Zipper the cat is twenty three years old. In human terms,
she’s over 110 and like all elderly creatures spends most of her time dozing –
though unlike her human equivalents she’s occasionally to be found at the edge
of the lawn, hoping to catch mice. Why she does this is a little unclear as she
hasn’t caught anything for over eighteen months.
For a long time we thought she might be immortal, but
it’s now apparent Zipper can’t have very much longer to go. We’ve been told
that once she ceases to use the litter trays, it will be a sign her mental
faculties have degraded – and even though there seem to be trays everywhere
she has begun to poo on the floor or door mat or any place else she happens to be.
In addition to which she’s arthritic and deaf and unable to groom herself.
Even so, it’s not been easy deciding when she should be
put down, assuming that she doesn’t simply wander into the garden and die under
a bush. And if it’s tough making such a
decision about a cat, how much more complicated and painful it is to consider
when a human life might reasonably be ended. As we live longer, so we are
having to face the problems of extreme age on a scale unimagined even a
generation ago. Once upon a time we mostly would have died of pneumonia or
septicaemia or some other cheery condition long before we had chance to develop
Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or something equally horrible.
So the question whether we continue to preserve life,
irrespective of its quality, perhaps for years on end has become urgent. Many
of us may have the care of an elderly parent or other loved one whose mind may
have died but whose body continues to live. It was possibly this that prompted
a new interpretation of King Lear in
the current National Theatre production in which Simon Russell Beale portrays
Lear in the grip of Dementia with Lewy bodies – symptoms of which include
hallucinations, delusional behaviour, disordered sleep, agitation and
aggression along with physical problems such as stooping, shuffling and
trembling of limb.
Russell Beale’s performance is compelling and colossal.
He plays the king as an old man whose mind and body are equally eroding, at
times lucid and strong, at others broken and mad. I saw the live-streamed
production and during the interval the actor explained in a recorded interview
how an understanding of DLB had informed his characterisation. He said that
while the illness did not provide a blueprint, it had helped shape his
understanding of the part and that its typical ‘sudden outbursts of rage’ had
‘seemed to tie to Lear very well.’
This reading sees the madness on the heath not as a
consequence of mistreatment by his daughters following an unwise decision to
divide his kingdom, but the intensifying of a mental frailty that led him to abdicate
in the first place. In the earlier scenes, it also allowed Regan and Goneril to
counterfeit the role of carers of a father that they love but by whose lack of
reason they are exhausted and driven beyond patience.
Russell Beale’s portrayal of Lear as a dementia sufferer
equally adds insight to the lines, ‘I fear I am not in my perfect mind/Methinks
I should know you.’ The lines have always been heavily poignant, but now seem
related to the experience of all those caring for people with Alzheimer’s and
other forms of dementia who fail to recognize their children or life-time
partners and are ‘mainly ignorant/What place this is’ and ‘know not/Where I did
lodge last night.’
Lear’s speech continues,
Do not laugh at me;
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.
While Lear is briefly reunited with his daughter, the
blind Gloucester has unknowingly been accompanied by his son Edgar. It is he
that persuades the despairing old man that a fall from the cliff at Dover has
been miraculously survived and urges him to continue. Gloucester promises that
henceforth he’ll bear ‘Affliction till it do cry out itself/”Enough, enough,”
and die.’
Later though, he relapses and Edgar has to remind him,
What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all.
His words are sometimes taken to show that redemption is
possible, even in Lear’s cruel world. It’s true that when Edgar finally reveals
himself, Gloucester’s ‘flaw’d heart’ is torn between ‘extremes of passion, joy
and grief’ and ‘bursts smilingly’, but context is everything and throughout the play one event is
contradicted by another. Edgar had declared to Edmund that the ‘gods are just’,
but there is no justice for Lear. Cordelia is murdered. The Fool is dead.
Gloucester’s long journey may have ended with a kind of
peace, but Lear is left in torment. What would he have lost had he died in
madness on the heath? True, he would have missed the tender reconciliation with
his daughter, but he would have been spared the agony of her death. So much for
ripeness being all. And when Edgar later attempts to salve the dying king, Kent
rebukes him saying,
Let him pass! He hates him much
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.
It’s hard to find much comfort in Lear. By the end, nearly all its principal characters are dead.
Even Kent, one of the few left alive, announces he’s off to follow his late master,
his ripeness for death unchallenged. Yet why should
Edgar frustrate Gloucester's attempted suicide and not Kent's? The answer
presumably lies in the fact that he was emotionally unprepared to lose his
father, so in preventing Gloucester’s death
he is allowing his own needs to prevail over those of his parent. This contrasts
with Kent whose love for the king favoured Lear’s wish for death over personal
desire to sustain him.
And all that while, Zipper remained with us, allowing us
to feed her but indifferent to our attention. When she produced young of her
own, she proved an excellent mother. Her kittens were born under the kitchen
table, but one by one she carried them to the top of the house where she had
prepared a nest for them. She would bring them dead mice, and was always an
expert hunter. Even until two or three years ago she was still catching up to
thirty rabbits a year, as well as innumerable smaller rodents.
Sometimes she would return with soil on the back of her
neck where she had followed prey into its burrow. Often the creatures she
brought home were dazed or half-conscious and she would fling them around the
lawn or let them stagger away from her before pouncing again. Occasionally we
would find dead things behind a cupboard where they had hidden from her before
expiring.
When not hunting, she would find a sunny place to lie and
take in warmth, or somewhere dry to shelter from rain. She was always utterly
herself; sleek, elegant, aloof – though in her declining years becoming more
affectionate and seeming to need our company.
In the natural state, she would have died years ago,
either of cold or starvation, or been killed and eaten. In our insulated
houses, it’s easy to forget the savagery of life in the fields and hedgerows.
Foxes will break into hen coops or pheasant pens and kill all the birds in a
frenzy. Crows are said to peck the eyes from new born lambs and though I've
never seen evidence of that, creatures killed on the road will first have their
soft and protein full eyes removed before the corpses are scavenged by other birds
and rats.
It all seems cruel, but it’s just nature going about its
business. The bird that pulls a worm from the ground may feed it to its chicks
and in turn be taken by a hawk, which might once have been shot or poisoned by
a gamekeeper. This is the world Lear inhabits, where humanity preys on itself ‘like
monsters of the deep’ and it’s not surprising the play should contain so many
references to wild creatures. Humans are exposed as simply poor bare, forked
animals and when Lear laments his daughter’s death he cries ‘Why should a dog,
a horse, a rat, have life/And thou no breath at all?’ There is no explanation.
In Lear’s world you are born, suffer and die and there is no promise of
anything beyond.
The father of Zipper’s kittens was a monstrous brute of a
tom. We didn’t know where he came from, but one day found him dead in the lane,
hit by a car. He was buried in the flower bed. One day Zipper will join him
there. She is unaware of this. Being a cat, she is also unlikely to be
acquainted with King Lear. For now
she is sleeping on the sofa, probably dreaming of mice.
