions about this—whether Tom is being dismissed or employed-duly inform our sense of the couplet's second line. What does it mean to "thy selfe bewray"? Which self? And why "bewray" -a word that usually implies the exposing of secrets, often with malign or betraying intent.
Edgar's "thy selfe" is dizzyingly uncertain: not only because it is unclear whether "thy" is Edgar or Tom, but because to "bewray" this "thy" is to reinforce, even to thematize, the same agential ambiguity.
perhaps the rarely noted fact that — contrary to expectation—this rhyming speech does not end with a parting rhyme of affirmation, but with a short line consisting of a single repeated verb: lurk, lurk.
At times like this the Edgar-part, under extremity of duress, can seem to float almost schizophrenically above both of its selves, with “Edgar" and "Tom" equally distanced and synthetic. There is a curious sense that the part—an uncertain amalgam of part-text, actor, Tom, Ed-gar, and some abstracted persona that is not quite any of these units-is being forced to rethink the smallest movement…Consequently, the part has to tell this body what to do, instruct it like an apprentice or a doll.
But which is the master, which the doll? Who is told to "Lurk, lurk"?
Who is doing the telling? It sounds like Tom: the creepy verbal repetition is often played as a return into the guise and voice of vagrancy. But this morphing has been going on for at least three lines. Again, neither origin nor target of the speech can be pinned down. To lurk is to be concealed and furtive. But it is different from the "happy hollow" in which Edgar earlier hid himself. For lurking suggests an active, perhaps sur-velling observation of others. The lurking precedes an ambush; it is an act of waiting as much as hiding: its true secret is latency, and therefore imminence. He is waiting; he is gestating; and when he comes, he will have secret and usable knowledge. Clearly the verb applies as much to Edgar (lurking inside Tom) as to Tom (for whom lurking is vocation and ontology).
The play's last words are spoken by Albany in the Quarto and by Edgar in the Folio:
The waight of this sad time we must obey,
Speake what we feele, not what we ought to say:
The oldest hath borne most, we that are yong,
Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (TLN 3298-301)
The change of speaker can seem fairly meaningless —one or other decent survivor, struggling to say something plausible. The easiest thing is to accept the Folio version as better, more final. Edgar has gone through more than Albany, and been closer to us; he is a slightly more persuasive aphorist and a lot more competent politician. Perhaps that will do. What is more, the contingent displacement of Albany by Edgar shows the Edgar-part persevering in its manners—we might say its sentence-to the very end. This is what Edgar does: he acts for others.
Part surrogate, part parasite, part scapegoat, part healer, and always, in some inescapable way, the cursed primogenitor, born to inherit the land.
But I think the fact of a switch matters as much as its possible ra-tionalizations. For a start, it shows the playworld's shuttered take on events persisting to the end: Albany says it, Edgar says it; one says it first, the other says it second; one auditions, the other gets the part; they say it together, they speak over each other; one voice speaks in the other's interstices, one voice haunts the other; they compete, defer, harmonize-and retreat mutually into silence. This last fact in particular should not be forgotten: that Edgar is possibly silent.
In the Quarto he says nothing after his blank notice of Lear's death-"0 he is gone indeed" (V. ill. 315) — not responding to Albany's request to rule with Kent. We can make what we like of this. It is invariably assumed that he takes up the mantle, perhaps through gritted teeth. But this is no more than implied (if that).
Even in the Folio he answers at an oblique angle to Albany's summons ("The waight of this sad time we must obey"; TLN
3298), and may as easily be rebuking the recalcitrant Kent as expressing his own reluctant obedience. The "sad time" he means to obey may be history's runes, which Edgar will study for himself, in his own sweet time.
The only sure thing is that he hasn't become King Edgar. He has been offered something without institutional definition, without clear narrative teleology.
. . . . .
Palfrey’s Poor Tom is a detailed, deep dive into the characters of Edgar and Poor Tom. Densely academic, but elegantly written, not dryly encyclopedic.
I wish Palfrey had done more “translation”/ interpretation of Tom’s lines, as he did with the Flibbertigibbet passage.
