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Chapter 4 - Filming Metatheatre: the ‘Dover Cliff’ Scene on Screen

from Part II - Lear en Abyme: Metatheatre and the Screen

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2019

Victoria Bladen
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Sarah Hatchuel
Affiliation:
Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier
Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin
Affiliation:
Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier
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Summary

In 4.6, Edgar, who pretends to be Poor Tom, guides his blind father Gloucester towards Dover. Gloucester has asked to be led to the top of a cliff so that he can end his days. But the cliff is only an illusion created verbally by Edgar who wants to protect his father’s life. This scene uses the power of the Elizabethan stage to become a moment of pure theatre, calling for a bare stage to retain all its ambiguities. The aim of this contribution is to show how cinema and television can sometimes maintain, and even foster, the scene’s paradoxes of a non-space. The chapter interrogates the possibilities offered by the screen to reflect the complex dramatic and metadramatic tensions in several film productions of King Lear that use Shakespeare’s playtext. These screen productions, emerging from different media and production contexts, all present different strategies to represent the ‘cliff’ scene. From Richard Eyre’s 1998 film, to films made for television and video release, to feature films (Peter Brook’s in 1971), they all attempt, through textual cuts, framing and/or editing, to circumvent the problem posed by a scene that seems to encapsulate the very essence of the bare Elizabethan stage.

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Chapter
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

Works Cited

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