Notes from the cliff

I feel very fortunate.

My cough is still an irritant, but I can do something about that. I feel a little stiff and sore, but I'm otherwise in good physical shape. The skies are clear and it is going to be another beautiful warm day. And I get to work on what is probably the best scene in Shakespeare, and maybe the best scene in drama - the 'cliff' scene in Lear.

We worked on it last night, and I learned so much. Shakespeare very often has his actors paint a verbal landscape (Gloucester does this in evoking the heath at the end of Act Two, most of the characters in Act Three develop this, and, at the beginning of Act Four, Gloucester describes the cliff he is seeking  at Dover) but here Edgar describes a landscape which does not exist, in order to deceive a blind man. Then Gloucester steels himself to commit suicide, only to find that he survives the fall, and has to still have that rage inside himself even as he swears that he will be patient in future. Then Lear comes on having lost his mind.... wow!

My job is to get the audience to believe in Gloucester's anger and despair, to make them believe that this man has lost the will to live and to deliver that one single speech with everything I can give to it, so that, as the director put it last night, Barry stands waiting to come as as the mad Lear and thinks 'How do I top that?'
I'll give it my best shot! This is such a privilege and I must not blow it.