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King Lear
The art of the stage is largely one of clearing space, of getting impediments out of the way and avoiding the incursion of new ones, demarcating fields on which patterns of experience emerge through time, be they psychic, spiritual, or ideological. A new lushness can take root, or a greater austerity. Or both, as they…
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King Lear
The end of the Chichester Festival Theatre’s KING LEAR tore my heart out and cast its remnants on a desolate plain. But I’ll get to that later. Up to then, Angus Jackson’s production, currently on loan to BAM, is refreshingly straightforward but somewhat nondescript; it tells the story, without dragging, but rises only occasionally to…
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A Christmas Carol
Dickens’ Scrooge has always reminded me, at least a little, of Shakespeare’s Lear. There is a similar majesty to his tale, although the outcome is comic rather than tragic, and he is, of course, petty bourgeois instead of royal. In place of vain munificence, it is self-loathing stinginess that afflicts him, and he is brought…