Paul Gross in King Lear: The problem of succession transcends time

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Paul Gross is one of Canada’s most acclaimed actors, most notably leading popular television shows such as Due South and Slings & Arrows.

He is also a renowned theatre actor, whose six-month run as the lead in Hamlet won rave reviews at the Stratford Festival in 2000. This year he is starring on the same stage in the titular role of King Lear.

King Lear, in simple terms, is about an aging patriarch running on ego when deciding how to divide his kingdom among his three children.

This story line may be familiar to fans of the HBO show Succession. While the real-life inspiration for the powerful patriarch and his dysfunctional family on the TV show is a mix of media families, from the Hearsts to the Murdochs, there is an older parallel in the Shakespearean tragedy about the powerful patriarch who cannot trust and misjudges his children, putting his empire’s succession plans in disarray.

Here, Gross shares his thoughts on how the play wrestles with the problem of succession, aging leaders and dysfunctional families, and his own not-dysfunctional family dynasty of actors.

How does King Lear speak to the consequences in any era of a lack of clear succession planning?

“I think at the beginning of the play he knows something’s wrong. Something’s not quite right. He doesn’t know what it is, but he better get this solved.

It would have been a lot simpler if he’d had a son.

It all has to be within the context of a timeframe. [In this production] we use as our touchstone the period after the collapse of Rome in England, the sort of era of warlords, and smaller kings than the King of Great Britain. All of this was really present in the minds of the people of the time, in the 1600s – I think 1606 was the first production.

They’d been going through this for decades with Elizabeth I, who didn’t have any children. There was always this worry that they would fall into civil war. This was ever present.

The play’s [world] is stripped down a bit – no Church, no parliament, and so on.

What he comes up with in the first scene is sort of hairbrained as a scheme. But it’s not such a terrible scheme. It’s not so hairbrained. He’s going to divide it into three, which triangulates things. It’s made very clear.

His youngest daughter is his favourite, who I think he thinks could actually run it, but he can’t just give it to her because she’s the youngest, and all of the constraints on that. But he’s going to get her married off, so there will be, at least, militias in three sections of the kingdom which would kind of give it some stability.”

Are there universal themes around aging leaders unable to move on that would be understandable to modern audiences?

“He’s not abdicating. He’s still going to be called King. He doesn’t quit. He’s just kind of retiring. And he’ll be there to help oversee if there’s a problem.

He wants everyone to give him a gold watch. He wants everyone to step aside and tell him he’s great.

That’s when it goes crazy, because that’s when he just makes up a plan on the fly, and it’s terrible. And it destroys the kingdom.”

What is it about King Lear, or Succession, that fascinates audiences, regardless of era?

“Four hundred years later, how does it mean as much to us now as it probably did then?

A great example of the [mass appeal of the] show Succession, and why Lear is still relevant: There were two guys and their wives, friends of mine that came out from the Badlands in Alberta. This was the first play that they had ever seen, so before they flew out, they asked if there was something they should read or talk about with me before they saw it, and I said, ‘No, I think you’ll get it.’

And they did: ‘Oh, it’s all about succession,’ a problem which every farmer and rancher in this country faces.”

Can the idea of loving one’s children fit into the narrative of the ruthless leader of an empire?

“The things he says to [his children and especially] Goneril are beyond belief. I don’t think he knew them very well.

If you’re a king, if you’re a CEO with a big company, you’re not hanging out with your kids all that much; you’re running around trying to run these giant things.

And he was a warrior, so he was running around hacking people’s heads off. I think he was closer to Cordelia because he had [at some point] settled the kingdom down, so he was actually home a bit more.”

Like other leaders who are busy running things and don’t concentrate on succession, how does Lear mess up his succession plan so badly?

“I don’t think Lear has time to think that far ahead. Whatever has come on, something has made him start to think, ‘Okay, I can’t continue to work at this pace. Something’s going to happen. I’ve got to hand it off. I’ll stick around and make sure it doesn’t all catch fire.”

And then every CEO’s worst fear comes to be, where he loses his power and his children belittle him.

“It all falls to pieces because he’s given away the one thing that kept everyone alive, which the fool says to him about 20 times in that first scene: ‘You gave it all away, you idiot. You gave it all away. Now they treat you like a child.’

Nobody is behaving the way they ‘should’ behave, and he doesn’t know why because he’s not self-reflective.

Then he can’t take the humiliation. That big, male, king pride is too damaged. And slowly he becomes the fool, just around the time the fool disappears from the play.”

How do you think Shakespeare’s words still resonate today, in terms of how leaders affect their ‘kingdoms’ for better or worse?

“I think Shakespeare believed the monarchy was the best thing for the time, but he was putting himself into the play to tell them how it ought to be done. It is Lear, but it’s Shakespeare, thinking, ‘Where can I put this? Oh, I’ll put this here:’

Poor naked wretches, wherso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loo’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?”
[Act 3, Scene 4 (Where Lear realizes the plight of the poor)]

How does the play handle the notion of the leader who does not reach self-awareness and integrity?

“Sometimes Lear is lucid. Sometimes he’s way off the mark. But we start pulling for him.

You’ve got to be able to get there, because if Lear can get to a state of grace, to some state of self-understanding, then so can we.

The tragedy is he doesn’t make it. That’s what kills us.

That’s where Shakespeare really took the biggest gamble of all, to say, ‘This is going to feel intolerably cruel, but we need to know that, because we can’t keep tying things up with a bunch of weddings and a dance.”

Your wife, Martha Burns, and your daughter, Hannah [Gross], are also actors, while your son, Jack [Gross], though he acted in high school, now works for a think tank in New York. How has acting as a family business worked out?

“When I was working that big television schedule, the hours were nuts. We worked, and worked, and worked.

I do regret a lot about that because I missed a lot of things.

On the other hand, I couldn’t really quit because they’d sue me.

And a lot of people would like the problem of being part of a wonderful television show that is popular. I don’t regret that part of it, but I regret missing things at the kids’ schools, and birthday parties. There were times when it wasn’t easy for the two of us, my being absent quite a lot, and Martha’s career was going in all sorts of great places, so we figured it out.

When you grow up in an environment and have all the framework … I wasn’t surprised that Hannah wanted to be an actor. Her personality, at least, when she was younger, was quite introverted. I told her, ‘You know, this is going to be hard on you. It’s hard.’

And I think she did find it hard to begin with, but she’s very good. She’s also really determined to do it her own way, and she would be a great spy. You’d never get anything out of her. You could waterboard her and never find out what project she’s working on. She never really tells us anything. Martha’s much more probing, she’ll keep going until Hannah tells us.”

There is a tension in the idea of legacy, where it means acknowledging your own finality but also looking ahead to saving something you have spent your life building. Is there a way this plays into your work in this piece?

“I like being able to be in something that will never quite be finished. It’s one of those parts that can’t be done.

But the corollary to that is that you can’t really fail. It’s incredibly liberating.

I like working around cameras, but they’re pretty tight. This is just wide open. Anything I do seems to be okay as long as it’s authentic and coming from something. And I get quite lost in it a lot of the time. I’ll come off stage and not exactly remember what I did at certain moments in the scene.”

Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

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