Restoring the Repertoire
T1706288807
Archive :: production:T1706288807, performance:S2073865600, venue:V76
King Lear
Rehearsed Reading. It was Nahum Tate who famously gave King Lear a happy ending - a change which held the stage for nearly 150 years and which Samuel Johnson preferred to the original. Successive 18th century actors and managers continued to make amendments but JP Kemble, who first played Lear to Sarah Siddons’s Cordelia, restored much of Tate’s original verse (at the expense of Shakespeare’s!) and it is a version from his prompt book which we will perform.
