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Glenda Jackson Plays King Lear on Broadway

The 82-year-old actress talks about the most powerful role in theater.

I’m not interested in whether audiences love us. I want audiences to believe us. I want them to believe. When theater works, the group of strangers come on in the light, and there is this larger group of strangers sitting in the dark. And energy goes from the light to the dark and hopefully is reinforced and sent back to you. And if that happens, a perfect circle is formed. And that is so unique. I don’t know that I have any direct sense of embodying, physically, a different person. If I take anything home with me, it’s a disaster, because everything I should have found I should leave on the stage, and hopefully I do. Every time you do it, it’s the first time you’ve done it. Somebody wrote to me and said that a particular line in a play had moved her to tears. Now I don’t know how to say that line. The curtain goes up, and play begins. And it’s up to us all then to find it. Those are journeys that have to be discovered every night. I just hope the kind of emotional memory that’s in one’s muscles and limbs responds, I think. Oh, there’s nothing better than the text. Look at the guy. He is the most contemporary dramatist in the world today, because he really only ever asks three questions. Who are we? What are we? Why are we? No one’s come up with really sufficiently satisfying answers. And it’s digging that out, it’s making that immediate and alive now that’s just so thrilling about doing one of his plays, actually. Lear’s character himself, he has no self-pity. And he has no fear, really. And he strikes me as being a man who’s never heard the word no. And he does have the capacity to learn. He really only discovers love, real love, when it’s much, much too late. And it’s a very harsh lesson. O.K., thank you very much. Close the door.

Magazine

Glenda Jackson Plays King Lear on Broadway

Video by Jacob Krupnick March 27, 2019

The 82-year-old actress talks about the most powerful role in theater.

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