SHOWN ON PBS ON MARCH 25, 2009

King Lear is not an easy play for television. It has produced two great black-and-white films, almost simultaneously, in the early 1970s. Peter Brook’s brutal interpretation looked and felt like a documentary about the Nazi invasion of Poland. Grigori Kozintsev’s magnificent version was filmed in 70 mm Sovscope. The two films allow us to see each in contrast to the other and thus to sense the borderlands of this vast script-from a close-up and negative exploration of human evil set loose by bad decisions to a more expansive vision in which higher values compete with iniquity. In Kozintsev, that virtue lost does not mean that it does not exist. In Brook, though, it does not exist.

The best television production remains the Papp-Sherin version of 1973, a televised stage production that incorporates the audience within its frame and thus captures some of the energy that live performance creates. James Earl Jones is a powerful Lear and Raul Julia a wonderfully menacing Edmund. Lee Chamberlin’s Cordelia had marched at Selma and really wants to confront “these daughters and these sisters.” The 1982 BBC production features a fussy CEO Lear in Michael Hordern and crowded frames that resemble a football huddle waiting for the wrong play to be called. The 1983 Thames version is an homage to Olivier and suffers from obtrusive cello chords, which undercut rather than reinforce the language. We see a great actor in his last role, but we do not see much more than that.

One can expand the size of a television screen, but the medium remains conceptually limited. It cannot incorporate special effects—a squiggly beam-up hardly qualifies—and it relies on a basic grammar of shots: close-up, two-shot, reaction shot, and the occasional rack shot and establishing shot. A recent version of King Lear-King of Texas-was bound to fail. It features a pint-sized Lear (Patrick Stewart) who decides-against any modicum of common sense-to divide his vast cattle ranch. Vast cattle ranches worked well in the great cowboy flicks of days gone by, but they get reduced to Archie Bunker’s living room on television. And, historically, by their very nature, cattle ranches resisted division.

The way to go with any Shakespeare script is to take a production from a small theater and reproduce it for the minimalist medium of television. Richard Eyre’s Royal Shakespeare production of King Lear at the tiny Cottesloe in London was remounted for television in 1998. Economy of scale works beautifully here. Ian Holm dons the Fool’s white cap once the Fool departs. Thus the production, via a simple metonymy, suggests the complex progress of Lear’s soul. Holm’s understated but sensitive readings need more resistance from Victoria Hamilton’s Cordelia. It is Lear who dooms her, after all, by insisting that they go obliviously off to a prison controlled by Edmund. That fulfills Lear’s dream of resting in Cordelia’s “kind nursery,” but Cordelia, for all of her forgiving qualities, is not characterized as either a purveyor of or a sucker for elevated rhetoric. But this is a production worth revisiting.

Trevor Nunn’s production, with Ian McKellen, was apparently difficult to understand. One Internet poster complained of “marbles in the mouth.” I know the script pretty well, having taught the play for fifty years, so hearing the words was not a problem for me. I did question the editing. Cordelia’s asides in the beginning, as she hears Goneril and Regan prostitute themselves with words of love, are cut. Her “Nothing, my lord,” comes out as a surprise to us as well as to the onstage audience. Also cut is Edmund’s attribution of the Lear thesis to Edgar (”I have heard him oft maintain it to be fit that, sons of a perfect age, and fathers declining, the fathers should be as ward to the son, and the son manage his revenue”). A Gloucester, still stunned by the opening scene, is convinced, as his shouting “O villain, villain!” tells us. But not here. And, if you are going to include the Gloucester subplot, why rob Edgar of his magnificent description of the view from the cliffs of Dover? This is what convinces the blind Gloucester that he is on the edge of eternity. And just because Lear says, at the end, “My poor fool is hanged,” it is not necessary to stage the hanging. Why report Edmund’s death if Albany’s contrast of that “trifle” with the death of Lear and Cordelia is cut? The payoff for the editing, though, is the retention of most of Kent’s role. That permits Kent (Jonathan Hyde) to develop as a laconic ally of Lear, a “reflector” of the main character, as Henry James would put it. The final voice-over, as Edgar ends the play, is a potent epilogue, a pessimistic closing of the play and an opening out of the play’s questions into the final silence, which is ours.

McKellen charts his movement toward madness well, using a finger to point toward a disintegrating cortex. Frances Barber and Monica Dolan are wonderful as Goneril and Regan, dark-haired adventuresses who obviously have neither reverence nor time for old men. “Age,” as Lear says, “is unnecessary.” Their competition for Edmund is powerfully depicted. The forthright Romola Garai as Cordelia does seem to be, as McKellen claims in his interview on PBS, the child of a second marriage. And it is at his former wife that he gazes so hopefully at the outset, at least as McKellen explains his subtext. The marriage auction between Cordelia, Burgundy, and France is brilliantly mimed. My favorite scene here is the chaotic rumble at the hovel, as Edgar, playing Mad Tom, the Fool, orchestrating an imaginary trial, and Lear going bonkers, run amuck. It feels like an episode at some indeterminate hour between midnight and dawn at the Deke House bar. The reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia is moving, as Lear admits his vulnerability and reveals a sweetness that had been latent in his character until now. The play, after all, is the story of the brief adulthood of this old man. The process cannot begin until he is no longer king. McKellen develops his understanding of that truth across a considerable spectrum of emotion. The saber battle between Edgar and Edmund is exciting and does seem dangerous, as stage combat seldom does.

This production represents the third major collaboration between Nunn and McKellen. The Macbeth of thirty years ago, originally produced at the tiny Other Place in Stratford and remounted for television, is probably the best version of that play available. And, of course, while its crimes strike heaven in the face, its viewpoint is close-up, as Lady Macbeth (a superb Judi Dench) plots to entice her husband to murder, as Macbeth is tempted, and, at the end, as he roams alone in his castle like a trapped bear and as she seeks for light in the gloom of damnation-while-still-alive (”Hell is murky”). A decade later, again in a studio production, McKellen played an Iago chillingly detached from the evil he was fomenting. And, again, Othello, for all of the Moor’s grandiloquence, calls for tight camera angles. It ends, as the great A. C. Bradley says “in a close-shut, murderous room.”

The current King Lear is a very good production of a play whose dimensions are simply larger than those that television can accommodate. But, for generations, the play was thought to be too large for the stage as well. It was not until the end of World War II, with the Holocaust and the bomb, that the play became available to us as a vehicle for performance. It is still too large for our imaginations and for the formats in which we recreate them, true, but history has proved to be just as incapable of being phrased or framed. And so, King Lear, will continue to challenge us, defeat us, and permit us to take it on again. It is, like Lear’s, a learning process.

H. R. Coursen’s novel Even in Dreams and his Recall: Selected Poems, 1967-2008 have just been published. He lives in Brunswick and teaches at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University and Southern New Hampshire University.