Lord Larry's Crowning Triumph

By RICHARD CORLISS

King Lear at the Museum of Broadcasting in New York City

Laurence Olivier stood in the wings of Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall waiting to receive the acclaim of 2,500 New Yorkers who had gathered two weeks ago to celebrate his 53 years of achievement in the movies. Olivier is a frail 75 now, and his body has played grudging host to enough illnesses to wipe out the entire Royal Shakespeare Company. So backstagers looked on with pain but not surprise as he momentarily lost his balance and slumped against the doorway. Then the crowd rose, and with it the applause. Olivier took his cue and went out onstage. Suddenly he was the dashing Lord Larry, energized by the spotlight, alive to the theatrical moment, mesmerizing one more audience. Like Tinker Bell, he heard the clapping and came to life again.

Taking a curtain call is one thing; tackling Shakespeare's fieriest monarch is another. So for Olivier to test himself against King Lear--as he did last fall for Britain's Granada Television, in a program showing exclusively in the U.S. through mid-June at the Museum of Broadcasting in Manhattan--is less a professional challenge than an act of reckless physical courage. This recklessness has become something of a habit with Olivier. A sense of danger, athletic as well as emotive, has often been at the heart of his Shakespearean performances. His Romeo (1935) clambered up to his fair lady's balcony in record time; his Hamlet (1947) leaped from a 14-ft. balcony to wrestle with Laertes; his Coriolanus (1959) executed a horrendous, death-daring fall. Inside this theatrical peer, the spirit of a Douglas Fairbanks was always bounding to get out.

Lear, at "four score and upward," requires no such exploits, but in this production he must ride a horse, swing heavy swords, be bucketed with 900 gal. of water, go shirtless, eviscerate and eat a rabbit. With the grip of mortality shortening every Olivier breath, each gesture can seem heroic, each line he utters a precious gift from the depleting stock of his time. But there are reasons beyond enlightened sentimentality to treasure this Lear. To support him Olivier has assembled an actors' aristocracy: Diana Rigg and Dorothy Tutin as Lear's treacherous daughters Regan and Goneril, Colin Blakely as the faithful Kent, John Hurt as Lear's Fool, Leo McKern as old Gloucester, David Threlfall (Smike in the R.S.C.'s Nicholas Nickleby) as Gloucester's loving son Edgar. Olivier has pruned the text significantly but fairly, tightening the action like a noose of family ties around the two patriarchs' necks. Most important, through cunning, craft and sheer force of will, Olivier has scaled the greatness of this role.

At a mere 2 hr. 40 min., this is tragedy driven at the gallop of melodrama. Brother fights brother to the death; the elder sisters are condemned by their lusts for sex and power; and father sets off fatal rivalries by waving the promise of a legacy before his children. On one level the play is a Dark Ages horror show, with eye gouging, self-mutilation, broadswords creasing legs and dull stakes piercing the heart. On the crucial level, Lear is an eloquent essay on madness: it finds the logic of poetry on those stormy heaths where every character capable of regeneration seizes it. There, Nature reverses hierarchies: only the blind Gloucester can "see feelingly," his disowned child proves himself a prince, the uncrowned Lear fills out the measure of majesty.

Olivier first attempted the king in 1946, more than half a lifetime ago, filching the assignment from under the nose of his co-director of London's Old Vic Theater Company, Ralph Richardson. In perverse retaliation, Sir Ralph never did bring his maundering grandeur to a role he could still play to perfection. Olivier is a shameless romantic of the 19th century, seeking magic in excess. The capacious bag of actors' tricks is there to be plundered. His Lear will roll his eyes, giggle like a naughty child, sniffle and foam in his "mad" scenes. Early in the play Olivier almost convinces that age has domesticated his talent, but once on the heath he becomes regal, extending his height and breadth, flexing the strong cords in his neck to trumpet his rage, shaping his surprising strengths to the outsize demands of the role.

And at the end, Olivier makes sepulchral music, unheard before, out of Lear's last indelible lines. He enters carrying his daughter Cordelia (Anna Calder-Marshall), and "Howl, howl, howl, howooool!" The sound begins as human language and ends in a wolf wail; the king is only a man, and man an animal frightened by the encroaching night. Then he bends over Cordelia and realizes she is dead. He whispers, "Never." Louder: "Never." A bold bellow: "Never!" A pathetic plea to heaven: "Never?" A final quiet reconciliation to despair: "Never." The lunatic vitality that came to him on the heath has seeped away. A kind of reason is his now, an awareness of man's vulnerability and of death.

The Olivier Lear is not only Olivier. There are marvelous performances: from stalwart Blakely, from the doggedly magnificent McKern, from Rigg, sleek and quick as tempered steel, and from Tutin, no longer wearing the "brow of youth" but still a beautiful, commanding presence. There are a few misfires in Michael Elliott's handsome production: Hurt's Fool is too fey, and Threlfall plays Edgar as another Smike, all wheeze and froth.

Just now, the program, broadcast in Britain five weeks ago, is up for bids in the U.S. There may be some resistance to the asking price (more than $1 million) from financially strapped culture outlets like PBS. And the moguls at the networks may prove to be no more hospitable to this Lear than were Regan and Goneril. Still, one hopes that some American TV system will allow the spotlight to shine once more on Lord Larry--and to illuminate us. --By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.