King Lear

The FIRST time I saw Bill Mack he was on stage in an Australian late night comedy theatre, trying to perform a puppet version of Shakespeare, from inside a booth that he wore like a tent, to a drunken audience, two of whom he had invited on stage.

He was not having a good time but the traditionalist in him insisted that the show had to go on and somehow he brought the performance painfully to a conclusion.

Bill, who was from New York and created The Royal Short Company - an intended reference to the Royal Shakespeare Company as he and his puppets performed very short versions of Shakespearean classics - was one of the kindest men I ever knew.

However, this didn’t help him the night in Melbourne when he broke two, and stupidly kept one, of the golden rules of show business.

1.Don’t invite a drunk up on to the stage.

2.Never work with a drunk when you are inside something you can only see out of in one direction.

3.The show must go on.

Unlike my friend Bill, not all of Shakespeare’s characters can be described as “being kind”.

Lady Macbeth is one who comes to mind though my vote for evil personified would be Lady Kaede in Kurosawsa’s version of the King Lear tragedy, Ran. Ok, it’s true that the Japanese director did not set out to make a version of King Lear but the parallels are strong, he admitted at least a subconscious link - and it was my first experience of the play.

It wasn’t my first experience of Shakespeare though; when I was at university I shared a house with Helen who was very knowledgeable about theatre and I asked her to take me to a play. She chose Shakespeare, possibly Richard the 2nd but I am not sure, I remember that the play began with an unjust banishment and my infantile, Hollywood addled mind assumed that the plot would centre on the banished’s rightful revenge.

Unbeknownst to me the actor who played this part was doubling up in another role and when he reappeared in a later scene my “goodies and baddies” assumption proved right. I didn’t understand why no one recognised him, a fact that falling asleep at some crucial point didn’t make any clearer and all in all I thought the whole thing a tad boring; something that I couldn’t say about Ran. Lady Kaede gave me erotic nightmares for weeks after.

My own experience with King Lear is limited to a week’s workshop I undertook with the French Clown teacher Philippe Gaullier. The work was centred on children’s games but we had to learn sections of dialogue in advance that he would ask us to use when, in a state of childish innocence and rapture, he deemed us to be open. After successfully recreating the feeling of an excited child calling his friends out of their house to play, he instructed me to deliver Lear’s lines –

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!”

Even though I had diligently prepared the text, only the first line would come as I was so caught up in the sudden feeling of being seven and in front of the house where Rosalind Wall, my neighbour had lived. So infectious was my summons that I succeeded in getting the whole workshop group on their feet to join me even though my tongue stubbornly refused to go any further. I felt sufficiently mad at that moment to warrant an Oscar.

You are probably wondering what al this has to do with Seattle. Is it the fact that Seattle is in King county, the thirteenth most populous in the nation? Or is it that last Saturday Rough Play Theatre opened auditions for their planned September production? Neither.

When I was seven a joke that used to go round the playground went like this – Why is a fire engine red? There are six men in a fire engine, two sixes are twelve, twelve inches make a ruler, Queen Elisabeth was a ruler, Queen Elisabeth ruled the seven seas. In the seas are fishes, fishes have fins, the Fins beat the Russians, the Russians are red and that’s why a fire engine is red!

King Lear was written by Shakespeare, my friend Bill performed Shakespeare with puppets, the puppets and Bill lived in New York, New York is on the East coast of America, on the West coast of America is Seattle and that’s why Seattle is King Lear.

The LAST time I saw Bill Mack was the morning that he left my flat after a week in London to catch the plane from Heathrow that was blown up by a terrorist bomb over the town of Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988.

He was one of the kindest men I have ever known.