THE CHINESE TRAGEDY OF KING LEAR CONTINUES:
Under extreme political pressure the philosopher-fool disappears. I don't know why adaptations of Lear have killed off the Fool. It should remain painfully unclear what happens to him. The Fool, as grand entertainer, has to perform a vanishing act. Everything is moving along, and, suddenly, the person responsible for merriment and criticism is not there anymore. We just saw him a moment ago acting out a play with Lear and Edgar in the hovel. He just did a good bit there: Oh, is that Goneril? he exclaims: "I took you for a joint-stool." A joint-stool! Har har har. The Fool was in top form, no signs of fading.
It takes a while to notice a disappearance when things are getting bad, but one day you look up and they're gone, the comics and comedians who enlivened your days and cued your witticisms.
Comedians grow old and embittered, too, become metacomical and turn into tragic historians of their own art form.
In Lear the Fool takes his leave. He could not deal with it anymore. Let's go back to act 3, scene 6, to see what happened. "Make no noise, make no noise," says Lear to the Fool in their hovel,
"Draw the curtains. So, so. We'll go to supper in the morning." This mention of supper reminds us that Lear, the Fool, Kent, and Edgar hadn't eaten anything in a long time. Lear loves his Fool, and so promises that there'll be a meal in the morning. It's an empty promise, but what can you do. "And I'll go to bed at noon," the Fool retorts (i.e., "yeah right, we'll supper in the morning"). Or maybe he didn't say it sarcastically. Maybe it was:
"I cannot not call out your bullshit but I say it with
kindness." Perhaps he takes his job seriously. The Fool must subversively speak truth to power to the end, even if there's no one to correct anymore besides the starving and broken-hearted.
You needn't ask what happens to the Fool. He doesn't come back because his kind effectively becomes extinct by the time we finish the play. There might not be any more Kents in this world, in the short and maybe even long term. But Fools of this kind? They will have disappeared as a category.
I felt this version of Lear was more violent than Shakespeare’s; maybe it is due to Lear being blinded instead of Glouster. It came across as starkly political, and lacked the parallel subplot of Edgar and Edmund, used to great effect, in my mind, by Shakespeare. And the language lacked the eloquence of Shakespeare, but, to be fair, Shakespeare’s language is rarely rivaled.
Palfrey's POOR TOM continued here:
"Five fiends have beene in poore Tom at once" IV. i. 61).
Or does he escape his specimen bottle, if only for a moment, glimpse the men around him, perhaps recognize them, and share the blessing around: a blessing for the King, another for the Duke, a third for the terrified Fool?
Or consider this:
‘Humph
Goe to thy bed and warme thee' [Quarto: cold bed] (TLN 1828-29)
These words cue Lear, but do they address Lear? It so, are they a savage irony, in the way of Lear's later imprecation for the blind Gloucester to use his eyes? Are they solicitous, taking their cue from the "poore naked wretches" speech, which the Tom-actor has just heard? Is it perhaps Edgar's voice, plaintive upon sight of the draggled king? Or is it Tom's, seeing the same thing, and saying that you do not belong here in my open? Are the words rebuking and dismissive? Or are they spoken to the fiend, a pitiful ery to be left alone?
Again and again Tom's script gives no answers to such questions.
Even apparently direct answers are nothing of the kind:
Lear. Did'st thou give all to thy Daughters? And art thou come to this?
Edgar. Who gives any thing to poore Tom? (TLN 1830-32)
Tom’s answer flips the agency on its head. He answers as the abandoned child, rather than the discarded father-unless the voice that answers isn't Tom's at all, but the hostage-taking fiend's ("who gives anything to that little creep ...?"). The king sees him as a fellow lost patriarch;…
It is never clear whom Edgar addresses, or where or whether there is a switch of address. The audience onstage, like the audience offstage, can do little but be a mute witness to Tom's histrionics…
Uniquely, his songs have much the same effect. It seems that song was one of the most memorable aspects of the part's first performances: William Carroll has documented how representations of Poor Tom were “radically transformed" after Shakespeare's play, such that the figure was immediately identified with singing. But it isn't that Tom is some kind of Autolycus-figure, entering in song, breaking into melody as his trade or calling card. He isn't a ballad monger.
