— King Lear with Ian McKellen

I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Yesterday we saw King Lear with Ian McKellen at the Newcastle Theatre Royal. This is an RSC production, directed by Trevor Nunn and the theatre was packed with anticipation.

Considering that McKellen has waited all his life for this part, he was surprisingly relaxed as the king who achieves sanity and enlightenment via a sojourn through madness. The actor, especially in the scenes depicting the depths of Lear’s despair, has the entire audience in a nervy, emotional and moving sweat. The play is notoriously ‘difficult’, but the part of the king is surely one of McKellen’s finest performances.

It was obvious that the actor had spent a long time with the script. Every line, every word had been internalised and assigned meaning, giving us a Lear unlike any other I have seen or heard. McKellen is an actor who can be too grand, who can sometimes reach beyond his character and lose the genius of the playwright. But in this role he triumphs. Time and again during his appearances on stage I had no experience of watching a great actor. The old king came roaring out of him and the poor player was lost and invisible behind his creation.

It is a rare occurrence to be moved profoundly, but this production of Shakespeare’s tragedy took me there yesterday. The final act has never before acted on my emotions in quite the same way.

Throughout the performance I was reminded time after time of the figure of Don Quixote, a comparison which has not occurred to me in previous viewings of the play. Both, of course, are fond old men in need of a touch of dignity at the beginning of their fictional careers, and each of them, created around the same time (KL 1603-1606; DQ 1603-1605), have to go through periods of insanity in order to reach some peace and equilibrium with the world.

The script of King Lear needs no more praise from me, the direction and the concept and the supporting actors and theatre technicians all played their part. The music was often unnecessary, sometimes intrusive and inexplicable. But in spite of small flaws I do not expect to see a better Lear. And at this stage of his career, what a piece of work is Ian McKellen.

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— Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka

About the world being better off without religion . . . I think so. It would be less beautiful perhaps, because some religions have created really beautiful architecture, incredible music, some of the most moving dances stem from religion — this idea or acknowledgement of something that stems from something larger than yourself. But I [...]

— “Fame Exhausts Me”

In The Guardian, Aida Edemariam interviewed Alice Walker, the author of The Color Purple.
In her first memoir, Black, White and Jewish (2000), her daughter Rebecca remembers how “Daddy sits in sometimes with the rifle and the dog waiting for the Klan to come”; in The Same River Twice (1996), Alice writes of her own mother’s [...]

— Diagnosing Lear

Anthony Daniels in The New Criterion has an interesting piece on how doctors have been trying to diagnose Lear’s condition for the past two centuries.
Nineteenth-century mad doctors in Britain and America said Lear’s case was just like many they saw in their asylums. Psychoanalysts perceived in Lear a case of thwarted incest (they would, wouldn’t [...]

— Presque vu XVI

Toby Litt on How I Write.
*
American diplomatic staff in London have run up a debt of $3million in fines through the refusal by their embassy to accept congestion charges for the use of the city’s roads.
*
Denied pens and paper, Guantanamo prisoners, scratched some of the poems in verses onto foam cups with pebbles. Other poems [...]

— Customer Service Hell

Sean at Community Group Therapy writes about his experiences with T-Mobile’s (badly misnamed) Support Service.
It’s a long post, but, fuelled with rage, it passes quickly and is a wonderful example of how to relate traumatic events with no other aids but writing materials and passion.
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— End In Sight In Corruption Murder

Metropolitan police have submitted a file to the Crown Prosecution Service after a fifth investigation into the murder of Daniel Morgan, a London private investigator axed to death in 1987. The inquiry has been led by Det Ch Supt David Cook.
The Morgan family have always believed that Daniel was murdered because he was about [...]

— Did I Shave My Legs for This?

Undernews posts a great list of favourite Country and Western song titles:
Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goal Posts Of Life
Get Your Biscuits In The Oven, And Your Buns In The Bed
Happiness is Lubbock in a Rear View Mirror
I Don’t Care if it Rains or Freezes ‘Long as I Have My Plastic Jesus
I’d Rather Pass [...]

— Bush Acting Strangely? - I Don’t Believe It

Think Progress reports on a wild-eyed Bush
Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated “I am the president!” He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of “our country’s destiny.”
Some [...]

— Bjork on Dylan

Asked if she was looking forward to appearing on the same bill as Dylan, Bjork said:
I’ve never really gotten into him. His voice is too nasal. And it’s like literature . . .
Rolling stone Mag

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