King Lear, sometimes called Shakespeare's cruelest tragedy, is about a king who loses his crown, a father who loses his children and a court, a society and an audience that loses his illusions. It has been translated and set up on stage in countless variants, and long with a happier ending than the original black ending. For the king who loses the crown eventually wins his humanity, and the patriarchy who loses his patriarch is in chaos that could open a historical glimmer of light. But Shakespeare extinguishes hope.
Edward St Aubyn's variation of drama, "Dunbar", briefly and well-named after its protagonist, media mogul Henry Dunbar, is no less dark and inexorable. The introduction's brutal violence and sex scenes brought my thinking to Bret Easton Ellis scandal success, the 1991 American Psycho morality, where vanity Patrick Bateman worshiped designer clothes and elite clubs and tortured women to death after eating. To do this, specially-dosed drugs were required for all involved - perhaps the only sign of human weakness in this hyper-materialistic satire over the icy neoliberal 1980s. St Aubyn adds to today's gasoline-consuming vehicles in what looks like a riveting kidnapping drama, instead of 17th-century horses and armies. But on the ground, in the body, where the author mostly likes the novel, the story itself is quite similar.
Edward St Aubyn - both the product and side effect of the English aristocracy's inherent sadism and perverted emotional life - is like the label in the society when, after the romance suite about the tormented upper class Patrick Melrose, he takes on King Dunbar. He too writes a morality, heavy with drugs prescribed by purchased private doctors, where he follows Henry Dunbar - media reporter of hatred and lies - in the fall of his age, maneuvered by his greedy eldest daughters who want to take over power and wealth and get rid of the youngest sister, less corrupt and more human. An unpleasant reminder, and a rival of the father's love, if they knew what that was. As in passing, a small monster in the tragedy of the dying empire also loosens up - it's St Aubyn who wrote! - the "tyranny of shame" that is the engine of so much violence, both in politics and the family.
Dunbar is locked in a luxurious retirement home (the back text states the conciliatory "private sanatorium" which discreetly emphasizes that the struggle for privilege and self-esteem begins in the language) from which he escapes with a friend. Origin's stormy heath and menacing night also appear here - but how should a gout-broken power player manage, deprived private helicopters and swindling employees? Dunbar's eerie walk - at the end of all four - last night underscores the wastefulness of a life drained of community and disinterestedness.
But the inner monologue of the walk is in itself a portrayal of aging and horror, tragic, as in Martina Montelius's "The Killing of the Dawn" or PC Jersild's future dystopia "Tivoli" about the retirement life at Bliss Gardens, dehumanized and fun in one.
They are stories of class differences, which often get bigger after retirement, and the feeling of not meaning anything anymore, not being able to rely even on their own brain. King Lear as a story of a traumatizing retirement and the mystery of aging? Yes, and about the struggle to live a dignified life, an authentic life as we say today, while Shakespeare talked about maturity and St Aubyn's Dunbar about preferring the truth.
St Aubyn celebrates triumphs with rhymes and playful language games (and his translator Erik Andersson as well, since the text appears to be almost transparent bilingual at times) that aims to avoid all torment, all responsibility, all genuine presence. Dunbar's friend the comedian Peter - the fool - gropes for his self. Who am I pretending to be? Just yourself. "I haven't practiced in him yet."
This is almost a Brexit Psycho if and for our time of crisis that put truth and decency, yes maturity, out of play. A Gökboet about an ongoing political tragedy. And since it is a tragedy, the whole accident is Dunbar's own fault. Though such self-insight has no place in a time that knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
The ride goes down.
Applause!