We are back from our Thanksgiving trip. Before I write anything about that, I want to finish up a post that I couldn’t complete before leaving. I probably should have done this on the plane or while I was in Montclair, but I don’t really like writing on my phone. And I suppose I am a creature of habit.

“King Lear”: Samuel Johnson said that he found “King Lear” almost unbearable. Yet here we were at the Barbican, experiencing it for the second time in a week. (According to the programme, the play was adapted in the 1680’s creating a happy ending, which was how Lear was played for the next 200 years.) After seeing Glenda Jackson take on Lear at the Old Vic, we were curious to compare the Royal Shakespeare Company version, starring the great Shakespearean actor Antony Sher, who we had seen memorably playing Falstaff about a year ago.

It is hard to compare the two Lears. The RSC production was in more traditional costumes and didn’t use things like projections. In some ways, I found the overall look of the RSC version preferable, although I thought the storm scene in the Old Vic production was more dramatically staged. One of the interesting little things the RSC production did was have destitute, silent characters often moving about the stage or sitting in corners, stressing the political context of the play, discussed below. Sher’s Lear was a more powerful a figure at the beginning, at least in part because he is not 80 years old like Jackson. So he begins the play as a robust monarch, taken with making declamations to the heavens.  (This production seemed to stress the part of the play that dealt with heavenly orbs and astrology.) The usurpation of his power and his descent into madness is a longer fall, perhaps, than Jackson’s. Glenda Jackson’s Lear was older and frailer and the removal of her knights was more of a personal affront. Sher’s Lear was a more active character so taking away his knights was a profound attack on his lifestyle in addition to his dignity. The daughters were more purely evil in the Jackson version, while the RSC played Goneril as more convinced of her father’s decline and her actions seemed more driven by concern for him, at least at first. (Regan was more the pure evil daughter.) The Fool (Graham Turner) was far more melancholy in the RSC production, as if he could foretell Lear’s upcoming demise. David Troughton as Gloucester was memorable, but with Royal Shakespeare productions it is almost unfair to call attention to any actor since the entire ensemble is always terrific.

I have to say that I wasn’t really that familiar with “King Lear” before this intense exposure. I think I read somewhere that Lear has currently become the most produced of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, passing “Hamlet”. It has almost as many iconic lines, though fewer soliloquies and some of the scenes are more memorable. The storm scene is a classic, but I think my favorite is the one in which Edgar leads Gloucester to what he imagines is the cliffs of Dover, so that the blinded father can jump to what he hopes will be his death. There are countless references to sight throughout the play and the play has a political sensitivity that seems fairly modern. As Lear wanders the heath, he finds himself surrounded by the homeless and starving and clearly is surprised and moved by the discovery of such poverty in his kingdom (“houseless heads and unfed sides”). According to the Programme, this reflected the conditions in Shakespeare’s time, as population growth, food shortages and economic problems lead many peasants to leave the land and move toward the cities. While a system of private social welfare was developing, the government did little to help the destitute migrants crowding into London (who Shakespeare saw on a daily basis) and Lear’s comment “O, I have taken too little care of this” can probably be seen as political commentary. This criticism reaches its peak when Lear urges Gloucester to get a glass eye “and like a scurvy politician seem to see things that thou dost not”.

Another Election: On Thursday, I went with my rabble-rousing New Unity Social Action crew to another meeting of a community organizing group. A few months ago, I went to a meeting of Hackney Citizens, in which the mayoral candidates spoke and were questioned. The time, the meeting was held by TELCO. It sounds like a telephone company or some sort of multinational conglomerate, but it actually stands for “The East London Community Organization”. It is the oldest Saul Alinsky-inspired social action organization in England and one of the biggest and most successful. Now there is a Citizens UK and a Citizens Liverpool and Citizens Brighton, etc., bur TELCO has held on to the name. So as I understood it from Andy that one of the main purposes of the meeting was the change the name to East London Citizens. The meeting was one of those over-programmed type of Alisnky meetings, which stresses participation by many and sticking to a script and to time limits. The whole thing was scripted out to he last word and most people just got up and read their little bit. So as you might imagine, it was stilted and lifeless.

Despite their efforts, they screwed up one thing. They seemed to be under the impression that London had agreed to build 100 affordable units at the old Olympic site in East London, through Community Land Trusts that Telco was pushing. A representative of Mayor Kahn was there. If you are going to have an action like this, you are supposed to meet with the speaker to make sure that you know exactly what he is going to say and, ideally, tell him what to say. They didn’t do that. So when some TELCO guy got up and with great fanfare asked the official to confirm and guarantee that the 100 unit would be built, he would do no such thing. He said nice things about the idea and said they would do some as a pilot, but simply refused to commit to any number. The TELCO guy seemed stunned and, as this was supposed to be a great victory they were highlighting, it made the actual achievement that they did accomplish seem a little like a failure.

Then they had the name change vote. Any member organization with five members present (how they checked the membership was unclear to me) was allowed to vote. They had two speakers for the two options. They did propose changing Community to Citizens in TELCO, which does nothing to deal with the confusion in the name. It seemed like a sure thing that the name would be switched to East London Citizens and I am pretty sure that is what the organizers wanted, but when they counted the ballots, TELCO won. It would have been interesting to attend the post-mortem that is supposed to be a part of every one of these sorts of meetings. The thing seemed like a chaotic disaster to me. It is a shame because they are quite effective in reality and are doing important work.

