Plummer, 76, is having the time of his life on that stage. He’s got a master actor’s technique–as his Captain von Trapp put it in “The Sound of Music,” “the first rule of this household is discipline.” But the freedom he grants himself to improvise in the moment helps turn the artifice real. Plummer’s Mike Wallace in 1999’s “The Insider” made the guy on “60 Minutes” look like an impersonator; his Lear seems less a performance than (in the king’s own words) “the thing itself.” This “Lear,” mounted in Canada in 2002 and opening in New York last week, treats the play as what it truly is: a soap opera about family dysfunction. Plummer credits director Jonathan Miller for keeping it grounded (“He wanted to take the play off the cosmic level–that’s so boring”), but it’s Plummer’s show. He gives Lear a crumbling grandiloquence and a palsied hand, and never lets us forget that Shakespeare’s towering, tottering monarch is also “a big baby.”
During his long stage career, Plummer had played Hamlet, Macbeth–but never Lear. “I thought, ‘He kvetches so much, he deserves everything he gets’.” He wanted to work with Miller in Ben Jonson’s comedy “Volpone,” but the director told him, “Before you croak you’ve got to try ‘Lear.’ It’s one of the funniest plays ever written.” Counterintuitive as this sounds–that onstage eye-gouging? That last-act pile of corpses?–Miller’s insight shaped Plummer’s interpretation. “Lear has to be a buffoon,” Plummer says now. “He has tantrums.” In Canada, he admits, “I rather made it like a nightclub act, but I think I’ve settled in to more legitimately mad behavior, like some old bum on Eighth Avenue.” He brings out Lear’s antic flashes of wit, which oth-er Lears–Scofield, Olivier–have underplayed; after first casting off the burdensome crown, Plummer makes Lear a youthful roisterer again. “It’s the only time in the whole play that he’s allowed to have fun, for Christ’s sake.” This renders Lear’s ultimate disintegration and enlightenment the more moving; at the end, the decision to play Lear’s corpse with eyes wide open ties together the two motifs Shakespeare’s been working all along: seeing and nothingness. It’s also clinically, chillingly real.
Plummer’s Lear comes alive in such details: from the Jacobean hospital johnny in which he dies (“You know he’s p—ed in it,” Plummer says) to the medically correct intensification of his dementia. “There’s absolutely no reason on God’s green earth why Lear didn’t have a couple of strokes,” he says. “I mean, I would have.” His stumbling over the name of Burgundy, one of the good daughter Cordelia’s suitors, gets an uneasy laugh, but it’s rooted in Plummer’s sense of Lear. “This is just the sort of Frenchman–frog, Lear would call him–that he can’t abide. So he’s determined to forget his name. He suspects anyone who has style and sophistication.” By the last act, Plummer argues, Lear’s madness has set him free: to deck himself with flowers, to pity his poorest subjects, to return Cordelia’s love.
Rigorous craft has set Plummer free: even to rant in character at rude patrons through the fourth wall if he damn well feels like it. His sense of what Yeats called “play for mortal stakes” sends you out of the theater, after three-plus hours of misery, in exhilaration.
