King Lear is, among other things, Shakespeare's prophetic contribution to the 20th-century Theatre of the Absurd. In the Lear world, even more than in that of Hamlet, the time is out of joint. Divine justice seems to be on a holiday; and we ask, "What is running the universe?"

Here Shakespeare has pitted Nature against human nature. He has underscored the similarities between the two, between man and animal. The forces of good and evil appear in mortal combat; those of good succumb, but in the process those of evil destroy themselves as well.

In this play Shakespeare stretched his reach as nowhere else. Indeed no other dramatist has ever taken on so huge and so impossible a task for the stage--not even Goethe with his Faust or Wagner with his Ring of the Nibelungen. Lear cannot achieve total success in performance; nor can Faust. But is this any reason to side with all those who continue to say they shouldn't be tried? With both works, enough is viable to warrant the attempt.

Since Shakespeare is, in Lear, grappling with the whole cosmos, his range here is enormous. He indulges in uncompromising extremes; and it is not surprising that the play contains both the most melting scene in all drama and also the most revolting. Appropriately, Shakespeare chose his grandest Manneristic style of writing--for he is dealing mainly with the distorted, the abnormal, the foreshortened, and the supersensitive.

In so doing, admittedly, he seems to have been unusually careless about small matters. There are more loose ends and unanswered questions in Lear than in Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth combined. But, except for the unsatisfying sudden disappearance of the Fool in the middle of Act III, these don't really seem to matter, so terrible and consuming is the sweep of passions that constitutes the main artery of the work.

The American Shakespeare Festival, in opening its ninth season, has chosen its toughest nut to crack. Under Allen Fletcher's careful direction. Lear (only slightly trimmed) has emerged as a powerful theatrical experience. Despite its shortcomings, the production firmly gives the lie to those who maintain that Lear can exist only in a reader's imagination.

As a setting for the play, Will Steven Armstrong has designed a black backdrop with dim squares, in front of which are five rough-sculptured set-pieces of pipes, rods, and wire mesh (three of them movable) that admirably convey the wildness, ruggedness, grimness, and remote time of the tale. His costumes, too, are always apposite.

No small help comes from Tharon Musser's lighting, which extends to the use of real on-stage flambeaux. In one scene (the fake trial of Lear's daughters) she effectively uses orange underlighting through a trapdoor in stage center. Conrad Susa has composed fitting music for woodwind, brass, and percussion; its discords reflect the play's dissonant world.

And what of King Lear himself? The role is in the hands of Morris Carnovsky, a staple of the Festival's company during its early years. Though Carnovsky came to Shakespeare late as a performer, he had come to him early as a student; and he soon showed he had the necessary gifts. His Shylock can never be surpassed, and his Prospero was extraordinary.

When in 1957 I proposed in these pages that he try Lear, he at once wrote that my suggestion was a "frightening thought." He said, "Parts of it I think I'd be up to--others I am dubious about." That is exactly the right attitude: a combination of confidence and humility. Anyone who thinks he has totally conquered the role will never be able to play it well.

Carnovsky's Shylock was perfect; his Lear is not. Yet his Lear is the greater achievement, and raises him, at sixty-five, to the pinnacle of a distinguished career. For let's face it: Shakespeare's Lear is the supremely difficult task for an actor (as his Cleopatra is for an actress), and its full realization is not humanly possible. The marvel is that Carnovsky has immersed himself so deeply into a character for which real-life experience offers no preparation, and has been able to project so much of it so meaningfully.

Lear is the most titanic figure in all drama. When Carnovsky first enters, dressed in a purple tunic, a silver-trimmed orange cloak, and a heavy gray embossed baldric, he mounts an improvised black bear-skin throne, stands with right hand alott, and all those present instinctively kneel. Though an octogenarian, this Lear is no weakling. He is not just a great man; he is not even just a king; he seems to be almost a god implanted on Olympus. (In an inspired touch, this same bit of business is pathetically echoed towards the end of the play.)

Carnovsky's voice is rich and varied, though it lacks the full-organ sonority that some of the passages cry out for. He is equal to the speeches of denunciation, and can make the word "recreant" sound like the vilest epithet in the language.

He is blessed with a visage full of character to start with, and knows how to walk, gesture, shake his head, blink his eyes, and in general supplement his speech with telling effect. We are caught up by this colossus of a Lear, who has not yet learned that you can't eat your cake and have it too: he wants to give up the crown and at the same time hold on to it.

