Q: Could you outline what you see as the plot. 

 An ageing king decides to give up his throne and divide his kingdom into three. He gives the kingdom away depending on how his daughters reply to a question which is "how do you love me?". Two of the daughters make speeches pretending to love him and one tells him the truth. For her pains, she's banished and the other two divide the kingdom. They then proceed by degrees to force their father out of his own house, out onto the heath. In the process he discovers that he has made a terrible and fatal mistake and he's destroyed both by their cruelty towards him and by his dawning insight as to the mistake that he has made. 

 Q: Could you sum up what, for you, the play is mainly about? 

 The great thing about King Lear is that you can find what you want to find in it. That's the first thing to say and it's important. It's not about one thing, it's about whatever you want to see in it. When you're sixteen you see it as a play about the blinding of Gloucester; when you're thirty you see it as a play about the horror of family life; when you're sixty you see it as a play about ageing. I see it as a play simply about the tragic parts of human life, a play about how human beings can will their own destruction. What happens is that an old man does something inconceivably stupid, almost immediately sees that it's stupid, and then he pays for it. So it's a play about human blindness and what it takes in order to see again. It's also a play about cruelty, about what happens when you make a mistake and you're punished and what cruelty does to you. 

I've seen King Lear fifteen times in my life and I still look at what cruelty does to another human being and feel I can't bear to see this. 

The interesting thing about the play, like all great Shakespeare plays, is that it's set in an absolutely specific time and place. If you take the heath, where a great deal of the action occurs, that's a very specific Shakespearean place, it's a part of the real England of his time. It was the part of England beyond the parish, beyond the city, the unlighted, unordered, disorderly place of English rural life in the sixteenth century. If you flash forward to the twentieth century, it's entirely conceivable to think of the heath either as a space inside your mind - the space of desolation, the space of loneliness, the space of craziness - or to think of it as a very specific location, a twentieth century location where human beings are pulverised by cruelty - like Auschwitz. If this is a play about cruelty the heath is the place where people go mad under the experience of cruelty. So that, in other words, a specific Shakespearean location can be transported and transposed into infinite other locations. One could easily imagine a King Lear in outer space. The locations will change and that's one of the reasons why the play has no possibility of dating. 

 He goes wrong because he doesn't understand who loves him most. It's a play about his blindness to the real sources of love in his own family. He doesn't realise that Cordelia loves him best, he doesn't realise that his older daughters love him least. His errors as a father are compounded by the fact that he's a king and a king is use to getting his own way, use to commanding obedience and therefore commanding love. The mistake he makes is that he thinks a father can command the love of his children. 

 I think one of the reasons that Lear is a great play is that it's extremely difficult to understand his state of mind. Many of the words that come out of his mouth on the heath are so hard to understand they've baffled commentators for four hundred years and actors look at them and say, what can I do with this? 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. It tells us something crucial about human beings - we can be driven mad by the cruelty of others. In that sense I understand his state of mind only too well, because cruelty does have that power to derange us. That's one element of his state of mind, the other element is guilt and self-reproach. You can be tortured by a sense of what you've done to other people that you can't undo, you just feel horrible and hopeless and it's irremediable and tragic. The interpretations of the play I can't stand are simply that he's senile, he's a babbling old fool. He's not a babbling old fool, he's a man being driven mad by cruelty, and by self-reproach. 

 I think that's another reason why it's a great play, you can see it both as a child and as a parent, depending where you are in your own life. I think it's entirely possible to sympathise with Regan and Goneril. To think this man is just impossible, this father's just impossible. We're willing to have him in the house, we're willing to treat him with respect, but he's simply taken over the house. If your dad moves in to stay with you and brings six cronies who drink all day and play poker all night and smash the place up, it tests your patience. Yes, I can understand how they feel, they feel that they're the mistresses of their households and this old man's come in and smashes the place up, acting as if he's still the boss and he's not the boss. 

 In all our piety about family values we don't talk enough about the rage that children feel towards parents, old parents, when they won't give up, when they won't let go, and the play is about that and, of course, I can see it. That's the greatness of great drama, that you see both sides, you can identify with the fathers, you can identify with the children, you identify with them equally. A great production doesn't make Goneril and Regan just conventional villains, like something out of a Charles Adams cartoon, these are flesh and blood daughters, and they have reasons for what they do and reasons for what they say. But their cruelty drives him mad, and you have to have a production that encompasses both of those realities - showing their cruelty but also making it comprehendible. 

