If Lear could just think what Cordelia said to me is actually true, it's not insulting and I as a father, painful as it is, must listen to what she's saying. If an actor can keep the sense that there's a possibility that something else might happen, that the tragedy need not happen, then you really feel it when it does happen, that's the paradox. If it just unrolls as an inevitability, there's no drama, there's no tragedy in fact. I think one of the reasons that Lear is a great play is that it's extremely difficult to understand his state of mind. That's the greatness of the play.
People have to understand that great language and great plays are incomprehensible.
That's their greatness. They're a puzzle, they're a mystery. What I think we can say about his state of mind is that he is driven mad, not simply by age and not just by suffering either, but by cruelty, he's driven mad by the way he's treated. The cruelty is not simply throwing him out into the night when he doesn't have a cloak, he's alone and it's raining, he's driven mad by the thought that his own children love him so little, are so ungrateful, that they can't even give him a bed in their house. Now think about that and you realise that you could be driven mad if your children simply said Dad do what I tell you or you can get out, and that's what they do to him.