Old Play in Manhattan

King Lear. For his return to the U.S. stage after nine years abroad, Orson Welles chose a tragedy as theatrically challenging as it is tremendous. His King is every inch a showman. His Lear is often pictorially brilliant. But it is hardly, on Shakespeare's terms, Lear; nor, even on Welles's terms, successful.

With its striding rages and vivid madness, Welles's Lear scarcely buttressed the widespread belief that the part is unactable; even with an injured ankle, Welles was never a mere "old gentleman tottering about with a walking stick." But both as actor and director, Welles slighted Lear's character and Lear's significance, did far too little with Shakespeare's poetry. Any number of moments lacked their sovereign power to move--and not least from scanting Shakespeare's sovereign powers of language.

Welles gave Lear not character but personality. The quest for effect outlawed inwardness; the thirst for size defeated stature. And the City Center cast had neither Shakespearean style nor personal distinction.

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By the second night of Lear's run, Orson Welles was completely crippled. Having broken his left ankle just before the opening, he sprained the right one immediately after it. Despite poor notices, Manhattan's City Center was packed when the second-night curtain rang up and Welles was rolled out in a wheelchair, one foot encased in a plaster cast, the other swathed in bandages. At 40, and weighing 260 Ibs., the heavy-jowled "boy wonder'' no longer looked like a precocious cherub, but he quickly demonstrated that he had not lost his showmanship.

Announcing in his deep, effortless voice that Lear could not go on but that Welles would, he apologized for looking more like "the man who came to dinner" than a tormented monarch. He candidly confessed that since the City Center was a nonprofit, cultural organization that needed the money, he had "come out to discourage a stampede to the box office." Only a few hundred of an estimated 2,800 present asked for refunds. The rest settled back for An Evening with Orson Welles.

Answering questions from the audience, Welles said that "deep down, all actors believe the bad things critics say about them," admitted that on opening night something had happened to him halfway through the play for the first time in his life that he had always "despised" in other actors: "I really believed the play. I was playing the part of a man who went mad and I was mad. I thought I was getting better and better. But I was so seized with it that I ceased to communicate with the audience."

Welles vowed that he would play out the run of Lear, "if they have to swing me over the stage with wire." Then he agreed to an audience request that he tell the story of Lear, acting the King's part. He interrupted his little concert only once --to apologize for having made a mistake in the text. "I'm terribly nervous," he said, "but I know why I made that mistake." Then he said to someone in the first row center: "Please don't take pictures. That clicking noise sounds like the breaking of bones."

Welles finished the week playing Lear to a full house. He was dressed and made up for the part, but did it all from his wheelchair. The audience loved it.

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