Every Inch a Lear: A Rehearsal Journal of "King Lear" with Peter Ustinov and the Stratford Festival Company, Directed by Robin Phillips

Jenifer Lepiano was a writer and drama teacher in Toronto.

Maurice Good was stand-by for Peter Ustinov in the 1979 Stratford production of “King Lear.” Theatre people, students of Shakespeare, any who have wondered about the process of putting a play on the boards will need no prompting to read his daily account of the preparation for this highly publicized and controversial moment in Stratford’s history. Good’s observations are as immediate as the rehearsal sketches Ustinov contributes; Ustinov experiments, spouts anecdotes, forgets lines; Phillips questions, digresses, wields the whip. Fortunately Good finds time to muse — on acting, directing, the play, Shakespeare, theatre and life — and it is to his credit that he is free of the tiresome reverence or petulant nastiness that so often sneaks into actors’ recollections of each other. This is a record that reveals more about the process under observation than it does about the observer.

The journal is at base a study of communal endeavor. Phillips and the acting company, along with the design and technical people, are workers first; for them the play’s the thing, their common task. And as the play grows inch by inch there is a sense of being on a construction site, watching the raising of some enormous edifice. In the entries of Good’s journal the structure still seems large and real enough to wander through, and for once the critics’ words, appended at the back, are as so much weather, blowing past.