Editing King Lear (section)

=== 20th century ===
[[File:Cordelia's Portion.jpg|upright=1.35|thumb|''Cordelia's Portion'' by [[Ford Madox Brown]]]]

By mid-century, the actor–manager tradition had declined, to be replaced by a structure in which the major theatre companies employed professional directors as auteurs. The last of the great actor–managers, [[Donald Wolfit]], played Lear in 1944 on a Stonehenge-like set and was praised by [[James Agate]] as "the greatest piece of Shakespearean acting since I have been privileged to write for the ''Sunday Times''".{{efn|Quoted by [[Stanley Wells]].{{sfn|Wells|1997|p=224}}}}{{sfn|Foakes|1997|p=89}} Wolfit supposedly drank eight bottles of Guinness in the course of each performance.{{efn|According to [[Ronald Harwood]], quoted by [[Stanley Wells]].{{sfn|Wells|1997|p=229}}}}

The character of Lear in the 19th century was often that of a frail old man from the opening scene, but Lears of the 20th century often began the play as strong men displaying regal authority, including [[John Gielgud]], [[Donald Wolfit]] and [[Donald Sinden]].{{sfn|Foakes|1997|p=24}} Cordelia, also, evolved in the 20th century: earlier Cordelias had often been praised for being sweet, innocent and modest, but 20th-century Cordelias were often portrayed as war leaders. For example, [[Peggy Ashcroft]], at the [[Royal Shakespeare Theatre|RST]] in 1950, played the role in a breastplate and carrying a sword.{{sfn|Foakes|1997|pp=36–37}} Similarly, the Fool evolved through the course of the century, with portrayals often deriving from the [[music hall]] or [[circus]] tradition.{{sfn|Foakes|1997|p=52}}

At Stratford-upon-Avon in 1962 [[Peter Brook]] (who would later film the play with the same actor, [[Paul Scofield]], in the role of Lear) set the action simply, against a huge, empty white stage. The effect of the scene when Lear and Gloucester meet, two tiny figures in rags in the midst of this emptiness, was said (by the scholar Roger Warren) to catch "both the human pathos ... and the universal scale ... of the scene".{{sfn|Warren|1986|p=266}} Some of the lines from the radio broadcast were used by [[The Beatles]] to add into the recorded mix of the song "[[I Am the Walrus]]". [[John Lennon]] happened upon the play on the [[BBC Third Programme]] while fiddling with the radio while working on the song. The voices of actors [[Mark Dignam]], [[Philip Guard]], and John Bryning from the play are all heard in the song.{{sfn|Everett|1999|pp=134–136}}{{sfn|Lewisohn|1988|p=128}}

Like other Shakespearean tragedies, ''King Lear'' has proved amenable to conversion into other theatrical traditions. In 1989, David McRuvie and [[Iyyamkode Sreedharan]] adapted the play then translated it to [[Malayalam]], for performance in [[Kerala]] in the [[Kathakali]] tradition—which itself developed around 1600, contemporary with Shakespeare's writing. The show later went on tour, and in 2000 played at [[Shakespeare's Globe]], completing, according to Anthony Dawson, "a kind of symbolic circle".{{sfn|Dawson|2002|p=178}} Perhaps even more radical was [[Ong Keng Sen]]'s 1997 adaptation of ''King Lear'', which featured six actors each performing in a separate Asian acting tradition and in their own separate languages. A pivotal moment occurred when the [[Peking opera|Jingju]] performer playing Older Daughter (a conflation of Goneril and Regan) stabbed the [[Noh]]-performed Lear whose "falling pine" deadfall, straight face-forward into the stage, astonished the audience, in what Yong Li Lan describes as a "triumph through the moving power of ''noh'' performance at the very moment of his character's defeat".{{sfn|Lan|2005|p=532}}{{sfn|Gillies|Minami|Li|Trivedi|2002|p=265}}

In 1974, [[Buzz Goodbody]] directed ''Lear'', a deliberately abbreviated title for Shakespeare's text, as the inaugural production of the [[Royal Shakespeare Company|RSC]]'s studio theatre [[The Other Place (theatre)|The Other Place]]. The performance was conceived as a chamber piece, the small intimate space and proximity to the audience enabled detailed psychological acting, which was performed with simple sets and in modern dress.{{sfn|Holland|2001|p=211}} Peter Holland has speculated that this company/directoral decision—namely ''choosing'' to present Shakespeare in a small venue for artistic reasons when a larger venue was available—may at the time have been unprecedented.{{sfn|Holland|2001|p=211}}

Brook's earlier vision of the play proved influential, and directors have gone further in presenting Lear as (in the words of [[R. A. Foakes]]) "a pathetic senior citizen trapped in a violent and hostile environment". When [[John Wood (English actor)|John Wood]] took the role in 1990, he played the later scenes in clothes that looked like cast-offs, inviting deliberate parallels with the uncared-for in modern Western societies.{{sfn|Foakes|1997|pp=27–28}} Indeed, modern productions of Shakespeare's plays often reflect the world in which they are performed as much as the world for which they were written: and the Moscow theatre scene in 1994 provided an example, when two very different productions of the play (those by Sergei Zhonovach and Alexei Borodin), very different from one another in their style and outlook, were both reflections on the break-up of the Soviet Union.{{sfn|Holland|2001|p=213}}