Tonight, Watch TV

Hell, me urging folks to watch TV is like Boehner cheerleading for the Obama budget. But tonight, on most PBS stations around the land, there is something that will very likely become a classic moment in TV history — Ian McKellen as King Lear. If you like, have the text handy too — if you don’t have a book of the plays, go online for a copy.

Lear is a play that speaks directly to our time, and its influence reaches across the centuries (modern theater lovers will appreciate the straight line that can be drawn from Edgar/old Tom’s Act III rant and Lucky’s monologue in Waiting For Godot). Lear remains the supreme parable on the delusion of political power, and that itself is only the thinnest slice of its riches and beauty. Aging, family, fatherhood, madness, love and all its impostor forms, nature, truth, death, and more — every imaginable theme of the human experience on Earth seems to have been touched by the light of the Master Poet’s pen, to be perpetually renewed, re-created in life and meaning, with each fresh performance.

The last Lear I saw was here in New York, about 20 years ago, with Hal Holbrook. I’ll miss this one from McKellen, because I lack a TV set. But you shouldn’t. With all due respect to lovers of Hamlet, I really think that this play is Shakespeare’s crown jewel atop a pile of treasure whose like neither literature nor art have ever seen, nor will again.