King Lear was amazing, as expected. I realized that I had forgotten more about the play then I thought I had since reading it in OAC (Grade 13 for those outside of Ontario). I tried to give my housemate a quick synopsis of the play before seeing it last night and I ended mixing the main plot (with Lear) and the subplot (with Gloucester) together and confusing him. At the end all was clear.
I completely forgot how funny the play is. It is one of Shakespeare’s tragedies but the play is full of humour especially from King Lear, the fool who travels with Lear and Edmund the bastard son. Christopher Plummer played an excellent King Lear and the actor who played Edmund was the perfect kind of villian.
The only problem I had with the play was with my brain. A lot of the actors had crazy English accents, especially the fool, plus they were speaking in Old English. I found out last night that when the part of my brain that translates Old English into something that makes sense and the part of my brain that sorts out accents both try to work at the same time something happens and neither of them work very well. I understood about half of what the fool said but I remembered that most of it was jibberish anyways. I wasn’t too concerned about it.
In summary: Good play, good acting, stupid brain!