Waiting for Lear: Re-creations of Shakespeare’s Play Through Beckett at the Royal Shakespeare Company

Abstract

Stage productions of King Lear at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) have played a key role in reinventing the play for each new generation. Every production finds unique ways of presenting Lear, each of which adds new layers of meanings that can potentially shape our understanding of the play. In the 1960s, romanticized and naturalistic approaches that had governed the staging of the play were displaced by a modern conception of King Lear as Shakespeare’s Endgame. This article examines comparatively how dramatic forms emblematic of Samuel Beckett’s theatre were assimilated into three distinct RSC productions of King Lear, directed by Peter Brook (1962), Adrian Noble (1982) and Gregory Doran (2016). Beckett’s enduring influence on the play’s afterlife foregrounds both the practices of appropriation and transformation of previous texts that shape contemporary Shakespearean performance, and the dialogic interplay of textual and non-textual elements through which Shakespeare’s play has acquired meaning on the RSC stage. The appropriations of Beckettian patterns were shaped by the tensions between text and performance, and the battle between centripetal and centrifugal forces that intersect dialogically in the processes of meaning-making within Shakespearean performance.