Derek Jacobi as "King Lear' in Brooklyn

For those of us of a certain age, who are currently mired in estate planning, retirement financing and health care concerns, King Lear is our play. No other dramatic work rails against the injustice of aging and its attendant indignities"“ job loss, memory loss, diminished power, diminished status, diminished health, dispossession, dislocation, disloyal offspring"“ as does Shakespeare's last, and greatest, tragedy.

So when my contemporaries go to see King Lear (as I do, whenever and wherever it's playing), we look forward to a good old therapeutic catharsis. Given our anxieties, goodness knows we need it.

Imagine, then, the surprise of visiting the Brooklyn Academy of Music this month to find a King Lear not at the nadir but at the height of his powers"“ robust, raging, defiant"“ and finding yourself not weeping but laughing and cheering him on.

The powers to which I refer belong to the actor, whose unconventional interpretation has challenged our perception of this immortal role. Derek Jacobi, at 72, gives a performance with the strength and endurance of a man in his 40s. Under Michael Grandage's direction, this marvelous British actor is in top physical and emotional form, vigorous, agile and nimble, whether he's striding about the stage or rolling on the floor. In the theater we call it "chewing the scenery," and the audience cheers him on.

Cracking under the strain

Shakespeare buffs are accustomed to Lears who crack under the strain of a disastrous downfall that occurs with dizzying speed during the course of the play. Lear is ruler of a vast, rich kingdom whose fatal error was to disburse his assets before his death, as many financial experts advise today. In short order he loses everything: his home, his riches, his retinue, his family.

His two elder daughters have cast him out, and he's rejected the third— the loyal Cordelia— in a fit of pique. This outburst of anger is his one indulgence, and it cost him everything ("I am more sinned against than sinning"). He's reduced to an "unaccommodated man… a bare forked animal"— homeless, naked, howling in a storm on a wild heath, driven mad by the injustice of it all.

What's distinctive about Jacobi's Lear is his resilience. Yes, he's lost his mind"“ but only temporarily. Yes, he's destitute"“ but he never loses control.

I felt cheated

The range of Jacobi's performance is virtuosic— from loving to playful to enraged to punitive to penitent. His forcefulness never wanes, his gait never falters (not even when he carries the weight of Cordelia in his arms), his voice never drops (except for the "Blow wind…" speech on the heath, spoken in a stylized whisper, and in that instance, I think the actor simply makes an unconventional choice). It's a tour de force performance, pulling out all the stops.

I admit I was on my feet during the standing ovation, cheering along with everyone else. But in a way I felt somewhat cheated. Where is the requisite Aristotelian "pity and fear" that one should expect to feel when watching a hero fall from such heights? Where is his helplessness, his aching vulnerability?

Moreover, where is the resulting rage that we feel as we witness the ravages of old age? How can we be robbed of that basic human response— anger— that Shakespeare's play has afforded us?

To forgive and be forgiven

In his compelling book of essays, The Needs of Strangers, Michael Ignatieff describes King Lear as a play about basic human needs in both the social and natural contexts"“ needs to be loved, to forgive and be forgiven, to secure shelter, to find pity and compassion.

"The heath is both a real place and a place in the mind," he writes. "It's the realm of natural man, man beyond society, without clothes, retinue, pride and respect."

Ultimately, if our need "on the heath" is for compassion, we'll find it in Shakespeare's beautiful words, whatever the actor's interpretation offers. If not Jacobi's Lear, then whose?

The best of all Lears

I'm sorry I never got to see Paul Scofield's magnificent rendition (remarkably, he played Lear at age 40, in 1962; a film version was made in 1971). I have seen and admired the recent Lears of Ian McKellen, Christopher Plummer, Kevin Kline and F. Murray Abraham. But the most cathartic one for me was Ian Holm's, in a 1997 production at the Royal National Theatre directed by Richard Eyre.

If you've seen Holm in the comedic film The Big Night, this casting choice might surprise you. At first blush, the smallish Holm might seem an unlikely choice to play Lear. But he played it magnificently, achieving a heartbreaking vulnerability and (fortunately, a taping of his performance is available on DVD).

As I think back on it, Holm's performance was all the more moving because it followed a decade when he was absent from the stage due to his inability to memorize text. (Talk about the triumph of the human spirit!)

It's the image of Ian Holm utterly naked, drenched and defenseless on that wild heath in a real, raging storm (they used tanks of water in the stage production) that brings home for me what King Lear is about"“ namely, the tragedy of old age, accompanied, paradoxically, by the clarity achieved in facing it.

Fathers and sons

So, if you're getting on, and if you're suffering from "a bond cracked 'twixt son and father," take comfort in Lear's friend Gloucester and his problems with his sons Edmund and Edgar. Or if you're a victim of ungrateful adult daughters, take solace from Lear as he deals with Goneril and Regan ("How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child"). With luck, you won't go as far as Lear did with Cordelia, saying: "Better thou/Hadst not been born than not t'have pleased me better."

And if you do, you can always say, as Lear said: "Pray you now, forget, and forgive. I am old and foolish."

Above all, don't apologize for your need to understand and, in return, to be understood. As Lear explains to those who've stripped him of his basic need— dignity— "O reason not the need…."