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King Lear Act IV, Scene 6, with Scofield: On the Beach
This RSC complete performance of “King Lear” is one of the darkest versions of the play, directed by Peter Brooke, but one of its most impressive sequences begins at minute 91 of this recording. It manages to communicate some of the deepest fellow-feelings of suffering humanity in challenging authority. This extended scene constitutes the real climax of the play, not Lear’s raging in the storm scenes, but his acceptance of the truths he begins to discover at quieter moments during them. The blinded Gloucester is in a suicidal mood , after discovering his son Edgar’s innocence of the charges by his half-brother, the illegitimate Edmund. However, Edgar successfully cures Gloucester by the grotesque shock therapy of a supposedly miraculous rescue after thinking he has thrown himself over Dover Cliff. On the beach Gloucester encounters the king and the two chastened old men exchange rueful remarks about their newly understood lives. Many actors think that Lear is still mad, but even in the storm he was really mostly mad with rage, and Sebastian Shaw of the RSC has plausibly played every line of Lear in this scene as simple truth. So Lear goes from mad rage at the start of the play to sane realism here.
Last Updated on Friday, 22 June 2012 11:55
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