Tallon Wynne Boling

King Lear

4/20/2020
 It was a beautiful, warm morning when I sat down to view the BBC film adaptation of

King Lear by William Shakespeare on my sixteen inch smudged laptop screen. I watched as a

plume of steam from my coffee mug danced in front of a cloudy image of an eclipse that

signified the beginning of my experience. My first response to the opening ten minutes of the

film was a feeling of discomfort. The lack of natural light, electricity, self -expressive costuming,

and clutter caused me to think that the story takes place in a post-apocalyptic society that doesn’t

attach appearance to individualism. The stylistic elements of the opening scene also informed me

that the journey I’d be viewing would be heavy and passionate through the utilization of color.

By only including shades of black, red, and grey in the color palette of the opening scene, I could

feel the weight of environment and understood it to be serious because of the lack of “happy”

colors. This uneasy feeling was soon reinforced when I looked to the performers. The world I

was experiencing is dominated by white, aged individuals with expressions that mirrored the dust

covered, black cloaks they sported. The lack of youthful energy within the performers blended

the performance of the actors with the stylistic components of the production to effectively

convey the serious and uncomfortable environment to the audience.

In the film, I found that the actor that portrayed the fool was engaging for reasons beyond

his quirky storytelling methods. This character is one that I found to be a perfect representation

of how costuming and scenic design can come together to help an audience experience identity,

time, and place explored in a production. To begin, the costume of the fool is a different texture

than his master that looks to be made of perhaps a burlap potato sack. Considering that this

texture of fabric isn’t used in modern fashion, the costume designer pointed out that the

production takes place in a time other than ours. Next, the color of the costume that the fool

appears in is a similar color to the daughters of the king seen in previous scenes. This gave me
insight to understand identity of the fool in the social hierarchy. Then, the grey textured cap that

the fool wore reminded me of a dunce cap that could be seen being worn by a cartoon character

after doing something dimwitted or mindless. Through a thorough analysis of only the fool’s

costume I was able to gather: the fabric worn by the fool is one of a lower class than the king, the

color worn by the fool is one that is attributed to being less than the king and/or the king’s

property, and the shape of the fool’s costume tells that the fool is a character that is not to be

perceived as intelligent as other characters. In minute 29 of the film, the fool uses a scenic

element of the set to further develop his character. In this scene, the actor gets on top of the table

draped in a white cloth to finish his story to the king. The character shows that he is a little silly

and acts whimsically by using the scenic design of the playing space. In his dancing over swords

and shields of the king’s men, the fool informed me that war and weaponry was a norm to this

environment and that his character didn’t act as seriously as the other men in the scene. The

performer then utilized the stage property of an egg to further develop his identity as an

entertaining fool to the king in his “behind the ear” trick. As one can see, the scenic design,

costume design, and stage properties in this film come together to both express the time, place,

and identity of the world of the production and to give further insight about the identities of the

characters in the film through a semiotic approach.

After watching BBC’s production of King Lear, I found the experience to be one that

built heavily on stylization and design. Being a person that has a lot of interest in the design

aspects of theatrical productions, I thought that the stylistic choices in the film, especially

between the costume design and scenic design, showed traits of remarkable collaboration and

informed decision making. Overall, the director and designers of the film created an engaging
experience through use of a consistent and unsettling color palette, a scenic design that created a

timeless and mystical world to explore, and incredibly talented and captivating entertainers.