Everyman's Disasters

It is a nice enough coastal town, but, as regards Shakespeare, Connecticut's Stratford is spotty. In the nine years since its founding, Stratford's Festival Theater has followed a practice of putting big names in mediocre productions. Katharine Hepburn in 1960 did nothing to salvage a ragged Twelfth Night; Robert Ryan was a disaster in Antony and Cleopatra.

This summer Stratford boasts a production that any Shakespeare theater in the world might prize -- a good company with a triumphant King Lear, played by Veteran Character Actor Morris Carnovsky. Fact is, Carnovsky's Lear is such a popular and critical triumph that last week Stratford canceled two performances of Henry V and one each of Comedy of Errors and Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra to give Lear a longer run.

Something Superhuman. At 64, Carnovsky has played many of the classic character parts -- Shylock, Prospero and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. But Lear, obviously, is something else again, and Carnovsky says that when the role was offered to him he "fainted inside." The part, he says, "demands almost super human strength. The actor must learn to tell the truth."

A standard criticism of Lear is that it is insufficiently motivated: Why do the malicious whims of two ungrateful daughters plunge the old man into a frenzy of madness and remorse? Why does his single action -- the banishment of Cordelia -- cause his universe to crumble about him?

The answer, as interpreted by actors such as Paul Scofield and the late Louis Calhern, is that the seeds of madness have always lain dormant in Lear, ready at the slightest pretext to sprout. But Carnovsky has a more mordant and, in many ways, a more tragic view. Lear, he contends, is everyman; his disasters are everyman's and the tragedy in Shakespeare's eye "is not in Lear himself, but in life." When Carnovsky's Lear, reeling like a wounded animal, howls forth

When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools,

he speaks not only for himself and for Gloucester but for his audience as well.

Sense of Loss. Nothing that Lear has done or will do can account for the disasters that overtake him or for the death of Cordelia, which Carnovsky finds "so needless it is unbearable." As Carnovsky interprets him, Lear is a man stripped of everything except the strength to protest. His final act, he points out, "is to accuse the gods, to say if you can do this, then life is not worth living. Lear then consents to die." What gives Lear dignity at last is his unflinching involvement in his own destruction. Through him, Carnovsky thinks, Shakespeare was saying "I am part of life, and I affirm."

Although Carnovsky is not a large man (5 ft. 9 in., 165 Ibs.) he dominates the stage at Stratford with such extraordinary passion that the rest of the cast seems physically small by comparison. "I grew up with an inherited sense of the tragic, a sense of loss," he says. Whatever sense of tragedy he may have got from his impoverished childhood in St. Louis, he must feel a sense of high achievement in Connecticut. For night after night he sends his Stratford audiences home in tears.

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