Today's Times has an article about an Arabic-language production of King Lear put on by children in a Syrian refugee camp. It's an affecting story for a lot of reasons, and one that underscores how truly global Shakespeare's cultural capital is. (Among the more interesting details is the fact that the production freely interpolated lines and scenes from Hamlet.)
But when the director, a 40-year-old Syrian television star, declares that "The show is to bring back laughter, joy and humanity," I have to think that maybe he's chosen the wrong play.
4 comments:
Oh, I dunno, I kind of think Lear is every bit as much a comedy gone awry as R&J and Othello are. Take out that nasty little twist at the end, and you've got something pretty close in spirit to Cymbeline or The Winter's Tale.
Fretful:
There are funny bits, to be sure, but the overall tenor is just so bleak; there's laughter, maybe, but not a lot of joy. (I just saw a production of it on Saturday that did a good job with the comedy, but still. Damn.)
And I weep buckets during Winter's Tale, every time.
Maybe they think of it as funny in that theater of the absurd kind of way. Martin Esslin's seminal book "Theater of the Absurd" quotes Lear's, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods..." So maybe...
The fool's parts are funny! But yeah, I think of Lear as one of the more bleak plays. It's hard for me to teach because some parts of it get to me so badly.
Just a guess, but I suspect that a lot of the refugees, even the kids, would have a very different way of receiving humor than the average theater-goer. I'm not about to argue that Lear is not bleak – lordy, is it bleak! – but people who have experienced their own very real existential horrors and absurdist tragedies might actually find some meaning in the play other than pure tragedy.
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