Available onlineTheatre games, workshops & rehearsals
(page 4 of 4)(Part of an online exhibition created by OU Associate Lecturer Brendan Jackson in 2014)
| Clip 9: | A361 King Lear workshop 2 |
|---|---|
| Duration: | 00:07:57 |
| Date: | 1984 |
Shakespeare’s plays make great demands of their performers. Hamlet and King Lear not only challenge the sheer stamina of the principals: there are also peculiarly difficult technical details. In King Lear, for instance, the King is required on one occasion to repeat the single word ‘kill’ uninterruptedly six times1, and on another to perform the same feat with five repetitions of ‘Never’.2 The next clip (Clip 9) is from a rehearsal which closes with a striking realisation of the first of these cruxes. The clip was filmed at the end of a long and exhausting workshop conducted by John Russell Brown. The crazed Lear has met the blinded Gloucester. Gloucester’s son Edgar appears briefly in a kind of choric role.
View Clip 9
Footnotes
1 Shakespeare, W. (n.d.) King Lear [Conflated Text, Act 4, Scene 6, line 181], in Greenblatt, S. (ed) (1997) The Norton Shakespeare, New York, W.W. Norton, p. 2538
2 Shakespeare, W. (n.d.) King Lear [Conflated Text, Act 5, Scene 3, line 307], in Greenblatt, S. (ed) (1997) The Norton Shakespeare, New York, W.W. Norton, p. 2552
