Seen and not seen

Abstract

King Lear, poet W H Auden declared, is an unstageable drama: “the one play of Shakespeare that, in the storm scene, really requires the movies”. Yet the art of staging does not simply concern the challenge of presenting things described but not seen; it also involves detecting the spaces between the words, locating concepts, events, and even characters that the text merely hints at. In a recent production of Macbeth at London's Globe Theatre, director Iqbal Khan put the Macbeths' child on stage, with a limited degree of effectiveness. Gregory Doran's new King Lear, at Stratford-upon-Avon's Royal Shakespeare Theatre, does something similar to more substantial effect. The “wretches”—the homeless beggars whose plight Lear finally acknowledges once he has been banished to roam across the stormy heath—are on stage right from the beginning. Pitiful figures shrouded in blankets, they are shooed off to make way for the arrival of the court, but hover on the periphery of the action, a mute reminder of the failure of Lear's governance.