KING LEAR:  LESSONS

From Saturday's Daily Telegraph

DAMIAN THOMPSON

In 1980, as a sixth former, I saw one of the great Hamlets: Jonathan Pryce, possessed by his dead father and speaking the ghost’s lines in a voice so unlike his own that you’d think a ventriloquist was hiding in the wings. (You can find a short extract of it on YouTube.)
We were taken to the Royal Court by Mr Pegnall, a mischievous genius of a teacher who never fitted comfortably into our staid and now defunct Catholic grammar school. (He once shocked a troublemaker into silence by telling him, with a languorously raised eyebrow, to f––– off. We liked him so much that no one mentioned it outside the classroom.)
The problem was that only Mr Pegnall could make me love Shakespeare. Once I left school, intellectual laziness reasserted itself. I remember a bad amateur production of Twelfth Night in my twenties, not being able to follow the plot, and deciding that the Bard wasn’t for me.
As a result, I didn’t even bother to read or watch King Lear. Then, a few weeks ago, I read that Jonathan Pryce was tackling the part at the Almeida. Here, at last, was an unmissable opportunity to discover a mighty landmark of English literature. But would I be able to follow the play, to absorb its dense imagery, without my old teacher helpfully untangling it for me?
So I took no chances. After a gap of 32 years, I resumed my English lessons with Mr Pegnall – or Peter, as I am now allowed to call him – and last week we went to see Lear.
Peter long ago gave up full-time teaching to concentrate on a second career as a much-praised poet. (His next collection is entitled Howl: the Silent Movie.) We held our lessons in the café at the Telegraph. It was reassuring that he has changed so little physically: there are a few more lines on the face, the thick hair is now grey, but the sonic boom of his voice still carries.
I’ve stayed in touch with Peter ever since leaving school, but our conversations have been mostly gossip, banter and a sharing of woes. I can’t tell you how exhilarating it was to be taught by him once again – to have him tune my tin ear until I could hear the passion and nastiness in a speech that previously lay dead on the page.
By the time the lights dimmed at the Almeida, Peter had primed me with questions: “How crazed is Lear in the first scenes? And, consequently, how culpable in his treatment of Cordelia? Do the actresses playing the 'ugly sisters’ bring a humanity that the words don’t accommodate? Does the Fool’s doggerel bite?”
I’m glad to say that Pryce made a deeply satisfying Lear: this was a finely honed chamber performance rather than grand opera. Michael Attenborough’s production was “absorbing and distressing”, according to the FT. True, and I felt some of that distress, since bittersweet memories of 1980 kept intruding.
If Pryce was the right age to play Hamlet then and is the right age to play Lear now, then it goes without saying that the nights are drawing in for me, too. Freud thought the play was all about the need to “make friends with the necessity of dying”. Maybe so. But in asking my schoolmaster to teach me the play in 2012 was I trying to brush aside mortality by turning back the clock? Or was the whole exercise, as Peter suggested, the perfect way to mark the passage of time – actor, teacher and pupil growing old together?
Either way, my fear of Shakespeare has been well and truly overcome. I’m now so obsessed with King Lear that I listen to it on my iPod. So my message to Peter is: thank you, sir. And sorry about only getting a B in the A-level.