In 1965, in an interview in Sight and Sound, Peter Brook eloquently discussed the difficulties of filming Shakespearian plays, decrying the ‘sad history of Shakespeare on the screen’ and denouncing the majority of Shakespearian films as ‘pitiful’ and ‘unspeakably bad’. Speaking at UNESCO's Shakespeare Quatercentenary Celebration in Paris, he said, in essence, that Shakespeare was impossible to film at all. However, the winter of 1968–9 found Brook in Northern Jutland, filming one of Shakespeare's most profoundly intricate tragedies, King Lear. When the film was released in 1970–1, critical reaction ranged from rapture to outrage. Nigel Andrews called Brook's Lear ‘a distinct achievement’, praising the acting, the setting, and, above all, Brook's use of the camera to ‘transcend repre-sentationalism’. Frank Kermode hailed Lear as a ‘fully realized and deeply imagined version of this great work … a masterly conception of the play’. Charles Phillips Reilly cautiously labelled the film ‘a mixed bag’, lauding Paul Scofield's performance as Lear and Brook's understanding of the themes of the play, but criticizing the camera work, especially in the storm sequence. Pauline Kael, the formidable reviewer for The New Yorker, simply said ‘I hated it’, and dismissed the film as ‘gray and cold … the drear far side of the moon’. According to Kael, the concept was ‘second-rate’, the script ‘plotless’, and the actors walking corpses.12 She dubbed the film ‘Peter Brook's “Night of the Living Dead”’.
The construction of national identity in Shakespeare’s King Lear and its filmic adaptation by Peter Brook
