Nunn and Nothingness  Ian McKellen plays Shakespeare and
Chekhov, but nobody wins  King Lear and The Seagull are both
plays about meaninglessness, but that doesn't mean they don't
mean anything. Quite the contrary. The achievement of both plays
is that they manage, while depicting the meaningless, arbitrary
twists and turns of fate, to create a sense of order that
supplies, by its existence, an alternate view: If plays so full
of unjust, unexpected, inexplicable reverses can make sense, the
universe can probably make sense too. We just don't happen to
know what sense it makes. Productions of King Lear and The
Seagull, consequently, need their own sense of order to a degree
that many plays don't. We'll never understand nature's way of
organizing the universe, but at least we can see how some
theater artist's sensibility has organized Chekhov's or
Shakespeare's depiction of it, and take a little comfort from
that. In both plays, it's easy for artists to lose their way.
With so much, of such violence, going on,