A Kind of Courage: King Lear at the Old Vic, London, 1940

A Kind of Courage: King Lear at the Old Vic, London, 1940 William W. French The London Times for April 16, 1940, called the production the "first genuine theatre occasion of the war." The occasion was a production of King Lear ("from all accounts the greatest production of our time") at London's Old Vic theatre with John Gielgud as a Lear of "Olympian grandeur." Harley Granville-Barker directed, with the assistance of Lewis Casson, at GranvilleBarker 's request the nominal director (Mack 27). Fear of war formed the backdrop that evening. The Times reviewer took note of the "real first night expectancy, the genuine excitement of an audience expecting something great." The war and Shakespeare's play converged, a pairing that generated intense excitement. What can we make of this theatre event in which some of the most prominent names of the twentieth-century British theatre worked together on a play that the learned had long considered unproducable? What does the concurrence of this production and the onset of World War II suggest? Recent performance history of Shakespeare has traced the numerous connections that may be drawn between theatrical performance and the producing culture. Especially, a production in which a director makes intercessions upon a play may be read as a cultural artifact. In recent years, King Lear in particular has been fertile ground for such directorial intercessions, with productions that suggest the rise of the bourgeoisie and the consequent collapse of feudalism, that portray an Oriental fantasy or a harsh Eskimo or Bedouin world, or that draw an apocalyptic vision of a godless, Beckettian world. Such "viable" productions employ modern technology and address current social issues to sustain the interest of contemporary audiences. Directors shape such productions according to a perceived cultural milieu—social issues, economics, politics, intellectual currents—and to current theatrical developments, as well as to personal convictions.1 The 1940 Lear at the Old Vic may serve as a test case to sort out the operation of cultural and personal forces in determining how our concept of culture figures into a 45 46 William W. French reading of a performance of a Shakespeare play. This is an especially intriguing and vital question now, as a new historiography challenges accepted concepts of culture, especially those regarding political power. The focus of this essay must rest upon Harley Granville-Barker, whose Preface formed the basis of the 1940 production and may therefore be thought of as the ground of the directorial concept of the production (Dymkowski 129-98). But Granville-Barker's "concept ," so considered, does not resemble the kind of "viable" appropriation to which directors such as Marowitz subscribe. Granville-Barker's approach steers a course between the "viable"—catering to contemporary audience interests —and the "valid"—hewing to a received perception of the text—that brings the producing culture into a gemination with the text and its audience. Granville-Barker's reading of Lear in the 1940 production did not appropriate Shakespeare to a specific political cause or an educational policy that supported hegemony. Neither did the production support "establishment views" or underpin a particular ideological framework (Wells 185). This point may become clearer if we compare this production to Sir Laurence Olivier's famous motion picture version of Henry V. Olivier's wartime film, a deliberate propaganda effort, distanced its audience from the horrors of the war by means of evasive textual cuts, by celebrating the concept of "England" as a "sacrosanct community," and by suppressing "ironies that the text directs against the king and his conduct." Olivier appropriated Henry V for the "war effort"and shaped the production by his "patriotic fervor" and an "almost mystic identification with Shakespeare" (61). Olivier's film truly mystified the play in the service of an intense patriotism and may certainly be said to encourage a hegemonic reading. Granville-Barker, on the other hand, had no such intention, and his 1941 King Lear comes across as neither hegemonic nor counter-hegemonic. The production in no way glorified the war it represented nor valorized its participants. Its force lay in confronting squarely the tragic inevitability of war—quite a different matter— and its inescapable consequences. Rather than glossing...