Laughing as Your Heart Breaks: Shakespeare Globe’s King Lear at NYU’s Skirball

Kim Paffenroth (Iona College)

Perhaps the easiest way to begin reflecting on this production, directed by Bill Buckhurst, would be to state what was immediately obvious to me, and then work from there: Almost nothing I saw on stage was how I would have imagined it, or how I would have presented it myself, if I were director. This is neither praise nor blame, just surprise. But in thinking about the disparity between what was on stage, and my expectations, a pattern quickly and obviously emerges. This production revels constantly, from beginning to end, in a dark humor, essentially expanding the role and outlook of the Fool (or the mad Lear) to subsume the whole play. The play begins and ends with happy, silly songs sung by the cast – which for the end means “resurrecting” Lear (Joseph Marcell) and Cordelia (Bethan Cullinane, who also played the Fool) from the stage to dance about, even bumping hips with one another. (In a thoughtful and useful Q&A after the performance, one of the actors explained this is a Globe tradition, that all performances must end with a full cast jig. Even he admitted, however, that when they are on tour, local audiences often object to this unfamiliar practice.) In addition, there are constant intrusions of whimsical music – almost all the cast members play an instrument on stage at some point. And practically every character laughs at inappropriate…