NEW YORK, March 21 (UPI) -- Christopher Plummer is giving the most commanding performance of this theatrical season as King Lear, even though at 74 he thinks he may have waited too long to take on one of the most difficult roles in the Shakespearean repertory.
"I'm older than most Lears," Plummer said in an interview before the play opened at Lincoln Center's Beaumont Theater. "I should have done it in my 40's or 50's. But I honestly feel I'm in better shape than I was then."
The actor first tackled the role of the crazed British king with problem daughters at the 2002 Stratford Festival production in his native Canada, celebrating that event's 50th anniversary. The New York "King Lear," directed brilliantly by Britain's Jonathan Miller, is based on the Ontario production.
Plummer, still a handsome and robust man, has determined that Lear was probably in his mid-80's, and the makeup for the role gives him the appearance of great age, his ruddy face framed in a halo of white hair with moustache and beard to match. He makes a bombastic entrance in sonorous good voice and only gradually shows the growing infirmities of body and mind suffered by Lear.
One of the first indications of his decline is his inability to remember the name of one of his daughter's suitors when making introductions, a Plummer invention. Gradually his hands begin to shake and a nervous slackness takes over his strong jaw. Within the first hour of this three-hour, slightly edited production, Plummer has convinced his audience that he is aging before their eyes.
It is masterful playacting, and no matter how well most audience members know the plot outline of "King Lear," it is Plummer's complete habitation of the role that hooks their attention and holds it to the tragic final scene.
Such mesmerizing performances are difficult to come by in American Shakespearian productions at the present time. The runner-up to Plummer's performance was that of Kevin Kline as Sir John Falstaff in the Lincoln Center's "Henry IV" earlier this season. When Plummer made his New York debut 50 years ago, he already had been trained in the classics by appearing with some of the greatest actors of the day and had played more than 100 roles.
Careers like this no longer exist for young actors, and the weakness of several members of the cast of this "King Lear" is all we need as evidence.
Brent Carver, who plays the complex role of Edgar, an outcast nobleman wandering the heath as a madman called "Poor Tom," is a fine actor, but he doesn't throw his voice across the footlights, and Claire Jullien as Cordelia also fails to project her voice or any clue to the personality of the "good daughter" whom Lear banishes.
As the "bad daughters" Goneril and Regan, who inherit Lear's realm, Domini Blythe and Lucy Peacock have a firm grip on being despicable and help Plummer carry the play. Their husbands, played by Ian Deakin and Stephen Russell, are little more than ciphers when they might have been co-conspirators worthy of sharing hisses with their wives in this best of the Bard's melodramas.
The other old man in the play, the Duke of Gloucester, is outstandingly played by James Blendick, a Stratford Festival veteran. This fine actor is entirely sympathetic as a courtier of honor and undying loyalty to Lear who is betrayed by his power-hungry illegitimate son, Edmund, a role given an unusual but effective humorous twist by Geraint Wyn Davies.
The rest of the cast does well enough, although Barry MacGregor seems somewhat subdued as the Fool, Lear's court jester and nagging conscience. Brian Tree makes an interesting character of the usually faceless Oswald, steward to Goneril, and Benedict Campbell is stalwart as the Earl of Kent, another loyal subject banished by Lear in the course of his fall from grace.
Ralph Funicello's unit set on a thrust stage only suggests various locations with the help of Robert Thomson's gloomy lighting, but it provides plenty of doors for entrances and exits. Clare Mitchell's costumes are from the early years of the 17th century when Lear was written, as good a time as any when it comes to sumptuous style, and Berthold Carrier's incidental music is also suitably Elizabethan.
