Shakespeare does 'Succession': Rory Stewart on King Lear

Secret Life of Books

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“Now, gods, stand up for bastards!”

King Lear is the Mount Everest of Theatre - a sprawling masterpiece of political turmoil, personal betrayal, horrifying gore and great poetry. It makes ‘Succession’ look like The Midsomer Murders. Lear is the pagan king who decides to divides his kingdom between two daughters (and banishing a third), only to find himself outcast, succumbing to madness, adrift in a world collapsing into civil war. Who better to tackle this cautionary tale of domestic and political crisis than Rory Stewart, host of The Rest is Politics, who has watched the downfall of several rulers, in one way or another.

For Rory, King Lear is ‘THE’ play. He fell in love with it at school and becomes only more seduced by Lear, as a character, the older he gets.

While Sophie and Jonty, in predictable style, try to tie the play to the Reformation and Shakespeare’s personal life respectively, Rory shames them by making the case that some works of art can’t be explained purely by the world around them; that something magic, and beyond Shakespeare’s own control, took place when he booted up his Quill 2.0 and started writing.

Rory also admits that, during his political career, he sometimes felt like Goneril to Boris Johnson’s King Lear; and rather yearns to be Lear himself, raging and shouting in the rain.

Content warning: the f-word is used thrice.

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