As Flies to Wanton Boys

King Lear used to be regarded as one of Shakespeare's library plays: great, but virtually unplayable. Presenting this epic drama, with its almost inhumanly difficult title role, is a little like climbing the sheer face of a formidable, treacherous, icy cliff. Nonetheless, some curious infusion of fatality in the modern consciousness seems to make the play accessible to contemporary audiences. And to modern actors.

In a new revival of King Lear that is by far the best work that the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater has ever offered, Lee J. Cobb gives the finest performance of a lengthy and distinguished acting career. A graduate of the militantly proletarian Group Theater of the late '30s, he was the quintessential Willy Loman in Broadway's first production of Death of a Salesman. Conventionally cast as a Hollywood heavy in many of his countless films (among them: Thieves' Highway, On the Waterfront), he almost invariably brought glimmerings of insight to even the most routine parts. At the age of 57, he is quite clearly ready for the challenge of Lear. His king is blind, incurably foolish, a man eventually so scoured by suffering that his death is like a saint's birth. The portrayal has an all-involving humanity from which an audience cannot withhold some of its deepest and most turbulent emotions.

Throwing Temper Tantrums. Here is a Lear with a willful, robber baron strain of not quite legitimate authority. The viewer feels that he has carved out his kingdom just as he proposes to carve up the map of England for his daughters. As a kind of self-made king, he falls into the first of his blindnesses, the idea that he can give away his possessions and his crown and yet retain power in his person alone. Cobb reveals how the fool in Lear is intrinsically a child. This 80-year-old is an eight-year-old in disguise, throwing temper tantrums against daughters whom he has naively empowered to switch roles with him. Regan and Goneril are, in effect, a stern, unyielding common mother fiercely chastising an obstreperous child. Cobb is equally good at conveying the sense of age: he is old inside as well as outside. The years are numbered in his white hairs, but there is also the anguish of diminished manhood, the baffled rage at seeing his own young wield the force that was once solely his prerogative.

Lear should be a storm, as well as be in a storm; Cobb is not quite up to that. He is more like Job than Jove. When he hurls his anathemas, he tends to scream unintelligibly, suggesting the hapless actor of whom Kenneth Tynan wrote that listening to his Lear "was like lip reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning." But during the storm on the heath, Cobb's Lear gains in compassionate wisdom what he loses in pride and sanity. As he shelters the shivering Fool, listens to the gibberings of mad Tom and later gazes into the bloody, eyeless face of Gloucester, Lear sheds his vanity and learns of his oneness with "unaccommodated man . . . such a poor bare forked animal."

In his final torment, Lear cradles the lifeless body of his heart's love, Cordelia, uttering the desolate fivefold "Never" over the daughter whom he will never see alive again. By that time, the odyssey of suffering is complete, and Cobb has elevated Lear's pain into a kingship of the spirit.

Quite apart from Cobb's impressive achievement, the Lincoln Center King Lear is distinguished by a supporting cast that truly supports. A rarity in the past, the players' acting rapport is a tribute to the skill of Director Gerald Freedman. Philip Bosco's Kent is a beautifully modulated performance with a Gielgud-like delivery of the Shakespearean line. Rene Auberjonois as the Fool is a supple mime of wisdom and Stephen Elliott's Gloucester is a man of probity incarnate, woefully abused. Barbette Tweed's Cordelia is appropriately sweet and good; Patricia Elliott as Regan and Marilyn Lightstone as Goneril are properly serpentine. Only Stacy Keach disappoints, by failing into smirky stage-villain mannerisms as Gloucester's bastard son Edmund. His performance misses the point of Shakespeare's transcendent vision which makes earthly villainy pale before the terrors meted out to men by fate:

As flies to wanton boys, Are we to the gods;

They kill us for their sport.

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