Performing King Lear: Gielgud to Russell Beale by Jonathan Croall, and: Writing Performative Shakespeares: New Forms for Performance Criticism by Rob Conkie (review)

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” The aphorism—attributed to everyone from Laurie Anderson to Frank Zappa—implies that there is something absurd about the attempt to capture performance in prose. The simile’s torque relies on the axiomatic idiocy of “dancing about architecture.” Still, there’s nothing inherently stranger in “dancing about architecture” than, say, dancing about the rites of spring. Given that architecture is about form, mass, suspension, etc., it might make a good matter for a dance. This is simply to say that while writing about dancing—or in this case, performance—has certain built-in challenges, it is by no means an absurd end.

It is nevertheless the case that much writing about Shakespeare in performance is nagged by an almost disabling self-consciousness. What’s more, this is true of the best writing about Shakespeare and performance, so that, paradoxically—to mangle another well-worn axiom—the best lacks all conviction. The two books under review approach the formal challenge of writing about performance from divergent flanks, one with a disarming lack of self-consciousness and the other with a winning brand of enabling self-reflection. Performing King Lear and Writing Performative Shakespeares share, that is, more than just an inevitable gerund; they each tack toward performance through techniques that leave the normative methods—thick description and thin critiques—behind and attempt above all to evoke performance through innovative form.

Performing King Lear is less an argument than an archive. It offers fifty-eight capsule summaries of Jonathan Croall’s interviews with the leading actors and directors of King Lear from across the last forty years. The structure is intentionally repetitive, which almost certainly means that the only people to read the book from its first word to its last are its writer and its reviewers. Read sequentially, however, the book provides a field survey of the things that actors and directors talk about when they talk about King Lear. They talk, almost to a man (which is also one of the points of the book), about the age problem, the storm scene, the weight of Cordelia, the determination to distinguish Regan from Goneril, so that what becomes clear from a seriatim reading is that actors and directors are not—in every instance—talking about their own experience of the play but instead are talking about performing Lear in the ways they imagine they’re supposed to talk about performing Lear—which is just one more way in which the Shakespearean stage is among the most conservative institutions operating in the West today.

For instance, nearly every actor and director of Lear/Lear brings up the difficulty of the storm scene, noting the audio-acoustic challenges of staging a credible tempest while preserving a legible text. Gielguld, for one, observes that “Lear has to be the storm, but I could do no more than shout against the thundersheet” (12). The quote is merely typical, since nearly every actor and director confesses to their failure to stage the storm scene to their own satisfaction (this is a theatrical version of the old saw that everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it). But failure—the failure to stage a storm, the failure to look the “right” age, the failure to carry Cordelia—is the hallmark of the play’s performance history, a sort of masochistic celebration of heroic but doomed assaults on the play.

One of the less attractive features of this well-managed book is that the reader has to spend so much time in the egotistic echo chamber of the interviewed, a who’s-who boy’s club of venerable Anglo actors and directors. There’s a lot...