His relation to song is instead scrupulously keyed to his suffering: the songs come as fragments, barely recognized, and less the sound of freedom than of unsleeping vocative competition or taunting, as though he constantly has an Ariel in his ear, a jangling, banging tinnitus, with tabor and pipe keeping him from sleep and issuing in this aural overflow…
We might even say that Tom exists-virtually, literally-at the end of the line. Think of that ghostly space at a line's end, alive with memory and imminence; think of the possibilities glimpsed or intuited but unspoken; imagine living at that space, in it, as it: and find Tom. He is at that prosodic no place, allegory of a life marked by privation and waiting.
Frame 9
Tom's voice is beyond rhetorical orders. His speech is more like a shattered mime—a mime shattered into sound—than an understood illocution. What with one ear can sound like the lexicon of multitudes, string upon string of curling, suspended life, can with another ear seem nothing but an inarticulate white noise, or the cry of a dying bird or mam-mal. It can seem like no sound at all, and rather a wound, an image, as the words manufacture their very own body, understood by no one anywhere, horribly stillborn. The words are dropped so as to die, voided and then avoided; or they are heard instantaneously as frozen silenced muteness, and instead of listening we simply look, and wait for him to stop, and be silent, and disappear.
It is as pure surplus that Tom is often heard in performance, as his barrage of words is received en masse, a single, barely decipherable speech act, signifying little but a hunted form of suffering or schizo-phrenia. This is much to do with the visual assault of his presence. Tom's words have to catch up with, in a sense translate, this more primary and immediate reality: the vision of him, his face and limbs transfixed to the gaze, a body suddenly exposed. The combined effect is a kind of garrulous mime: the words not only generate, but somehow are histrionic physical gestures. Face and voice combine to form a single compound violence.
Consequently, much of Tom's allegory-rich suggestibility comes not from words, but from his startling physicality….Tom is Adam, and the hovel the flooded Garden…
And Edgar? Talk about being an existential renter: because what else is he right now, crunched somewhere inside Tom's pyrotechnic dis-play? Who can say what he is thinking? He certainly cannot. He is given nothing, not the tiniest aside, still less a parting soliloquy, to assure the audience that he knows how big and strange this moment is, or that he might have things under control.
***…he bursts into accusation when his father appears, as he bursts into accusation when his father appears, gruesomely haloed in his torch.
.
This is the foule Flibbertigibbet
Here comes his father in the guise of a fiend:
Hee begins at Curfew
Never a peaceful sleep in that house:
And walkes at first Cocke
We were always woken early:
Hee gives the Web and the Pin
Lessons were torture:
Squints the eye
The teacher malevolent, candlelight dim:
And makes the Hare-lippe
His ghoulish face distorted as it loomed:
Mildewes the white Wheate
Breakfast was mean:
And hurts the poore Creature of earth.
You made us to mar us. (TLN 1895-99; italics mine)
We might say that Tom has never been more necessary than now, when Gloucester arrives, and it is only through Tom that Edgar can let loose his barbs. The Edgar-actor has little more to go on than we do. And Edgar has little more to go on than his actor. He is clamped inside Tom-Granville-Barker calls it an "arbitrary bondage" - guarded by him, armored by him, in some implacable way prevented by him. Life is at once ratcheted to barely bearable intensity and tantalizingly on hold.
[*FN3. Harley Granville-Barker: "Edgar also is drawn into Lear's orbit; and, for the time, to the complete sacrifice of his own interests in the play, "Poor Tom' is in effect an embodiment of Lear's frenzy, the disguise no part of Edgar's own development." Prefaces to Shakespeare, Vol 1 (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1930), 273-74. But compare Granville-Barker's later observation:
"Through the ravings of Poor Tom we can detect something of the mind of Edgar with its misprision of the sensual life-of his father's life, is it?" (319).]
Edgar is held inside Tom, forced into deflection, seeing and not-seen, excited in a state of waiting. And what is worse: just like his father, with his wistful address to his lost son ("I had a Sonne, Now out-law'd"; TLN 1946-47), Edgar is possessed by love and hurt that are expressible only through apostrophe. For surely this is the key to Tom's parting chant, with its darkly poignant infantilism:
Childe Rowland to the darke Tower came [Quarto: towne]
His word was still, fie, foh, and fumme
I smell the blood of a British man. (TLN 1966-68)
Tom resists Gloucester's thrice-spoken demand for silence ("No words / No words / hush" (TLN 1965) as the child is led by the smell of blood and climbs the "darke Tower" to where the ignorant "Brit-tish man" lays. The song perhaps harks back to childhood in the castle; perhaps it echoes a fanciful dream. But above all Tom's rhyme, charac-teristically, will not be bound by the occasion. He does not stop when Gloucester tells him; his voice floats beyond the moment, across the gap and into the scene that immediately takes the stage: where Bastard and Cornwall vengefully plot the very same British man's destruction. The scripting is devilish and heart-breaking. Because these are apostrophes to apparent absence-to the son, to the revenge-that are in fact terrifyingly imminent.
