Would you be care to share your thoughts on King Lear in general? Recently played Cornwall in a production of it and I’m interested in your thoughts. Thanks!

It’s my favorite Shakespeare tragedy, a play of such ferocity and real human fear that the first time I saw it as a kid of all of ten years old it freaked me right the fuck out. 

It was the RSC at Stratford-upon-Avon and the production had this enormous moon hanging over the stage, and when Gloucester was blinded, the moon cracks and starts spilling sand down like an hourglass. And the mix of the violence of “out, out vile jelly” and the moon breaking, I felt this sense of genuine cosmic terror, like the planets were coming apart and we were going to fall off the planet and into the void. 

Thankfully, there was an intermission and I was calmed down, but holy hell. 

Lear may not be the tightest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, its writing might be a bit more Whitman than Dickinson, but for sheer elemental force it cannot be beat.