Surviving Shakespeare

Kristian Levring's The King is Alive

Abstract

Kristian Levring's The King Is Alive shows how rich the payoffs can be when Shakespeareans turn their attention to experimental cinema, with its strong ties to postmodern notions of text, authority, and reception. Following the strictures of the Dogme95 movement, Levring surrogates Shakespeare's story of "unaccommodated man" to a form of stripped-down, unaccommodated filmmaking. He targets King Lear as a rich site of dramatic plots, functions, and effects, which he redistributes in a postmodern version of survival narrative. A former British stage-actor memorially reconstructs Lear on the back of the Hollywood screenplays he reads for a living, then encourages his fellow survivors to rehearse the play in the abandoned mining town in the Namibian desert that is the film's mise-en-scène. As the film evolves, characters who initially approach their assigned roles without understanding or conviction begin to claim passages associated with their emerging subject positions, so that the play itself uncannily speaks through them.