There mis a marked difference between every one of Tom's appearances.
In his first scene "Edgar" barely gets a look in. Tom carries all before him, is the focal point of endless questions: indeed, he or it in many ways is the question. It is little wonder that the Quarto text notates the king's party's next appearance on stage thus: "Enter Gloster and Lear, Kent, Foole, and Tom" (III. vi). The stage direction is no error. Tom is. Edgar has vanished.*
But the second Tom-scene is different. He struggles to get Lear's attention. And as Lear ignores Tom, Edgar re-emerges: as though issuea precisely from Tom's loneliness or his redundancy.
In the Folio version Edgar seems to say goodbye to Tom halfway through the scene: "poore Tom thy horne is dry" (TLN 2032). We might hear in this a reemergent Edgar, perhaps quoting a proverbial lament: the horn is the vessel in which the beggar-man carries his drink; and it is his voice, his music.
Taken as one (drink, voice, music) the horn compacts or perhaps compensates for Tom's elusive virility. A dry horn speaks the emptying of inspiration, and so the need to move on to find refreshment. The horn must be filled; a new patron found. But for Edgar, it seems, the lament is valedictory. His Tom is done.
At the end of the scene everyone else simply leaves the vagrant be-hind, without so much as a word. There is a litter prepared for Lear, and "welcome, and protection," promised at Dover. "Come, come, away," says Gloucester, and the king's party departs (TLN 2049-56). But what of Poor Tom? Where does he go? He is left by his maker (Edgar), apparently because he is alone and disregarded: no longer noticed or useful, and so dispensable. Secretly, surreptitiously, Edgar leaves Tom. Then less secretly, and with far more carelessness, everyone else leaves Tom too. No one sees this happening, of course, because no one can see the difference between Tom and Edgar. But in Shakespeare sight is not always the measure of truth or existing. Has Tom then vanished? Is he annihilated, rendered null, by this withdrawal of attention?
But it so, what happens if we decide to renew our attention?
Edgar's next appearance takes place only in the Quarto text. He is alone, marooned on stage after the others leave. Edgar is trying manfully to cheer himself up, to be a loyal subject and faithful godson, to frame a catechism whose repeated uttering might carry him across present doubts and turmoil:
Exit [Lear, Gloster, Kent, Fool
Edg. When we our betters see bearing our woes, we scarcely
think our miseries our foes.
Who alone suffers, most i’the mind,…
The speech happens between two scenes - one in which Gloucester leads the king and his party away, the next in which Gloucester is hauled in to be tortured by Cornwall and Regan.
This interstitial placement is crucial. Perhaps Edgar's soliloguy expresses something quite different from anything in the Folio text; or perhaps it provides a text for the dizzying transvertebrations to come.
***The decisive couplet is this:***
He childed as I fathered, Tom away;
Marke the high noyses and thy selfe bewray (III. vi. 117-18)*
He has been badly fathered (poorly treated by Gloucester), just as Lear has been badly "childed," or cruelly treated by his progeny. Conversely, Lear has been made a child ("childed"), and Edgar has been made a father ("father'd"). So who has Edgar been made a father to?
One answer is about to become apparent: he will father his own father, caring for the blind man's life like a parent might a toddler. Another answer is Tom, insofar as he is Edgar's own creation. But if Tom is Edgar's child, then the chiasmic inversions of the phrase also insist that Edgar is Toms child. Each is responsible for the other's creation and sustenance; each seeks to mold, prescript, discipline the other; each cares for the other;
[***FN Harold Bloom sees this couplet as the key to the play, and the Edgar-role as aflicted by
"an excess of love!" Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1999)]
The inextricable complicity of Tom and Edgar is reinforced by the couplet's ambiguous address. "Tom, away" might be a dismissal, an admonition for Tom to leave and for Edgar to resume his "just proof." Equally, it might speak a renewed girding of the loins— "let's go!" — with Tom retaining his role as the disguised Edgar's barrier-breaking avatar.
