day eleven: lear
January 11, 2017 @ 3:48 pm | Filed under: Books
I’m teaching King Lear to Beanie’s literature class this month, and part of my prep has been to watch as many iterations of the play as Youtube can provide. There are a few good Ian McKellan clips to be found, but what has really entranced me is the series of interviews and scene excerpts from the National Theatre production starring Simon Russell Beale. Absolutely riveting.
And the devastating Act IV, Scene iv.
There are 26 clips in the series. Only four are excerpts from the performance, but the interviews are well worth the time.
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Alice Gunther says:
Awesome, Lissa! We just put on King Lear with Bernadette as Kent, Neil and Gloucester, Cecilia as Reagan and Rebecca as Cordelia. Very, very intense.
On January 11, 2017 at 7:51 pm
Melanie Bettinelli says:
Well, that’s been a nice little rabbit hole to fall down. I wasn’t planning to lose myself in Lear, but now I want to go watch a bunch of productions.
On January 11, 2017 at 8:41 pm
bearing says:
I took three high schoolers to a local movie theater to see a rebroadcast of a simulcast National Theatre production of Hamlet (with Benedict Cumberbatch) last school year. Unforgettable. I need to keep paying attention for when the theater does stuff like that again.
On January 12, 2017 at 5:53 am
Susanne Barrett says:
My daughter Elizabeth and I saw an incredible performance of Lear at the Old Globe about five years ago. It was truly masterful…and when a lion roared from the zoo, echoing some of the old king’s lines, a shiver went up my spine. That’s one benefit (or not) of the outdoor staging of summer Shakespeare: sometimes the zoo animals join in. 😉 When we saw Richard Thomas and Blair Underwood in Othello there more recently, a group of monkeys got into a contentious fight during Desdemona’s murder scene, and we were almost giggling at the effect…which is not what the Bard intended!
I’ll definitely mark these to watch and perhaps save them for my tragedies discussion in the Shakespeare Family Workshop this spring! Thank you!!
Warmly,
Susanne
On January 12, 2017 at 11:22 am