Speechlessly King Lear

The deterioration of Lear's mind and speech, the psychotic shrieking of his daughters, the destruction of the stage itself: the trajectory of McKellen's King Lear is geared head-on towards anarchy. Every semblance of order is disrupted in an assault on notions of both the anatomical body and the body politic. Sibling rivalries are paralleled against one another, political structures are broken down and the physical body is, shudderingly, torn apart.

The destruction of all these structures are focused on, and of course facilitated by, the language of the characters. Shakespeare's masterful writing cleverly suggests that both an excess and a lack of language can be detrimental to the pursuit of truth: Edmund's verbosity ties his own wit up in knots, while Lear's nonsensical inarticulacy is a manifestation of his madness.

From the very opening of the play, speech is notably vital to one's political standing. King Lear demands his three daughters to, in turn, tell him how much they love him. When the eldest two use exaggerated metaphor to convey a showy and superficial sense of total devotion to and reverence of their father, Lear rewards them with their share of his lands. When his youngest Cordelia honestly tells her father that she loves and honours him as a daughter should, no more and no less, Lear flies into a rage and casts her out of his court. Her honesty leaves her stripped of her royal identity - a symptom of a court mistakenly obsessed by the meretricious spectacle of power and love, rather than the genuine article. From the outset, speech, what it represents and what it causes, is crowned the most powerful. The political structure itself is wholly submissive to it.

As the play progresses, the speech of King Lear himself becomes more and more impenetrable as his reality is populated by the inanimate objects with which he converses. In doing so, he rejects the real people that surround him and an atmosphere of distrust is created through the lack of genuine interaction between characters.

The sombre close to the play sees Lear finally pierce through his madness. His boggling language, that obscured his reality and baffled his spectators throughout the entire play, conclusively morphs into perfect, simple, and tragic, truth. In these final moments of tragedy, the king achieves complete linguistic clarity as he laments, "I might have sav'd her; now she's gone for ever". McKellen is magnificent as he completes Lear's full circle - having opened the play with a fiercely authoritarian rejection of Cordelia's gently honest declaration of love, he closes in quiet admission of his reciprocating love. Language, in its purest and simplest form, serves the mad king best; as a facilitator of truth, he can finally and simply articulate his love for Cordelia, subsumed in the tragedy of her death.

In a modern-day political climate that is caught up in the bold claims of its leaders - fake-news Trump and Brexiteering May - McKellen's portrayal of King Lear reconsiders the importance of transparent honesty. Just as Lear rejects Cordelia's authenticity in favour of her sisters' ostentatious claims, the leaders of our times dangerously tend towards a backhanded obscuring of truth. Our world has become a macrocosm of King Lear's court, linguistically enslaved to showy demonstrations of power ("Make America Great Again"; "strong and stable") which are tragically void of true meaning when not vindicated through action. The honest clarity of Lear at the end of the play is something that we are yet to achieve. Shakespeare remarkably and emotively records the profound flaw of dishonesty in our social anatomy and teaches every generation an important lesson: language for the sake of language is always futile in the end. Only true and genuine honesty will really prevail.