Decisions about this—whether Tom is being dismissed or employed-duly inform our sense of the couplet's second line. What does it mean to "thy selfe bewray"? Which self? And why "bewray" -a word that usually implies the exposing of secrets, often with malign or betraying intent.
Edgar's "thy selfe" is dizzyingly uncertain: not only because it is unclear whether "thy" is Edgar or Tom, but because to "bewray" this "thy" is to reinforce, even to thematize, the same agential ambiguity.
perhaps the rarely noted fact that — contrary to expectation—this rhyming speech does not end with a parting rhyme of affirmation, but with a short line consisting of a single repeated verb: lurk, lurk.
At times like this the Edgar-part, under extremity of duress, can seem to float almost schizophrenically above both of its selves, with “Edgar" and "Tom" equally distanced and synthetic. There is a curious sense that the part—an uncertain amalgam of part-text, actor, Tom, Ed-gar, and some abstracted persona that is not quite any of these units-is being forced to rethink the smallest movement…Consequently, the part has to tell this body what to do, instruct it like an apprentice or a doll.
But which is the master, which the doll? Who is told to "Lurk, lurk"?
Who is doing the telling? It sounds like Tom: the creepy verbal repetition is often played as a return into the guise and voice of vagrancy. But this morphing has been going on for at least three lines. Again, neither origin nor target of the speech can be pinned down. To lurk is to be concealed and furtive. But it is different from the "happy hollow" in which Edgar earlier hid himself. For lurking suggests an active, perhaps sur-velling observation of others. The lurking precedes an ambush; it is an act of waiting as much as hiding: its true secret is latency, and therefore imminence. He is waiting; he is gestating; and when he comes, he will have secret and usable knowledge. Clearly the verb applies as much to Edgar (lurking inside Tom) as to Tom (for whom lurking is vocation and ontology).
The play's last words are spoken by Albany in the Quarto and by Edgar in the Folio:
The waight of this sad time we must obey,
Speake what we feele, not what we ought to say:
The oldest hath borne most, we that are yong,
Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (TLN 3298-301)
The change of speaker can seem fairly meaningless —one or other decent survivor, struggling to say something plausible. The easiest thing is to accept the Folio version as better, more final. Edgar has gone through more than Albany, and been closer to us; he is a slightly more persuasive aphorist and a lot more competent politician. Perhaps that will do. What is more, the contingent displacement of Albany by Edgar shows the Edgar-part persevering in its manners—we might say its sentence-to the very end. This is what Edgar does: he acts for others.
Part surrogate, part parasite, part scapegoat, part healer, and always, in some inescapable way, the cursed primogenitor, born to inherit the land.
But I think the fact of a switch matters as much as its possible ra-tionalizations. For a start, it shows the playworld's shuttered take on events persisting to the end: Albany says it, Edgar says it; one says it first, the other says it second; one auditions, the other gets the part; they say it together, they speak over each other; one voice speaks in the other's interstices, one voice haunts the other; they compete, defer, harmonize-and retreat mutually into silence. This last fact in particular should not be forgotten: that Edgar is possibly silent.
In the Quarto he says nothing after his blank notice of Lear's death-"0 he is gone indeed" (V. ill. 315) — not responding to Albany's request to rule with Kent. We can make what we like of this. It is invariably assumed that he takes up the mantle, perhaps through gritted teeth. But this is no more than implied (if that).
Even in the Folio he answers at an oblique angle to Albany's summons ("The waight of this sad time we must obey"; TLN
3298), and may as easily be rebuking the recalcitrant Kent as expressing his own reluctant obedience. The "sad time" he means to obey may be history's runes, which Edgar will study for himself, in his own sweet time.
The only sure thing is that he hasn't become King Edgar. He has been offered something without institutional definition, without clear narrative teleology.
. . . . .
Palfrey’s Poor Tom is a detailed, deep dive into the characters of Edgar and Poor Tom. Densely academic, but elegantly written, not dryly encyclopedic.
I wish Palfrey had done more “translation”/ interpretation of Tom’s lines, as he did with the Flibbertigibbet passage.
