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The fifth season of The Shakespeare Plays opened in America on October 18, 1982, with the last play that Jonathan Miller directed for the series. The result is a provocative version of King Lear that marked the third time that Miller had cast Michael Hordern in the role of the foolish, old king.1 Fifteen months later, on January 26, 1984, Americans finally got to see the much heralded Laurence Olivier' s King Lear. This version, taped earlier in England for Grenada Television, was directed by Michael Elliott and produced by David Plowright. These two productions of the play differ radically, each with instructive strengths and weaknesses. Having these two recent productions of the same play to compare and contrast provides us with a valuable opportunity made in "translating" King Lear to television.
The acting styles in these two Lears differ in many significant ways. Michael Elliott conceived of his Lear as existing in a mythic world with characters who appear somewhat larger than life. Naturally following from this is his emphasis on individual performances. There is little doubt that the casting of Olivier in the title role of what was officially billed as Laurence Olivier' s King Lear was the prinicpal reason for the production, but Olivier had a splendid cast to back him up, and the members of that cast turned in some memorable, indeed unforgettable, performances. The mise en scène and editing of this production call attention to these individual performances with a preponderance of closely framed one-shots and rapid cutting-the effects of which are to accentuate the faces of the actors and the slightest nuances of expression that flicker across them. However, I intend to consider in a moment what this strategy denies us on television.
In Jonathan Miller's production, the emphasis is exactly the opposite. Miller's actors perform in ensemble, consistent with his view of the play that the family is a metaphor for the state. Michael Hordern graciously defers to the other members of the cast who all give subdued performances consistent with many of Miller's beliefs about how Shakespeare should be acted for television. Miller uses a relatively static camera which records fairly long takes of the actors generally in medium two-shots, three-shots, and four-shots, as opposed to Elliott's...