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King Lear is the subject of our September 2024 summer school. It will be in London this year - six great days on what is thought by many to be Shakespeare’s greatest play. And who better to lead the first three days than the legendary director Bill Alexander. The RSC associate notably directed the actor Corin Redgrave in the title role 20 years ago. Michael Corbidge, RSC senior voice and text associate, will take over from Bill to workshop the last three days. The School will run from
September 9-14
at The Playground Theatre, West London.
Company founder Mary Chater said: “Bill is one of the greatest directors of Shakespeare working in the English language. It’s in his DNA. Michael works on Shakespeare with exciting insight and ease from an actor's point of view. Two contrasting approaches for a full immersion on this great play. We can’t wait.”
The six day school costs £480. If you want to sign up for this most stimulating and revelatory of days then let us know. Be quick as places are limited! A non returnable deposit of £80 will secure your place, the full amount to be paid eight weeks before the first day of the course.
Notes on Lear
King Lear has long had a reputation as the ultimate in tragedy: this harrowing tale of an irascible father driven mad by the cruelty of his children asks more searching questions of its audiences than many commentators have felt equipped to answer.
It is no coincidence that the play today is more popular than ever before. Despite its complexities Lear seems to speak more loudly to contemporary audiences than ever before - more in tune with the pessimism and emptiness of the modern era than any other Shakespeare play: Jan Kott radically compared it to Beckett and Ionesco’s theatre of the absurd, commenting that in Lear “the abyss, into which one can jump, is everywhere”.
Shakespeare’s most obvious source for the work was an anonymous play performed by the Queen’s company, The Chroncile History of King Leir and his three daughters (not published until 1605). The Duke of Gloucester subplot is taken from Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and some of Poor Tom’s language derives from a viciously anti – Catholic pamphlet (1603) by Anglican cleric Samuel Harsnett. Michel de Montaigne’s Essays also seem to have been fresh in Shakespeare’s mind at this point.
Interpreting the play
Looked at one way, King Lear is all about politics. It begins with a ruler’s casual resignation from power, and ends in catastrophe when rival factions tear his country apart. There’s reason to think that Shakespeare’s earliest spectators would have seen the relevance of this fable – particularly on St Stephen’s Night 1606 (December 26, the day after Christmas), when the audience for this new play included King James I, a ruler who had brought Scotland and England into uneasy political union for the first time. Read as a warning to princes, King Lear’s message is stark: power is yours, it says, but so are the gravest of responsibilities. People’s lives, the lives of what the play calls the “poor naked wretches” who make up the commonwealth, matter (3.4.28). It is only by being driven mad that King Lear realises the truth, but one of the play’s many tragedies is that, by then, it is too late: his kingdom has already gone.
King Lear pushes the political and the personal into massive conjunction, and it addresses not just politicians but ordinary mortals too: it shows that who has power matters, and that problems afflicting a country’s rulers can have terrifying consequences. Shakespeare makes the story of what happens “when majesty falls to folly” as King Lear’s Kent bluntly puts it (1.1.148), the epicentre of his tragedy.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Playground Theatre, Unit 8, 343-453 Latimer Rd,London, United Kingdom