THE CHINESE TRAGEDY OF KING LEAR CONTINUES:
Under extreme political pressure the philosopher-fool disappears. I don't know why adaptations of Lear have killed off the Fool. It should remain painfully unclear what happens to him. The Fool, as grand entertainer, has to perform a vanishing act. Everything is moving along, and, suddenly, the person responsible for merriment and criticism is not there anymore. We just saw him a moment ago acting out a play with Lear and Edgar in the hovel. He just did a good bit there: Oh, is that Goneril? he exclaims: "I took you for a joint-stool." A joint-stool! Har har har. The Fool was in top form, no signs of fading.
It takes a while to notice a disappearance when things are getting bad, but one day you look up and they're gone, the comics and comedians who enlivened your days and cued your witticisms.
Comedians grow old and embittered, too, become metacomical and turn into tragic historians of their own art form.
In Lear the Fool takes his leave. He could not deal with it anymore. Let's go back to act 3, scene 6, to see what happened. "Make no noise, make no noise," says Lear to the Fool in their hovel,
"Draw the curtains. So, so. We'll go to supper in the morning." This mention of supper reminds us that Lear, the Fool, Kent, and Edgar hadn't eaten anything in a long time. Lear loves his Fool, and so promises that there'll be a meal in the morning. It's an empty promise, but what can you do. "And I'll go to bed at noon," the Fool retorts (i.e., "yeah right, we'll supper in the morning"). Or maybe he didn't say it sarcastically. Maybe it was:
"I cannot not call out your bullshit but I say it with
kindness." Perhaps he takes his job seriously. The Fool must subversively speak truth to power to the end, even if there's no one to correct anymore besides the starving and broken-hearted.
You needn't ask what happens to the Fool. He doesn't come back because his kind effectively becomes extinct by the time we finish the play. There might not be any more Kents in this world, in the short and maybe even long term. But Fools of this kind? They will have disappeared as a category.
December 9, 2024
This play was one of the hardest texts I have read as a 22 years old person, in terms of context. It is agressive, violent and many times I had to take a break, it was too much at some point. But overall, as Edward Bond himself says on the preface, it is meant to be violent. He wrote it for it to be violent, and to show humans violence. If you think you can bare some gore and violence, and if you are interested in theatre plays, you should read this. A masterpiece at last.
September 7, 2022
Read in preparation for my Third Year University Course on Tragedy. Again, I’m finding the vast majority of these plays to be beyond my frail intellect. They seem a little to lofty and abstract for me. That being said, I much preferred this one to many of the others, as I could easily follow the story, and appreciated being able to recognise the characters at first glance. Captured the unnerving and disturbing elements of Shakespeare’s revered tragedy, injecting it with more contemporary questions about social morality in the modern world. I am excited to learn more about all of these texts from my tutors, and to consider their difference from the Classic and Shakespearean tragic dramas I have encountered and come to love. Perhaps soon I will be snow to say the same for contemporary plays.
December 13, 2023
not sure what i expected this to be but it wasn’t really this… i feel like there’s a lot of things that went over my head here but there were still things i appreciated (mostly the king lear parallels in all honesty)
i’m wondering if this might have been more effective as a novel? a lot of the narrative was told through asides which i get is a brechtian thing and he was heavily influenced by brecht, but i would still be interested to see how differently this might come across as a prose narrative
i’m wondering if this might have been more effective as a novel? a lot of the narrative was told through asides which i get is a brechtian thing and he was heavily influenced by brecht, but i would still be interested to see how differently this might come across as a prose narrative
February 25, 2020
Edward Bon brilliantly recreated King Lear, with parody and violence. Lear is just like Donald Trump who is obsessed over building a wall to protect his nation, not realizing the enemies are inside not outside. Bond basically explores the way we think of world though categorical thinking or the concept of us and them. By and large, since he is a postmodern author his work contains lots of intertextuality from names and ides from Shakespeare.
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December 12, 2025(modern english drama)
April 14, 2024
Edward Bond's reinterpretation of Shakespeare's King Lear presents an intrepid and stimulating exploration of political themes, challenging traditional views on power, responsibility, and societal structures, Bond's adaptation delves into the complexities of governance, morality, and individual agency, offering a stark critique of authoritarianism and inequality. Through his reimagining of characters and plot elements, Bond crafts a narrative that resonates with contemporary audiences while engaging in a reflective investigation of human nature and society.
