THEATER

59E59
My Perfect Mind

This is small theater and a big opportunity to really enjoy a play.  We've seen and like Lear.  There were many moments and head nods to Shakespeare and Lear.  But, the play never pulled together and captured our full attention.

The King’s the Thing, Not the Play, for an Actor Who Would Be Lear

Eight years ago, the English actor Edward Petherbridge flew to New Zealand to play King Lear. He’d never seen himself as the Lear type.

“One thinks of Lear as rather towering, a kind of oak,” he said, sipping a cappuccino in a coffee bar near Central Park. “I’m more a sort of birch.” Indeed, he seemed nearly as slender as a birch in a tan linen jacket and a white straw hat with a black band — Edwardian chic. With his wispy white hair, a bristlier white beard and red-rimmed eyes, he has the look of a gentleman rabbit, not a warlike royal.

But at 70, an age at which major roles are scarce, he was hardly going to turn down the part. “I thought, ‘Well, if somebody wants me to do it, I can do it.’ ” During the first day of rehearsal, the cast members read the play, and on the second they began work on Act I. Mr. Petherbridge recited Lear’s speech about dividing his estate so that he can “unburdened crawl toward death.”

That night, he woke in the early hours and collapsed on the bathroom floor of his hotel. His right side was paralyzed. He feared he’d had a stroke. He crawled toward the telephone and called for an ambulance.

He had had a transient ischemic attack, sometimes called a mini-stroke. Dr. David Greer, a professor and vice chairman of neurology at Yale University described such an attack as “a warning of a stroke,” a rehearsal.

Mr. Petherbridge said that in his case, the rehearsal was “a pretty full-dress one.”

Even before he had a second, more serious attack in the hospital two days later, Mr. Petherbridge said he knew: “I wasn’t going to be able to do Lear, no question.”

But he’s doing Lear now, though not quite as Shakespeare intended, in “My Perfect Mind,” from the theater company Told by an Idiot, which opens at 59E59 Theaters next Tuesday. Mr. Petherbridge and the actor Paul Hunter, who met when they starred in a roundly detested West End revival of “The Fantasticks,” created the play, which takes its title from a line in “Lear,” in which the king frets, “I fear I am not in my perfect mind.”

Antic and impish, the two-actor piece describes Mr. Petherbridge’s life, career and recent illness. It is a play about not playing King Lear. It was presented at the Young Vic in London last year.

A few days before his attack, Mr. Petherbridge had been ready to rage at the storm. Afterward, he couldn’t walk without support, couldn’t write, couldn’t read. He remembers having to learn to put his finger and thumb together. “I thought, finger and thumb together, how do I do that?” he said.

But a year later he was back onstage, in a revival of Kurt Weill’s last musical, “Lost in the Stars.” And a year after that he was in that production of “The Fantasticks” and soon he began work on “My Perfect Mind.”

Until recently only younger actors dared to play the role of Lear. As James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, explained in a telephone conversation, Shakespeare originally wrote the part for the actor Richard Burbage, who was then in his late 30s. “For most of its history, this was a younger actor playing an old man rather than an old man playing an old man,” he said.

“It is a daunting and taxing role both mentally and physically,” said Mr. Shapiro, whose “The Year of Lear,” about 1606, when the play was written, will be published this fall.

Lear is no ordinary character. He may call himself “a foolish fond old man, fourscore and upward,” yet he is vigorous enough to overpower and kill an opponent in the final act, then stagger onstage with a dead Cordelia in his arms. And Lear has almost a quarter of the lines in the play, which is not exactly a short one.

At 78, Mr. Petherbridge, hasn’t quite reached fourscore, but he’s had a long and eventful career. His résumé includes many seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Company and London’s National Theater, two Tony nominations and a stint as Lord Peter Wimsey on the BBC. If greater fame has eluded him, he doesn’t seem to mind. “I’ve not been in ‘Downton Abbey,’ ” he said, with cheerful resignation.

