The Hampstead Players, in their 40th year, to present a production of King Lear in Hampstead Parish Church on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.
In October 2006 I flew to South Africa with my brother Charles to visit my ill GP father, his last decade having suffered from Alzheimer’s. At Heathrow I had bought a Penguin paperback of King Lear and read it intensely on the flight. We arrived just hours after Dad died, two days short of his 83rd birthday. A few days later, at his funeral, his three sons gave eulogies.
Ever since, I have wanted to tackle this great tragedy with The Hampstead Players, though nervous of my fitness for it. Yet 10 years later – and with Shakespeare remembered 400 years after his death – it asks to be performed. It is an epic play which I always thought would suit the Autumn Production in our Church. And I am grateful to my fellow director Annie Duarte for sharing the burden and pleasure of this adventure.
The play famously turns on Lear’s ill-fated decision to divide his kingdom and some have thought this resonates with David Cameron’s holding of the EU Referendum. I believe the play accommodates itself to all times and is just as relevant in the modern world as in the time of James I. As Ben Jonson, playwright of our Summer Production this year, The Alchemist, eulogised in the First Folio of 1623, his contemporary Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time!”
Nothing can be made out of nothing – King Lear (William Shakespeare, 1606)
Looking back over 40 years of The Hampstead Players, we have been fortunate in our three vicars over this period: Graham Dowell who helped found us, Philip Buckler who supported us, and of course Father Stephen who occasionally performed with us.
We have put on 18 Shakespeare productions: the first in 1984, Twelfth Night, was directed by my mother Pat. Other Shakespeare Autumn Productions followed up to 1999’s The Tempest directed by Sir Alan Goodison. From Hamlet in 2001, which I directed, to last year’s Richard II, directed by John Willmer and Bill Risebero, all have been Summer Productions.
This will therefore be our first Shakespeare Autumn Production this millennium. It is a challenging play to undertake but a popular one this year, with a number of professional productions, including one with our ex-MP Glenda Jackson. As before, to suit our purposes, we have edited the play somewhat, but it still gives a true picture and preserves all the themes, from fathers and their ill-judgement made mad and blind, to their discovery of humanity, love and redemption.
Or, as Nicolas Bentley puts it in his 1972 Tales of Shakespeare: ‘The basic problem with which King Lear is concerned is one that is as relevant today as it was in Shakespeare’s time: what to do if you have got a geriatric relative living in the house.’
Lear asks his three daughters how much they love him, and at my father’s funeral 10 years ago we three sons told how much we loved him. I would like to dedicate our production to all great fathers.
Do come and support us.
Nothing you can make that can’t be made
‘All you need is love’ (Lennon/McCartney 1967)