In this tome, the outmoded hierarchy of power is pulled to bits and dissected, revealing the faults and prejudices inherent in authoritarian rule. Unlike Shakespeare's depiction of a king's decline into madness and eventual revitalization, Bond's Lear confronts the intrinsic corruption and cruelty of the ruling elite. Lear's abdication of responsibility serves as a catalyst for societal upheaval, exposing the oppressive nature of his regime and the exploitation of the marginalized.
Bond's representation of Lear as a flawed and morally ambiguous figure challenges the conventional notion of monarchie authority. Rather than presenting Lear as a sympathetic victim of circumstance, Bond emphasizes his complicity in perpetuating injustice and inequality. By questioning the moral inferences of political power, Bond forces readers to confront uncomfortable truths about the nature of governance and the abuse of authority.
Central to Bond's reinterpretation, is the theme of individual responsibility and moral agency. Unlike Shakespeare's emphasis on divine providence and cosmic justice, Bond's adaptation foregrounds the ethical choices made by characters in the face of systemic oppression. Cordelia's transformation from a passive victim to a revolutionary leader highlights the importance of personal accountability and collective action in challenging oppressive structures.
Bond's characters grapple with the ethical dilemmas posed by their social context, confronting their own complicity in perpetuating injustice. Through Lear's journey of self-discovery and redemption, Bond underscores the moral imperative of confronting injustice and advocating for social change. By foregrounding the role of individual agency in shaping political outcomes, Bond challenges deterministic views of history and society, emphasizing the transformative potential of human action.
Bond's reinterpretation of King Lear serves as a searing critique of societal structures and institutionalized inequality. By exposing the brutality and callousness of the ruling class, Bond highlights the inherent injustice of hierarchical systems of governance. Characters like Regan and Goneril embody the ruthlessness and self-interest of the privileged elite. At the same time, Lear's gradual awakening to the suffering of the marginalized exposes the hypocrisy of the status quo.
Bond's adaptation subverts traditional notions of nobility and virtue, presenting a world where power and privilege are wielded with impunity. Through the lens of Lear's downfall, Bond interrogates the underlying dynamics of class oppression and social hierarchy, challenging audiences to confront the systemie injustices that pervals society. By foregrounding the voices of the marginalized and disenfranchised, Bond exposes the structural inequalities chat underpin political power and authority
To conclude, in this reinterpretation, political themes take center stage, challenging traditional views on power, responsibility, and societal structures. Through his bold reimagining of characters and plot elements, Bond techniques a narrative that resonates with contemporary audiences while engaging in an insightful examination of human nature and society, By deconstructing power and authority, exploring individual responsibility, and critiquing societal structures, Bond offers a compelling vision of political upheaval and social transformation. Through Lear's journey of self-discovery and redemption, Bond underscores the moral imperative of confronting injustice and advocating for social change.
Ultimately, Bond's adaptation serves as a powerful annotation on the complexities of governance, ethics, and human agency, inviting us to reflect on the enduring relevance of Shakespeare's timeless tragedy in a modern context.
A classic. Most recommended.
In this tome, the outmoded hierarchy of power is pulled to bits and dissected, revealing the faults and prejudices inherent in authoritarian rule. Unlike Shakespeare's depiction of a king's decline into madness and eventual revitalization, Bond's Lear confronts the intrinsic corruption and cruelty of the ruling elite. Lear's abdication of responsibility serves as a catalyst for societal upheaval, exposing the oppressive nature of his regime and the exploitation of the marginalized.
Bond's representation of Lear as a flawed and morally ambiguous figure challenges the conventional notion of monarchie authority. Rather than presenting Lear as a sympathetic victim of circumstance, Bond emphasizes his complicity in perpetuating injustice and inequality. By questioning the moral inferences of political power, Bond forces readers to confront uncomfortable truths about the nature of governance and the abuse of authority.
Central to Bond's reinterpretation, is the theme of individual responsibility and moral agency. Unlike Shakespeare's emphasis on divine providence and cosmic justice, Bond's adaptation foregrounds the ethical choices made by characters in the face of systemic oppression. Cordelia's transformation from a passive victim to a revolutionary leader highlights the importance of personal accountability and collective action in challenging oppressive structures.
