Interview: Joseph Marcell, the Globe's King Lear

King Lear is back! Mere weeks after a Shakespeare in the Park production concluded at the Delacorte, the Globe Theatre of London brings New York its fourth major Lear of 2014, with a Sept. 30-Oct. 12 run at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts in Greenwich Village. Starring in the title role is Joseph Marcell, 66, who has numerous credits with both Shakespeare's Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company but will forever be remembered most as Geoffrey the butler on Will Smith's 1990s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Marcell spoke with BWW by phone from Washington, D.C., where King Lear began its three-month U.S. tour earlier this month. They've since moved on to Philadelphia, and after New York will perform in Boston, Santa Fe, Seattle and several California cities. The production, which has a cast of only eight, has been touring internationally since the spring of 2013.

This King Lear uses an Elizabethan-style "booth" staging. What does that entail?
It's the style of staging that fits a small-scale touring production of any of the Shakespeare plays. These productions are directed and designed to play outdoors, just as the Globe itself is a theater that is outdoors. The production is not necessarily what you would see in a, say, cross-arch theater that is enclosed and covered. Our properties are minimal; the sound effects and music are made by the actors; our costumes are made to last because we tour for quite a long time. And most of all, the production is set up in such a way that it is apparently a touring theater company arriving at a town, setting up and presenting a play.

Does anything else about the design or performance style distinguish it from other productions of the play?
The most important thing for our production, and for all the Globe productions, is the text--the precision with which the verse is spoken. That is the one thing we do not skimp on.

Have you been in King Lear before?
Yes, at the Globe in San Diego [in 2010]. I played Kent.

Is there something especially timely about the play that it's been getting so many productions lately?
Timely? Yes, I suppose in the sense that the baby boomers are at the age where they're beginning to divide the spoils of their lives. Lear's a play about a generation gap, really--the understanding of the young by the old and the old's expectations from the young--and it's forever timely, I think.

Do you consider Lear a victim or villain? He's been described as both.
I try to present the character as it is written...a man who is perhaps a little outside his time, who believes in virtues that no longer exist, and who is vain and thinks because he was anointed by God that he has rights. I think the academics have one point of view, and the person who actually plays the role has an entirely different point of view. But you cannot take that kind of didactic opinion of the character you're playing. You have to play him as he is presented, a fully rounded person who makes some terrible mistakes. One thing I have discovered is my opinions of Lear when I was not playing the king were actually wrong. It's not quite as easy as it appears. The man who's playing Lear knows more about the people watching it.

King Lear is often described as the most difficult role in theater--and you've been playing it for well over a year. Has it gotten any easier?
Lear is quite a challenge [and] has been considered the culmination of an actor's career. Like all Shakespeare plays, the title character has the bulk of the work. We've taken the production from Austria to Turkey to most of England, and now we're in the United States for three months. We have a method of work that is quite exhaustive--nothing is left to chance. We continue to rehearse, we continue to hone things, we continue to try to make perfect what we do. So we have not quite achieved the definitive, and I daresay we never will, and that's what keeps it alive and keeps it magical because it continues to grow. It's alive, it's not fixed. Things get more difficult, things get easier; certain speeches become clearer, others become more dense.

Do audience reactions vary from place to place?
We play very different venues. We adjust to our situations and the environment we're in. I'll give you an example. We were at the Master's Garden at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in England, and we were playing outside. We begin the play and it's bright and sunny, and then two-thirds of the way into the first half of the play--just before Lear gets onto the heath--it begins to rain, and there's thunder and lightning. Our audience is soaked, we are soaked, but the play continues. But we cannot present the play we presented with all the noise of thunder and lightning, although it is precisely what we need. We have to change our approach; we have to be more precise with our speech, more distinctive.
We had an interesting reaction in Turkey, where we had surtitles. Our audiences were, like, two seconds behind us. So we'd be speaking something and they'd be reacting to something we had said two lines earlier. We've played audiences where they have been in the late 60s and they kind of really understood the problems Lear has with his daughters. We've had audiences who found it outrageous that children could behave in such a way with their father, they were absolutely shocked that there was no respect and understanding, and we've played other audiences who found it hilarious that Lear could not see that these women did not like him.

You were born on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Have you returned?
I try to visit as often as I can. We took the production to St. Lucia last year, and we spent some time with Derek Walcott--which led to a production of Omeros at the Globe, which we did early this year.

Was The Fresh Prince your first time working in the U.S.?
I first came here with the Royal Shakespeare Company back in 1974, a show called Sherlock Holmes with the late John Wood. We played the Kennedy Center and then we were on Broadway for about four or five months.

Did you consider staying in the States after the TV show ended?
I came to the USA to work on The Fresh Prince. I continue to work on both sides of the Atlantic, but yes, I spend more time in Britain. I shall be back in the U.S. in January to do some things in California. I'm an actor...I do sell to the highest bidder.

Are Fresh Prince fans showing up at King Lear?
We do have a way of greeting our audiences before the play starts. so people come up and say hello, and of course they want to engage you in very serious conversations about what you've done and the things they've seen you in. Of course most people [ask], "Can you tell me about Will Smith?"
You do go into people's homes when you're on a television show, and you do have a kind of detached personal relationship with them. And they come to the theater and see you live and they expect the person they see on television is the person that they're watching. There's a moment in the play where Lear says, "Doth any here know me? This is not Lear." I went, "Doth any here know me?" and somebody went, "Geoffrey!" I could have thought of some wonderful things to say, but that would not have been apposite.
I did some touristy things [while in Washington]. I went to Mount Vernon, to see the president's home and his farm. After, I was having tea with a friend of mine, and this person came up and just went berserk. They could not believe that I was sitting here, at the restaurant, in Mount Vernon and of course called everybody to come and see: "Look, this is Geoffrey, who used to be in Will Smith!" I was in Adana in Turkey, 200 miles from the Syrian border, and people were stopping me in the street and saying, "So good to see you, tell me about the show..." In Germany, in Denmark, in Malta, in the West Indies, in Austria, wherever we go. The Fresh Prince is a world phenomenon. Thank God.

Click here for tickets and information on the U.S. tour of Shakespeare's Globe's King Lear and here specifically for the New York City performances.