Brook�s decision to construct an �interpretation� seems to be an open acknowledgement of and engagement with this question. In order to create a film of King Lear, a play that runs for some four and a half hours unedited, it was obvious that some cutting of the text was required. The necessity of transferring the aural to the visual for the cinematic medium automatically suggests that a large proportion of the text must instead be rendered visually in some way. Filming the text �authentically� in the belief that it will stand for itself would lead to a suppression of the visual and therefore emasculate the cinematic medium, making the whole process a hollow imitation of the theatrical experience. What Brook and Birkett recognised was that heavy editing and adaptation of the text was a legitimate option and not a betrayal of the author if the heart of the play�s meaning was retained. Recognising that the spoken word operates very differently in film, Brook attempted to �construct a distance between himself and Shakespeare�s language� from which he could devise a shooting script from the play-text. Brook�s initial exercise was to ask Ted Hughes to translate the play into a more modern but still poetic idiom. Though this translation would eventually not be used, it provided a certain objective basis for Brook to then write his own visual treatment of the play, one that remained directly linked to the themes of Shakespeare�s original. Jorgens seems to support this view with the observation that Brook�s Lear �was true enough to important dimensions of the original and powerful enough in its own right to be valued alongside good �presentation� of the same work�. As Boris Pasternak (translator and screenwriter for Grigori Kozintsev) stated:
Half of the text of any play� [is] a diffused remark the author wrote in order to acquaint the actor with the heart of the play�s action. As soon as a company has penetrated his artistic intention, and mastered it, one can and should sacrifice the most vivid and profound lines (not to mention the pale and indifferent ones), provided that the actors have achieved an equally talented performance of an acted, mimed, silent, or laconic equivalent to their lines .
Hence, in addition to cutting, Brook made a number of slight alterations to the action to tell the story more rapidly and emphasise certain elements. Brief examples include Gloucester listening in on Edgar when Edmund makes him read the forged letter (emphasising the father�s feelings of betrayal); the transposition of Edgar�s lines regarding Gloucester�s death to Cornwall (making the dialogue with Edmund a case of two villains conversing) and bringing �onstage� the deaths of all three sisters (turning their death into a tragic sequence of images ). That such changes are derived half from the text, half from Brook�s reading of the text, emphasises the impossibility of clearly separating any necessary �adaptation� from a text from an interpretation of it.
II: Re-presenting the Text
The whole play [of King Lear] seems concerned with sclerosis opposing the flow of existence, of cataracts that dissolve, of rigid attitudes that yield, while at the same time obsessions form and positions harden. Of course, the whole play is about sight and blindness, what sight amounts to, what blindness means � how the two eyes of Lear ignore what the instinct of the Fool apprehends, how the two eyes of Gloucester miss what his blindness knows.
- Peter Brook
Shakespeare�s King Lear raises many themes: the relationship between father and child, between rulers and ruled, but perhaps most importantly the play examines the relationship between man and �nature�, or (as Jan Kott suggests) �the absolute�. The decision to set the play in a pre-Christian England, which Well�s observes as a notable difference between Shakespeare�s play and his source texts , is a deliberate attempt to explore man�s relationship to a universe without a god. Brook seems to agree with Saunders� opinion that,
Lear is a tragedy of apocalyptic dimensions anatomising a moment of crisis in Western civilisation when people had to confront the notion of existence without belief in an ordered, secure universe beyond their temporal universe .
Whether the play has an implicitly Christian message (a reading Stephen Greenblatt acknowledges ) is open to discussion. Undoubtedly, the sheer profusion of invocations to both pagan gods and the natural world made - which are pointedly all left unanswered � shows Shakespeare creating a discourse around perceptions of �rationality� in the universe.
Brook�s intention was to reveal Lear�s fundamental belief in a rational world as fallacy, mere illusion. It is the Fool, the �archetypal soothsayer� , standing apart from society and commenting on it, who has already recognised this at the beginning of the play: �he is independent because he has realised that the world is simply folly� . One of the main dynamics of the action is Lear�s discovery that his personal confidante is right. As the Fool (in the Folio text)observes at the close of III.II:
