Interview with Sir Ian McKellen on playing emKing Lear/em

Interview with Sir Ian McKellen on playing emKing Lear/em

Featuring Ian McKellen speaking about his experience playing King Lear with the Royal Shakespeare Company for Trevor Nunn's film adaptation of the play, this clip includes McKellen's valuable insights about King Lear which are supplemented by carefully chosen excerpts from related scenes. Here, McKellen emphasizes King Lear's relationship to the gods that changes from from full faith to a loss of faith in the final scene where after hearing of Cordelia's death, he compares the human state to that of the lesser animals. By analyzing this progression of the ultimate devaluation of King Lear's faith, McKellen comments upon how we, the audience, must also notice the the advancing of Lear's aged state that his daughters Goneril and Regan take advantage of. In pondering upon King Lear's age, McKellen also imagines what he believes to be the "backstory" of Lear's life. While he understands that Shakespeare intentionally did not mention King Lear's past, since he is not creating a retrospective but a play that takes place in the present and causes the audience to accept Lear for who he is at this stage in his life, McKellen's interesting analysis as an actor needing to imagine a "backstory" in order to more successfully play his part, offers valuable insights into understanding King Lear's reactions to his daughters' actions. By imagining Lear as a man who has been widowed three times, with his last wife, the mother of Cordelia, being his true love, McKellen attempts to understand how Cordelia's refusal to publicly speak her love for her father could be taken as such an offense, considering that Lear would be metaphorically looking into the face of his wife, presumably the same age and image as her daughter when she died, as making her inability to express her love all the more burdensome for his aging heart. By finally describing his playing of this role as reaching the "Everest of Shakespeare" McKellen emphasizes the importance of the King Lear as a character, and King Lear as a whole, which gives great gravity to our reading of the play and our as both students and audience members either reading or viewing this monumental play.