I recently came across a theory of the American poet Delmore Schwartz’s that Hamlet only makes sense if you assume from the beginning that all the characters are drunk. Given Schwartz’s own fondness for booze, this idea perhaps smacks of drunken hyperbole itself. But it certainly sprang to mind while watching BBC2’s King Lear (Monday), where Anthony Hopkins spent quite a lot of the first half swigging enthusiastically from a hipflask.
After all, this did appear to explain much of Lear’s behaviour: the constant alternation between belligerence and sentimentality; the combination of self-dramatisation, self-pity and — the way Hopkins played it — self-amusement; and maybe even that initial decision to divide his kingdom in a spectacularly misguided bid to prevent ‘future strife’. (Might Lear have possibly woken up the following morning wondering just what the hell he’d done the night before?)
Directed by Richard Eyre, the programme opened in what seemed to be present-day Britain under military dictatorship. After a few establishing shots of the Shard, the Gherkin and so on, the camera zoomed into a heavily guarded Tower of London where Lear was about to announce his doomed plan around a shiny conference table.
In fact, for a while, this updating seemed both half-hearted and a bit confusing. If Lear really was a military dictator, why did everyone keep calling him a king? Why were there no modern media in evidence as the country/kingdom fell apart? Why did Goneril live in a contemporary home counties mansion, but Gloucester in an old-style Tudor palace? Why, for that matter, were 21st-century people swearing ‘by Apollo’?
Gradually, though, it became apparent that these inconsistencies were a deliberate attempt to reimagine Shakespeare’s ahistorical world where realism and myth jostle together. Admittedly, even when you did appreciate this, there were some jarring moments.
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