Being King Lear: 'If you’ve got a squillionth of an actor’s notion in your body, you respond'

John Gaden has played Lear three times, once with Geoffrey Rush as the Fool. He talks to Nancy Groves.

All my Lears have been in Adelaide, all 21 years apart. And the first time they asked me, I was just 27. I wore a grey wig, which Margery Irwin had worn in the play before me (it was that kind of theatre) and about 10 miles of curtain material, so heavy it almost killed me. Look, I was way too young.

It was a travesty in a way but I remember a few things I never did better because I had the energy and the contact with the anger to do it.

The second time was opposite Geoffrey [Rush] as my Fool. And I remember the last time I did it, somehow you get more empathy as you get older. I almost dried up doing the curse to Goneril, I found it so repellent. If she’s going to have kids, let them be dismembered, disnatured torments?

It’s really hard to invest those lines with your full conviction. It’s a total rejection of your child and your child’s child. As a grandfather, I found that almost impossible to come to terms with.

Where do you start with Lear? The language. It’s such wonderful language. and if you’ve got a squillionth of an actor’s notion in your body, you respond to it. It’s the journey of an old man’s life encapsulated into three hours.

In a sense, liking and not being liked is an irrelevant question when it comes to Lear. By the end of the play he has been through such an enormous amount of extreme rage, jealousy, neediness, madness – real madness, the total unbalancing of a mind – through sleep into this moment (before Cordelia is bumped off), this wonderful little world of worlds.

John Gaden is in Orlando at the Sydney Opera House until 19 December. Geoffrey Rush is playing King Lear, opening on Friday at the Sydney Theatre Company’s Roslyn Packer theatre, until 9 January.