King Blear

Art, like nature, is divided into organic entities. A rose is not a pear, and a pear is not a giraffe. Similarly, a novel is not a play and a play is not a film. Yet year after year the singular Anglo-American idiocy of trying to adapt a given work from one form to another goes on, a process that Louis Kronenberger once described as "cutting up a sofa to make a chair."

The latest sofa cutter is the distinguished, able and antic English theater director, Peter Brook. Having directed King Lear as a play, Brook has turned it into a film with the same star, Paul Scofield. The picture is never great and not always good.

Sage in Motley. What has Brook done with this ravening epic of the thankless daughters and their wild old fool of a father? He has had to cut it to prevent it from being grindingly long. The cuts have weakened the cumulative impact, and in specific instances the weakness can be felt. A diminished interplay between Lear and his Fool (Jack

MacGowran) reduces the full irony that the Fool is a sage in motley.

Sometimes, a powerful dramatic effect is totally lost. When Lear sees that Cordelia (Annelise Gabold), his sole loving daughter, is dead, he utters the fivefold "Never" that some regard as the greatest single line in English drama. But in the film, he does not fumble at his throat and go on to say "Pray you, undo this button," thus depriving the act of tragic purgation and vertiginous descent from regal magnificence to the pitiable humanity of the commonplace.

In strict filmic terms. Brook and his cameraman, Henning Kristiansen, supply plenty of visual pyrotechnics. One decision was splendid. The dominating color, or noncolor, of the film is white. This creates the proper sensation of wintry old age and bleakness. The film gives off an almost palpable and desolating coldness, as if one were witnessing snow on the craters of the moon. But the defect of that virtue surfaces at the fulcrum of the play, which is the vast raging storm on the heath. The lashing rain seems incongruous in such an icy climate, and no one's thoughts should be remotely physical at that moment. Shakespeare has carried us to the butt end of existence, as close to an annihilating image of nothingness as drama has ever achieved. One ought, at that moment, to be in awed metaphysical contemplation of man's terrible fate.

Apart from the matter of color and cold, there are painterly compositions, off-focus shots, bifocal shots and all sorts of imaginative camera stunts. The most ambitious filmic effect does not really come off. Brook tries to combine highly stylized segments, almost like animated Japanese prints, with segments that are strictly naturalistic in a homey medieval vein. In watching these shifts, the viewer can only fail to pay full attention to what Shakespeare is saying. This is the basic problem of film v. theater. The film's priority is always the visual image, to which the word is subordinated. But on the stage the word has priority and it fires the imagination.

The Actor as Object. Similarly, the actor in a film is an object. The camera is impersonal, but not magnanimous: it makes the actor part of the scenery. Onstage, the actor is at the incandescent center of the action. He incarnates the flame of truth and beauty invested in him by the playwright to be passed on to the audience. Thus one can say that Scofield is perfectly all right as Lear, that MacGowran is a good Fool and that Irene Worth is especially good as Goneril, the oldest and ugliest daughter. Then, too, Alan Webb sensitively portrays the Duke of Gloucester, whose eyes are gouged out with stomach-churning realism. But the instantaneous afterthought is that though these actors have done absolutely superb work onstage, a filmgoer who sees only films would never guess it from this Lear.

The ultimate failure of the film is too serious for the good things in it to redeem. It is unthinkable that at some moment the destiny of Lear would not move one to tears. That moment never comes in this film.

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