When he rages on the heath, Carnovsky cannot quite make the voiced tempest in Lear's mind compete with the externally storming elements that symbolize it. Rightly the director made no attempt to recreate a realistic hurricane on stage, but combined realistic features with stylized ones rendered by the musicians. For no storm ever rained on man could ever equal the one that Lear describes.

In this production, the storm rises and falls, and the whole becomes a sort of huge stichomythic dialogue between Lear and Nature rather than a ludicrous replica of a lyric tenor trying to sing over an unyielding Wagnerian fortissimo. Yet further experimentation with these scenes can probably make them still better.

From time to time Carnovsky adds grunts and expletives that are not in the text, but they are always in keeping with the part. And as he exits before intermission and enters after it, he keeps repeating, "A king, a king!" This occurs but once in the text, but its repetition serves to make clear the precise nature of the idee fixe that forms part of Lear's insanity.

I can find no fault with Carnovsky's handling of his subdued dementia, the reconciliation with Cordelia, and his death--with one exception, and this seems a serious flaw.

What I have in mind is Lear's very last five lines--the most daring and unorthodox valedictory speech ever penned, though made up of nothing but short, everyday words: "Thou" It come no more,/ Never, never, never, never, never!/ Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir./ Do you see this? Look on her! look! her lips!/ Look there, look there!"

Lear has Cordelia's lifeless body before him, and mourns her. Carnovsky delivers all these lines in the same mood--one of depression. This is, I believe, a misinterpretation. Shakespeare wants a change of mood here, and he makes it possible by inserting the infinitely touching but essentially irrelevant "button" line.

In the concluding distich, Lear dies a happy man. (His words here are not madness; despite the textbooks, Lear has recovered from his dementia before his death.) Suddenly he sees something on her lips, and he has a final moment of beatific joy. "Pour on; I will endure," he had yelled at the storm. Like Job, he does endure; and like Job he gets his reward, if only for an instant. He waited; and Godot has arrived.

What does he see on Cordelia's lips? We don't know. For us, as for John Henry Newman, "Omnia exeunt in mysterium." But for Lear, the ultimate question is answered, and the answer comes as a sudden flash of enlightenment analogous to the Buddhists' satorl. This ecstatic discovery is what Lear should convey to us in his last two lines.

(I have, of course, no use for the idiotic happy ending, with Lear restored to the throne and Cordelia blissfully married, that for ages afflicted productions of the play until Macready restored Shakespeare's original text exactly a century and a quarter ago.)

The rest of the company on the whole displays an admirable high quality. Philip Bosco conveys the fervor and noble loyalty of Kent, who is to Lear what Horatio is to Hamlet. In the earlier parts of the play, the Gloucester of Patrick Hines is somewhat perfunctory; but after being blinded, his thereby improved "sight" spurs him to the most eloquent work of his career. His prayer and his final dialogue with Lear are extremely moving. (But why did the director place his "suicide" leap on the flat part of the stage when a six-inch "cliff of Dover" was available a few feet forward?)

As Edmund, Douglas Watson moves lithely, has the proper glint in his eyes, and articulates cleanly, even exaggerating and toying with the alliterative b-sounds in his lines. James Ray does not always keep Edgar in focus, but Lester Rawlins brings pathos to the half-witted wisdom and grotesque postures of the Fool. The evil of Tom Sawyer's Cornwall is well spoken, as is that of Nicholas Martin's Oswald.

Of Lear's three daughters, Carrie Nye's Regan has strength and all the requisite viciousness. The other two are the chief disappointments in the cast. Rosemary Murphy looks hateful enough for the arch-villainous Goneril, but she lacks the requisite venom in her diction. Cordelia does not have many lines, but is a fully drawn character. As Anne Draper plays her, she emerges rather neutral. The role is pivotal for Cordelia represents the future ideal of love (as Edmund represents the primitive past and Lear the civilized present). This Cordelia does not emanate sufficient love.

Nevertheless, this Festival production is impressive and purgative. And Carnovsky's king is classical tragic acting of rare stature; we are not likely to see a better Lear in our times.

(Ed. Note: The drive to the Festival Theatre in Stratford, Conn., takes three hours via the Massachusetts Turnpike and Exit 53 from the Merritt Parkway. Reservations in advance are advisable, and free picnic facilities are available on the grounds. All performances begin punctually; and, a half-hour before, there is an exhibition of expert juggling on the lawn. Forthcoming issues will carry reviews of "Henry V" and "The Comedy of Errors," which will be played in repertory with "King Lear" through Sept. 15.