In the past, Mr. Petherbridge has played the Fool and the King of France in “Lear,” but after New Zealand, he still dreamed of giving the title role a try.

Backstage at “The Fantasticks,” Mr. Petherbridge first proposed to Mr. Hunter that they create a two-character version of the tragedy. But Mr. Hunter (a co-founder of Told by an Idiot, which Mr. Petherbridge describes as “frightfully avant-garde”) argued they’d have more fun creating a new play.

They brought on Kathryn Hunter (no relation), one of the few women to have played Lear, as the director and an additional creative voice, and began devising scenes for “My Perfect Mind.” Mr. Petherbridge describes that process as lively and imaginative, “like having a kaleidoscope and shaking it and seeing a series of pictures.”

Many of those pictures illustrate Mr. Petherbridge’s biography, but there’s a lot of Shakespeare in there, too. As he and Mr. Hunter refined the script, “There’s a war of attrition going on,” he said. “It’s a friendly war. There’s me trying to get as much Lear into the show as I could and him trying to take as much out.”

The director Ms. Hunter described the extraordinary “clarity of thought” and the “state of fragility” that Mr. Petherbridge brings to the Lear passages, especially the reunion with Cordelia, a suggestion of the Lear he might have been. In an email, she said she wondered if Mr. Petherbridge’s illness and recovery, “this experience of having one’s identity suddenly wrenched and thrown out of balance,” also informed his acting.

These days, Mr. Petherbridge saves his fragility for the stage. Walking in Central Park last week, he was energetic and sure-footed, clambering up stairs and down slopes and around ponds. He said the only lingering effect from his illness was that sometimes, when he is telling a story, “its poignancy or even its humor can make me feel as though I want to sob.”

Still, he’s not crying over Lear. Not when he has “My Perfect Mind” to look forward to.

“It’s the most glitteringly golden booby prize that you can possibly imagine,” he said. “It really is.”

My Perfect Mind – review

This two-man show is the oddest of mixes: part trawl through the life and times of the classical actor Edward Petherbridge, part Shakespeare recital, part theatrical in-joke and part metaphysical meditation on the frailties of old age and the extraordinary abilities of mind and body to renew themselves. Told by an Idiot's My Perfect Mind is an exquisite piece of tomfoolery, inspired by Edward Petherbridge's experience of not playing King Lear. It offers a playful and moving exploration of life as an ongoing performance. It is infected by gleeful madness.

The facts are these: in 2007, Petherbridge travelled to Wellington in New Zealand to fulfil his long-cherished ambition to play Shakespeare's mad monarch. But two days into rehearsal, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed. Remarkably, he was still able to remember every word of King Lear.

Played out on Michael Vale's tilted stage – a world that's off-kilter and difficult to physically negotiate – and directed by Kathryn Hunter (who has played both Lear and the Fool), the show mirrors the relationship between the foolish king and his wise fool. Paul Hunter plays a series of fall guys, from a German psychiatrist to a Romanian Shakespeare professor, and Laurence Olivier, who advises that the essential requirement for an actor who plays Lear is a Cordelia who weighs very little. There is a running gag that all these impersonations are "borderline offensive".

In fact, the entire show gurgles with merriment as it skewers luvvydom, pokes fun at conceptual art and offers tongue-in-cheek advice to theatre-makers on how to treat the audience: "You've got to shove it up their arses before you shove it down their throats." The theatrical in-jokes would wear thin, were it not for the fact that Petherbridge's mixture of bravado and frailty brings real heart to the enterprise. So, too, does the untangling of his relationships with his mother, who herself suffered a stroke two days before he was born, and his brother.

It's a show that invokes the ghosts of Petherbridge's childhood, the ghosts of all those actors who have played Lear, and the ghost of the performance that Petherbridge never got to give.

The result is a funny, moving reminder that however much we aspire to be the king, we are all fools in one way or another.