King Lear: My quest to build the perfect production of Shakespeare's harrowing play.

Slate Magazine: "Thackeray found King Lear boring. Tolstoy was no great fan. Samuel Johnson dreaded rereading the play—he recoiled from the death of Lear's youngest daughter, Cordelia. (Johnson preferred playwright Nahum Tate's sentimental rewrite of Lear, published in 1681, which inserted a happy ending and supplanted Shakespeare's version onstage for more than a century.) Nineteenth-century essayist Charles Lamb declared that staging Lear 'has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting,' concluding, 'The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted.' Nearly two centuries later, Harold Bloom concurred: 'You shouldn't even go and see somebody try and act the part,' the scholar said, 'because it's unactable… I've never seen a Lear that worked.' Beginning with a vain, irrational king rejecting both his favorite child and his most faithful servant on a whim, ending with a mad, uncrowned derelict dying of a broken heart—with a detour wherein another foolish old man's eyes are gouged out—King Lear is a shocking spectacle of two families eating themselves alive.