The Madness of King George.

There is much to praise in The Madness of King George. Adapting his own play, Alan Bennett hasn't attempted in-depth characterization but instead gives us a panoramic view of how England's politics and court life were affected by George III's derangement. The playwright's adroitness must be admired. He keeps all the narrative threads firmly in hand, never lets them get tangled: the political duel of Prime Minister Pitt with opposition leader Charles Fox; the machinations of the prince, driven by a sense of his own uselessness to subvert his father; the desperation of Queen Henrietta to stay in touch with her husband as the phalanxes of physicians and politicians form about him; the rivalry of the doctors, each cosseting and advancing his own theory; and the various flutterings and confusions felt in the ranks of equerries, ladies-in-waiting, and manservants. Best of all, Bennett never lets the audience forget that a suffering human being is the center of all the whirligig politicking and scheming. The afflicted king is mad yet sane enough to be an appalled observer of his madness. Bennett holds the king's repulsiveness and pathos in such tactful equipoise that the splendid Nigel Hawthorne is free to create a man in extremis rather than a walking, talking disease.

In fact, the entire cast is splendid. The British repertory system here has its usual triumph. The smallest part is executed not just with technical competence but with flair, as if each player knew that an entire play could be written about his/her character.

Nicholas Hytner, the virtuoso stage director (Miss Saigon, Carousel, and the stage version of King George) whose first film this is, takes charge of his new realm without fuss or timidity. The battle of wills between King George and Doctor Willis becomes, in close-up, a battle of eyes. The takeover of the king's chambers by Willis's orderlies is choreographed with frightening brilliance as a miniature palace coup. And the various outbursts by the king and the court reactions to them are expertly modulated: they skirt black comedy without ever dehumanizing a suffering man or his embarrassed attendants. The film's set designer, Ken Adam, wonderfully abets Hytner by creating a palace world both immense and cramped: the hallways down which bowing ministers retreat seem endless, but the royal pages sleep three in a wardrobe, as if they were just so many toys tossed into a box at the end of the day.

Nevertheless, this movie left me...not exactly cold but dissatisfied, as if I had gone to a four-star restaurant, been served a course of succulent appetizers, and then been informed that the main course had been canceled. I can come up with two reasons for my reaction. First, a glaze of cynicism coats the political events in this story, trivializing the meaning of George' s madness as a public catastrophe. Second, a certain diffidence of Bennett's in regard to the nature of madness somewhat confuses our responses to the king's illness as a personal affliction.

On the political level, the king's madness nearly results in his deposal in favor of his son, which would entail Pitt's replacement as prime minister by the Whig, Fox. Much is made of this threat as the picture races toward its climax. But no audience, at least no non-British audience, has an emotional stake in the struggle of Pitt against Fox, Tory against Whig. We may desire that George not be deposed because we think him a kind man, but why should we care if the king's Tory party is toppled? If Pitt is a cold-fish keeper of balance sheets and the Whig leader is an unctuous schemer, what is our choice? As a dramatist, Bennett insists on attaching a political urgency to George's restoration to power, yet nothing in the way he portrays the king's friends and enemies supports that urgency.

As to the depiction of the madness itself, any criticism of Bennett's handling of it must be tempered by the fact that the very subject of madness is now more difficult for dramatists and novelists to explore than at any time in the history of drama. Every insight achieved by contemporary science uncovers a new area of uncertainty. When Shakespeare dealt with madness in King Lear, he presumed that it was both a punishment for Lear's shortsightedness and injustice to Cordelia and a frenzied accession of wisdom that opens the tyrant's eyes to the suffering of all humanity. Apart from the bard's genius, it was his Elizabethan ignorance of clinical explanations of insanity that made him confident enough to achieve coherence and poetry.

Bennett knows, among other things, that a disease called porphyria, by chemically affecting the nervous system, may have caused George' s condition. But after such knowledge, what insights? Bennett is much concerned with the reality and possible unreality of the personality. Is the personality a social manifestation of something real inside us or is it a flimsy construction that insanity can sweep away? Is madness the horrible exaggeration of one's real personality or is it an invasion, an undermining, a sabotaging of the personality?

Bennett begins his questioning brilliantly. He and director Hytner give Nigel Hawthorne a wonderful moment in the opening credits sequence that the actor executes to perfection. Dressing for an appearance before Parliament, George is shown talking affectionately to his wife, comforting a tearful toddler daughter, and bullying his foppish son. He is a bluff, gruff, commonsensical, almost exaggeratedly sane man, the "Farmer George" that his people love. But when he is called to enter Parliament, Hawthorne sets his face into a red, angry mask and grits out the word, "Right!" between his teeth, as if he would like to chew all the politicians up and spit them out. It's not a change from but an aggravation of his bluff, John-Bullish self. But, as the madness takes hold, and George charges onto a cricket field, roughly pushing aside children to show them how to bat, or takes over an orchestra to show them how to really play Handel, the king seems like a John Bull gone crazy. And when he attacks a handsome lady-in-waiting whom he's long eyed but (being a faithful husband) never before harassed, isn't this an enactment of frustrated desire? So the madness of King George is indeed a horrible exaggeration of George's real self - right?

Well, perhaps not. When George laments to his wife that he must spill the obscene words that have lodged themselves in his brain, doesn't that suggest a psychological invasion, an over-throw of George's real personality? After his madness abates, questions Lady Pembroke as to whether he attacked her or not. He professes no memory of it. Has he blocked out the memory of sexual violence or has he really no memory of a deed he committed when he was literally not himself? Indeed, when George tells Doctor Willis that the king is not "here" (that is, inside his body) and "the king is somewhere else," doesn't that suggest an estrangement from his true nature rather than a monstrous enlargement of it? On the other hand, doesn't the fact that Doctor Willis' s methods, which are as brutally punitive as those of an old-fashioned schoolmaster disciplining a ruffian child, do indeed work (at least for a while) suggest that the king' s grossness actually reflects his desires and that the insanity simply unloosed the id from the royal superego's control? Maybe. Maybe.

I'm not faulting Alan Bennett for not diagnosing King George. He's a dramatist, not a doctor. But by shifting from one notion of madness to another, he teases the mind without satisfying it. As I initially stated, Bennett's aim is not primarily psychological but panoramic. But, since the political wars of that era carry little weight as presented here, the viewer must finally be moved by psychology - the presentation of the king's pathetic state. And on this level there is enough piteousness - the king's separation from his family, his physical agony - to move the viewer in isolated, short-lived moments.

But a truly stirring, poetic account of physically caused madness is nowadays achievable, perhaps, only by imaginative clinical writers such as Oliver Sacks. Novelists and playwrights should be wary of entering this emotional territory. They lack Shakespeare's splendid ignorance.

Postscript: I've just seen Madness a second time and, although I stand by what I've written above, the film has so much to stimulate the mind and please the eye that it proved more fascinating at this viewing than at the first. Anyway, why shouldn't the mind be teased upon occasion rather than satisfied?