On Election Day, Judie and went to see “King Lear” at the Old Vic, with Glenda Jackson in the title role. There seemed to be something appropriate about going to the play on the day when it appeared that America would elect its first female President. In any event, it would be better than sitting around all evening obsessing about the election when nothing would actually happen here until after midnight. Little did we realize that we were going from a theatrical study of madness and tragedy to a real life experience of madness and tragedy.

It all seemed to be going well at first. Clinton leading in the first reported votes. States like Georgia and South Carolina too close to call, when one would think they would be automatically for Trump. There seemed to be a possibility of going to bed before 3:00. But, as we all know now, it all inexorably shifted and the race became closer and then it all began to fall apart. It didn’t seem possible, but this narcissistic con artist was winning and by 4:30, I had to give up and go to bed. I couldn’t watch the end of this disaster, much less listen to the gloating of people like Giuliani and his ilk.

It all still seems like a bad dream. I have heard people say that maybe it won’t be so bad, but I don’t buy it. It is going to be awful and untold harm will be done to the planet and to the idea of American democracy. A type of visceral hatred has been released by Trump and it is not something you can get back into the bottle easily. I know that we, the majority of the country that actually voted for Clinton, will have to band together to fight this, but there will be a lot of losses along the way. I also know that demographics is destiny and the rule of the angry white men has to end at some point. But by then the rock will be back at the bottom of the damn hill and we will have to start pushing it up all over again. I truly believe that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”. It is distressing when it gets bent back the other way, but I guess that has to make us pull harder on the bar.

“King Lear”: I imagine that actors all over England rushed to audition for parts in this. There is something truly epic about Glenda Jackson deciding to play Lear. And it isn’t simply the obvious parallel to Hillary and what seemed like the Year of the Woman until Tuesday, when it turned into the Year of the Sexual Predator. This was her first performance in 25 years, since she left acting to become a member of Parliament from 1992 to 2015. The woman is 80, for God’s sake and she took on an incredibly demanding role. Despite all that, it was not surprising that she was wonderful. Her Lear was a bit old and frail but had her wits about her at the outset, as she made the fateful errors in dividing her kingdom among her daughters. She then moved through anger into fury as her daughters betrayed her, winding up as a mad king cursing the heavens. It was a memorable performance. the rest of the cast was brilliant. In particular, Rhys Ifans was wonderful as the Fool, who at one point launches into a Bob Dylan impersonation for one the Fool’s songs. Harry Melling (Dudley Dursley in Harry Potter) was impressive as Edgar. Jane Horrocks (as Regan) and Celia Imre (Goneril) were suitably evil as the two awful daughters. And Edmund’s first speech was done while he was working out, skipping rope and doing all sorts of physical things. It was amazing that Simon Manyonda could do it without even breathing hard. Finally, I wasn’t crazy about the modern dress costumes or the minimalist scenery, although the way they did the storm scene was sort of clever. In a way that focused everything on the acting, which was amazing.

“Julius Caesar” On the night after the election, we went to the Donmar Warehouse to see an all-woman production of “Julius Caesar”. It was good to get out of the flat or we would have just sat around being depressed about the election results. And “Julius Caesar” has a special resonance for me, since I was in possibly the worst production of all time in my first semester at Bowdoin. Miserably acted and directed, all I can say is that I had a very small part as a freshman and mainly watched in a combination of horror and hilarity behind my sword and shield at what transpired. I’d gone to college thinking that I wanted to be an actor and I realized about halfway through the rehearsals that Bowdoin was not going to teach me anything in that area. But I did make some lifetime friends standing and giggling with the Roman Legion upstage, as the “actors” declaimed downstage.

Once again, seeing an all-woman production of this play seemed like it would have a particular relevance on the evening after what we assumed would be Clinton’s election. In light of the reality of what happened, it seemed depressingly appropriate that the play was set in a woman’s prison. It was a fabulous production, fast-moving and well acted. The women were dressed pretty androgynously (since they were in a prison, they were mostly in gray), so the fact that they were woman was not really made a point of. The amazing actor, Harriet Walter, who played Brutus, was one of the creators of the trilogy of which “Julius Caesar” was a part. She was riveting in the role and, in some ways carried the production. I thought that Jackie Clune also stood out playing Caesar. She had a certain charisma and confidence that made her seem like the kind of leader that people would follow and want to make their dictator. (She also had reddish hair cut fairly short, which gave her a vague creepily Trumpian look.) I also liked the actor who played Casca. The staging of the play used the idea of the prison without letting it obscure the Shakespeare. It was sometimes very cleverly done. I was sort of lukewarm about the way that “Friends, Romans and Countrymen” was done, possibly because the woman playing Marc Anthony could not match the gravitas of Walter and be an effective counterpoint to her Brutus.

“Julius Caesar” is a tremendous study of politics and power. It has a number of familiar lines that are a part of the popular lexicon and one of the great speeches in any play. But I have always felt that the play actually becomes a bit dull after Marc Anthony’s speech, which unleashed “the dogs of war”. It kind of goes on and on as you wait for the conspirators to be killed on the battlefield. (When you think about it, Elizabeth I would not have been happy with a play that let regicide go unpunished, so Shakespeare had a point he was compelled to make there.) I suspect it is often edited down and, in this case, the end of the play is simply cut off by the prison guards, shortly after Brutus’ death (“This was the noblest Roman of them all.”), which was an interesting way to deal with the problem.