 When he says I did her wrong. If you've ever wronged someone you certainly feel that moment and if you've ever lost someone you've loved, you feel what he feels at the end of the play. It's a play of fantastic intelligence as well, if you think of that amazing scene just before he goes out onto the heath, where he delivers the famous speech "Oh reason not the need". It's the greatest defence in the English language of why we should take each other's needs on trust. He's saying I need this desperately and you as my children must take that on trust. You just have to accept it, trust is the basis of human life. If you start arguing with my needs, we'll all end up stark naked, unable to trust each other over anything. So that's a passionate defence of something that I think we all in the end believe. 

Why does it move me? It's a play about learning what life is like too late. That always moves you, because our lives are full of mistakes, even happy lives and good lives are full of terrible mistakes. This is a play about making horrible mistakes and then living to see just how horrible those mistakes were. If you think seriously about your own life, you can't go to that play without seeing it replayed for you. Of course I'm not Lear, I'm not Cordelia, I'm not Regan, I'm not Goneril, but I can see parts of myself in every part of it. 

 Q: Is there anything today that helps us to relate to the play? 

 I think that Lear's madness has to be understood in moral terms. It shouldn't be understood as a medical condition, it should be understood as a condition that results from suffering. The closest analogy in the twentieth century is the madness of the people who were released from Belsen, Auschwitz, and Buchenvalt. That is to say people who were driven mad by suffering and by cruelty, people whose whole sense of the moral order of human life was so disturbed and destroyed by what they went through that they simply lost their reason. We don't think of madness in those terms, but that's the kind of madness that Lear, that Shakespeare, is talking about in this play. He's not just talking about senility or Alzheimer's, he's talking about the mental disturbance that can happen when you're treated with utmost cruelty. That's still shocking, but it tells us something precious about human beings, which is that our sanity is dependent on certain expectations of other human beings. If those expectations are systematically violated, if we are treated like dirt for sustained long periods of time, we will lose our reason. It's one of the facts about human beings that Shakespeare wants us to understand and I think it should, in a moral sense, teach us never to treat human beings like excrement. The message is as simple as that. 

 Q: Is there a film or stage production that still lingers in your memory, that probably will always stay there? 

 Lots do. I've never forgotten Scofield's King Lear. Something about Scofield's pitted, scarred face, the way it took the camera. He has an amazing capacity to convey an impression of being ravaged by life and experience and so it's a tremendous surprise to remember that Scofield did it when he was a young man. But I think it's wrong to go to this play and hold in your mind some absolute moment of perfection. There is no perfect performance of this play, this play is bigger than anybody who's ever tried to do it. 

There are some wonderful productions, Ian Holm is a fantastic Lear. I think you have to go to the play wanting the actors to succeed, giving them all of your attention, hoping against hope that they're going to be able to do this. Of course, there isn't an actor or an actress who gets it entirely right, because there are all kinds ways of doing good Lears. When Kurusawa did Ran, which is a kind of Japanese Lear, and he strides out of that burning building down those steps, it's an image I'll remember as long as I live. It's not in the play but it should have been. That's an example where there's a version of the play which no-one had ever conceived before, but seems absolutely necessary and right and you can't imagine any other way of visualising that moment of Lear's utter destruction on the one hand, and his utter majesty on the other. It's bringing the two together in that one image that's so unforgettable. Here's a man who's destroyed his kingdom, destroyed his life, destroyed himself, striding out down these burning stairs in a condition of utter majesty. It's one of the greatest images in western art, I think. 

 I keep going to Lear over twenty years because it unfailingly produces those moments in which artistes in different times and different cultures and different centuries are roused by the sheer power of those words, to transcend themselves, to go beyond what they thought was possible. I'm sure that on a good night Ian Holm would sit in his dressing room taking off his make-up and thinking, I went somewhere I didn't know I could go. Any great actor or actress who's been in this play loves it because it takes them somewhere they have never been, as a human being and as a performer. 

 I very much respected Richard Ayres' attempt to do it as a family drama, deliberately small scale, focussing intently on the family dynamics. To do a lot of work with those stage villains Goneril and Regan and the men they marry, and try and make their rage at Lear more comprehensible.