Bond's characters grapple with the ethical dilemmas posed by their social context, confronting their own complicity in perpetuating injustice. Through Lear's journey of self-discovery and redemption, Bond underscores the moral imperative of confronting injustice and advocating for social change. By foregrounding the role of individual agency in shaping political outcomes, Bond challenges deterministic views of history and society, emphasizing the transformative potential of human action.
Bond's reinterpretation of King Lear serves as a searing critique of societal structures and institutionalized inequality. By exposing the brutality and callousness of the ruling class, Bond highlights the inherent injustice of hierarchical systems of governance. Characters like Regan and Goneril embody the ruthlessness and self-interest of the privileged elite. At the same time, Lear's gradual awakening to the suffering of the marginalized exposes the hypocrisy of the status quo.
Bond's adaptation subverts traditional notions of nobility and virtue, presenting a world where power and privilege are wielded with impunity. Through the lens of Lear's downfall, Bond interrogates the underlying dynamics of class oppression and social hierarchy, challenging audiences to confront the systemie injustices that pervals society. By foregrounding the voices of the marginalized and disenfranchised, Bond exposes the structural inequalities chat underpin political power and authority
To conclude, in this reinterpretation, political themes take center stage, challenging traditional views on power, responsibility, and societal structures. Through his bold reimagining of characters and plot elements, Bond techniques a narrative that resonates with contemporary audiences while engaging in an insightful examination of human nature and society, By deconstructing power and authority, exploring individual responsibility, and critiquing societal structures, Bond offers a compelling vision of political upheaval and social transformation. Through Lear's journey of self-discovery and redemption, Bond underscores the moral imperative of confronting injustice and advocating for social change.
Ultimately, Bond's adaptation serves as a powerful annotation on the complexities of governance, ethics, and human agency, inviting us to reflect on the enduring relevance of Shakespeare's timeless tragedy in a modern context.
A classic. Most recommended.
May 4, 2025
I gotta admit, this interpretation Lear (the character) is truly deserving of everything that happens to him. However that doesn’t matter all too much, since every other character is just as terrible as him. The constant absence of any real character motivations. goals and any other form of establishing personality means that everyone seems to always make the worst and/or most vile choice they could make for no reason, seemingly at random.
This feeling carries on to the story as well. So much stuff happens off-stage, without the audience ever really being caught up on them. Everything feels like such a big mess that even the characters have lost the plot – and not in a way that the writer intended. The moment to moment interactions always feel like the characters are talking past each other. Every sentence spoken feels super clumsy, like no one knows what real conversation sounds like. Topics are picked and dropped at random, because the characters barely ever react to what the others on stage have just said and done. And when the topic/action changes to a new focus, there is no sensible transition – characters just randomly start talking about something new or doing something new without any catalyst. This extents to the larger scale story too. At several point, the writer just pulled new plot threads out of nowhere because he seemingly failed to create a plot that could span across all three acts.
In conclusion: Everything about this play feels like a first draft that is still unfinished.
This feeling carries on to the story as well. So much stuff happens off-stage, without the audience ever really being caught up on them. Everything feels like such a big mess that even the characters have lost the plot – and not in a way that the writer intended. The moment to moment interactions always feel like the characters are talking past each other. Every sentence spoken feels super clumsy, like no one knows what real conversation sounds like. Topics are picked and dropped at random, because the characters barely ever react to what the others on stage have just said and done. And when the topic/action changes to a new focus, there is no sensible transition – characters just randomly start talking about something new or doing something new without any catalyst. This extents to the larger scale story too. At several point, the writer just pulled new plot threads out of nowhere because he seemingly failed to create a plot that could span across all three acts.
In conclusion: Everything about this play feels like a first draft that is still unfinished.
December 18, 2024
"I know it will end. Everything passes, even the waste. The fools will be silent. We won’t chain ourselves to the dead, or send our children to school in the graveyard. The torturers and ministers and priests will lose their office. And we’ll pass each other in the street without shuddering at what we’ve done to each other."
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August 1, 2024Some unexpected differences from the original, almost made me wonder why he adapted it. Still a great play - I'd only read Saved before and this was seriously, vastly different. Way under-read in the U.S.
February 25, 2019
Walls. Perfect for the Trump era.
December 3, 2020
Bu kadar uzatmaya gerek var mıydııı
November 29, 2021
frekansına giremedim
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