1 King Lear – From the Script
From the Script
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
King Lear, 3.2.1–3
2 King Lear – At the Festival
The Tragedy of King Lear was chosen for the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s 1965 season, following on the heels of three great tragedies produced each of the previous three years, Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. By its fourth year the Festival was already establishing itself as a summer go-to tourist and arts attraction in southern Utah. That summer not only featured a bigger and better stage and record audience numbers, it was also the first year of the Utah Shakespeare Fetival’s Costume Cavalcade that would continue to grow in artistic merit and popularity for years to come. Featuring the creative work of the company’s talented designers and stitchers, the highlight of the show was a replica of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation gown, weighing 75 pounds (the original was said to have weighed as much as 300 pounds).
Not artistically auspicious but of historical note, that summer, a Saturday night production of Much Ado About Nothing became the first show in 4 years, that had to move indoors, in the middle of a performance, due to inclement weather.
3 King Lear – The Artist: A. Clayton Robbins
A. Clayton Robbins was born in Alberta, Canada in 1919 but lived in Utah most of his life until his death in 2010. Robbins studied under very talented mentors at the University of Utah and was involved in fine art most of his life but did not pursue the arts as a full-time profession until his retirement in 1980. The last 30 years of his life was devoted almost exclusively to the creation of bronze sculpture. Many of the sculptures in the Pederson Shakespeare Character Garden were created by Robbins or were fashioned on his design.
This depiction of King Lear on the heath was modeled on the features of Hollywood actor Harold Gould, who played King Lear here in 1992.