Κіng Lеаr 2008 Iаn ΜсΚеnnаn

This is the international production directed by Trevor Nunn and shown in the U.S. on PBS. It stars the incomparable Ian McKennan as Lear, and that is enough reason to check this version out. I have preserved the act/scene structure, though I had to cut 5 scenes into clips, doing my best to wreak as little violence on the original as was done in the production, where much cutting was done. YouTube's 10-minute limit was my undoing-- the filmmakers' was our 21st century attention span. Nunn wisely left many a messenger in the wings with their speeches of reportage, no matter how poetic, even when they were about matters neither the characters nor the audience knew had happened-- the esthetic of our times has taught us that if it wasn't captured by the lens, it might as well not have happened. I could quibble about many, even most, but since this works beautifully as a movie, what's the use of complaining about alterations made in the play? I was more than a little irked by Nunn's apparent dislike of Shakespeare's way of marking the ends of scenes with rhyming couplets, bits of doggerel and other comedic bits of business, especially since these cut deeply into my favorite speaking part in the whole play-- the Fool. But I may be a little eccentric in seeing him as an alter ego of the lead character, Lear in negative as it were. To those of you keeping track of the numbers, Act IV sc 3 is not missing-- it was cut from the production. Scenes cut into two or more clips are marked by lower-case letters, for example, 5.3a, 5.3b, 5.3c-- in the text and the production, these three parts run as one continuous scene. When I say this works as a movie, I mean as a movie version of a Shakespearean play. For a more radically "cinematic" version liberated from expectations engrained in us by the ubiquity of Shakespearean poetry in our cultural idiom, try the 1971 Russian-language version translated by Boris Pasternak, directed by Grigori Kozintzev, and musically scored by Dmitri Shostakovich. It is available on the ensouvenir channel, playlist link: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=029D222C23575266