Author Philip Womack on the dark pull of Shakespeare’s harrowing tragedy, the genesis of his new novel The Broken King
I’ve read King Lear at least twice in the last couple of years, and seen two performances: one at the Almeida, in Michael Attenborough’s 2012 quasi-mediaeval production, with Jonathan Pryce as the prideful monarch who divides his kingdom between his daughters, only to be cast out onto the heath amongst the madmen and the storms; and this year, 2014, at the National Theatre, directed by Sam Mendes, with Simon Russell Beale in the title role as a fading dictator. Pryce was the better Lear, his descent into insanity more convincing; Beale played it for laughs, twitching and gurning.
Surely one Lear, once, is enough for anyone? you may be thinking.
There is something at the heart of the play which draws me to it, again and again: a curious blackness, which has a strength like that of a black hole, sucking everything into it, changing, transforming things, not into something “rich and strange”, but into something entirely other.
“That simple sentence haunted me ever since I first heard it: evocative and elusive, it hums with mystery”
This is epitomised by a phrase spoken by Edgar when disguised as the madman, Poor Tom. Edgar, and his strength of goodness, is vital to the play (something that the Attenborough production brought out, whilst Mendes made him into an uninspiring, weak figure); falsely accused by his half-brother of plotting to kill his father, the Earl of Gloucester, he inverts himself entirely: princeling to pauper in one terrible moment. When he runs into Lear on the heath, the two make a poignantly despairing couple: one, a father thrown out by his daughters; the other a son accused of wanting to overthrow his own father. As they enter a hovel, Edgar sings, apparently inconsequentially: “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.”
That simple sentence haunted me ever since I first heard it: evocative and elusive, it hums with mystery. It inspired Robert Browning to write a whole poem. I myself have used it, and the Browning poem, as the inspiration for my new book, The Broken King, a dark fantasy for children in which a mad emperor is at odds with his own daughter.
The Dark Tower is symbolic of everything that is powerful about King Lear. It’s romantic and thrilling, suggesting the culmination of a quest; and also it hints at the central darkness of the play, that ontological blackness which exerts its pull. Yet it constantly eludes and evades a definite meaning.
Every time we grasp something about the play, or seem to, it slips further out of our grasp, breaking further and further apart, spinning out, like the universe itself. It is unstable, shifting, dizzying, and that is why I love King Lear.
The book launch for Philip Womack’s third novel, The Broken King, the first in The Darkening Path trilogy, is tomorrow. Published by Troika Books, it is out 30 June. Philip is a contributing editor at Port. Read more by Philip HERE
