Age of madness

CORIN Redgrave reminds you of a favourite old uncle. Comfortable to the point of slightly scruffy in appearance, quietly-spoken and apologetic about arriving a few minutes late.

Can this really be the man about to unleash the gimlet-jawed madness of King Lear on the main stage at Stratford before it transfers to Newcastle's Theatre Royal?

Those about to witness his transformation to monarchacled mutineer will vouch for his ability, but, for now, the actor/director/author talks in humble tones about Shakespeare's saddest role.

So how does he prepare himself to become a king who loses his grip on reality? "The trouble with a process is that it would become stale after a while. The problem is twofold, after a time you have to dig spurs into yourself more and more ferociously to make it work and actually it's a cheat because the frame of mind you want to be in at the start of the play is not the frame of mind of someone who believes he's going mad.

"Lear's in the frame of mind of somebody who has spent an extremely successful morning working out his plans for the enlargement of his palace and is now about to pull off a political masterstroke by dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters and keeping everyone guessing about who is going to get the lion's share. So he's in a benevolent frame of mind... that tips over into a violent anger. Otherwise it's signalled to the audience 'oh, watch out, he's going to go'."

Ideally he's looking for an audience to be surprised, appalled and delighted by the twists and turns of the story as though seeing Lear for the first time.

Redgrave admits he's fascinated by the way people prepare to take to the stage. He explains: "Do I want to be in a state where you're worrying about an unpaid gas bill and all the things that one does in any one moment of the day. You have to be in a state of readiness to meet an audience and go on a journey with them and the odd thing about that is that there is no ideal preparation. You can spend the whole day preparing and you can arrive flat and tried and feeling rather spent. Or you can spend a whole day doing a mountain of things and arrive half-an-hour before the performance totally frazzled and you can find that you're in an electric state of readiness. So there is no answer to that."

"I think it's comparable to sport in certain ways. In what state of mind must you be to play a Wimbledon final? And I think it's about as important as that to play King Lear. On any given night it should be like a Wimbledon final."

He's equally thoughtful about his own age of 64 and the way an elderly king should be played. He says: "I had some negative views, I didn't think he needed to be played by a man who thought of himself as very old. And I think it's a funny thing, you are as old as you feel really aren't you?.

"I don't think it's a good thing to try and talk like an old person because old people who actually sound old are one in a million. My mother (the actress Rachel Kempson), almost to her dying day, and died at 94 last year, didn't get mumbly until she was 92 or 93.

"Older members of the audience have told me they felt it was a good thing he isn't palsied, stricken and crabbed with age. He's a bit of a conundrum, Shakespeare talks about himself as an old man when he's 40 and Lear is described in one line as four-score years and more but he's got three young daughters. We know that's not impossible, but it sort of seems unlikely, so I think it's a metaphor for a man who is old.

Redgrave's also playing Kenneth Tynan on Tyneside. He met the great critic and writer when was 11 and Tynan came to the Redgrave's house.

"He was a very audacious young man partly because he was very ambitious and had high opinion of his own abilities and also he was the sort of man who got over being cripplingly shy by being extremely extrovert. "When I answered the door there was a very tall, youngish man no more than 21 at the time, wearing bright scarlet trousers which was very unusual in the early 1950s. He did review a few of my performances, but by the time I really got underway in the theatre he had already taken the step to going to the national theatre, so he ceased writing reviews.

Asked if he liked Tynan, Redgrave chooses his words carefully: "I liked him in the sense that he was an immensely talented man and he was probably one of the most gifted writers that I'd ever come across. He was head and shoulders above all of them. He was funny, very perceptive and he was often wrong. The thing about Tynan, and one of his best qualities, was that he loved talent, he loved ability and his mission was to make room for that... a kind of universal John the Baptist for talent."

The production, simply called Tynan and based on The Diaries Of Kenneth Tynan edited by John Lahr, works as a monologue with Redgrave speaking the writer's thoughts. The diaries were left to Tynan's eldest daughter to do with as she liked. And she is advisor and costume advisor for the project which will play Startford's Swan before taking to Newcastle's Theatre Royal for three performances, November 10-12.

But Lear looms larger. He reflects: "Here you are beside Mount Etna and suddenly things start to erupt and they go on erupting for the next two hours and it is a big challenge, perhaps the biggest of all. It's been said that nobody can completely succeed and nobody can completely fail either. That is one of the saving graces of Shakespeare, there's no such thing as a perfect performance."

* King Lear runs November 16-20 at Newcastle's Theatre Royal. Box Office: 0870 905 5060.

Published: 28/10/2004