KING FOR A DAY.

Can an actor who has spent the greater part of his life onstage--an actor who has been lauded in a wide variety of roles both here and abroad--be too old to play King Lear, by the time he gets around to it? Of course, age is not the problem with Christopher Plummer's portrayal of the alternately brilliant and mad king (at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre), but it's possible that Plummer's accrued success is. You get the sense, watching this tepid production, that he has simply grown too comfortable with the part of the great actor to bother harnessing his energy to this Mt. Everest of a role.

Lear's tragedy should--as all tragedies do--force us to confront some of life's inevitabilities: the infirmities of old age; the tattered selfhood that we cling to despite the dying of the light; our desperate need to have an effect on the minds and hearts of others. Decency and convention generally prevent us from addressing these miseries outright. It is only when age, madness, or illness takes possession of us--when we are already, in a sense, outcast from society-- that we can speak a kind of truth about our self-interest. Shakespeare's Lear bears the weight of age and lives in fear of madness. Stripped of his physical powers, he is free to howl, howl, howl into the fast-approaching night. Nevertheless, the last thing that dies in a ruler is his passion for control. In the play's first act, the King assembles his three daughters, Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia (played drably here by Domini Blythe, Lucy Peacock, and Claire Jullien), to announce that he is dividing his kingdom among them. He declares his purpose this way:

Give me the map there. Know that we have divided, In three our kingdom; and 'tis our fast intent , To shake all cares and business from our

age, , Conferring them on younger strengths, while we , Unburden'd crawl toward death.

As it happens, however, Lear is not truly ready for his self-imposed retirement. His responsibilities define him, and without the "burden" of negotiation what language would he speak? The King wants to cut a deal: he will not divide his kingdom evenly among his daughters; instead, they will be rewarded with "shadowy forests and with champains rich'd, / with plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads" according to the degree of their love for him. Lear poses the question:

Tell me, my daughters, -- , Since now we will divest us both of rule, , Interest of territory, cares of state, -- , Which of you shall we say doth love us most? , That we our largest bounty may extend , Where nature doth with merit challenge.

What he is really asking is not who loves him but who will live for him. His children are his legacy--all that will be left to reflect his increasingly fading self. The trouble is that daughters are not made in their father's image. Shakespeare's hall of mirrors throws Lear back to Lear, but he is unable to see himself as he is. Nor can he see Goneril's and Regan's duplicity when they exaggerate their affection for him. (His demand is vexing to his older daughters, and their resentment makes a certain sense when you consider that, given their class and sex, their father probably had little interest in them before he decided to put his affairs in order.) Lear perceives Cordelia's understated declaration of love--a far cry from her sisters' overblown rhetoric--as a shattering of the mirror he would like her to hold up to his soul. What Cordelia means when she says to her father, "I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty / According to my bond; no more nor less," is "You are you and I am I and somehow, across the chasm of that painful isolation, the isolation inherent in being an individual, there is love." What Lear hears is only ungratefulness for a gift that has nothing to do with giving.