COPENHAGEN — When I told friends that I would be seeing King Lear on our second night in Copenhagen, and that the performance would be in Danish, that I wouldn’t understand a single word of the three-hour tragedy, the only advice I got was this: Don’t laugh.

I settled into my seat (second row, smack in the middle), still feeling the jet lag and a long full day of trailing Courtenay through the National Museum, a sculpture museum, some kind of museum to the royal family’s horses, a canal tour and some other stuff.

Laugh? The question was how soon I was going to cry.

Well, it wasn’t that bad. No, I didn’t understand anything anyone said, except for a couple too-brief appearances by one actor speaking English, but then I’ve had somewhat similar experiences with

Royal Danish Playhouse

the Shakespearian English at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival. I am, if nothing else, an old pro at staring blankly at theater performances and somehow, someway, almost holding my own in the conversation with Courtenay at intermission and afterwards.

We agreed that Gloucester was kind of weak in the first act, that Cordelia and the Fool, played by the same actress, lacked the charisma and moral standing needed to pull the play together at the end, or something like that. Anyway, I didn’t fall asleep and didn’t fall apart.

And I didn’t laugh.

But here’s the thing: Everyone else did. Apparently it was an unusually funny performance of King Lear, at least up until they gouged one guy’s eyeballs out and tossed them around stage. I averted my eyes and longed for worse seats. Second row!

There was scattered laughter through the play, but I felt like I did when I was about four years old and watching TV with my Dad, trying to laugh when he did.

Some of the highlights, from a non-Shakespeare, non-Danish-speaking theater-goer:

–It was a cool, compact playhouse, with interesting lighting and uneven brick walls that cast interesting shadows everywhere.

–A decent sword fight between Edmund and Edgar. Will would have been impressed with some of the parrying.

–An unusually nasty and bloodthirsty Regan.

–An impressive performance by the actor that played Lear, who got crazier and sicker as the play went on, and got the final speech just right. It was moving, kinda, almost, in any language.

–Spoiler alert: Almost everyone dies. That’s how I knew the end of the play was near.

Anyway, I’ve survived the toughest day of our vacation. It’s all downhill from here.

At least until next week’s opera performance of Falstaff. It’s going to be performed in Italian. I don’t speak Italian.

But there will be Danish subtitles.

Go ahead and laugh.

(Postscript: It was a beautiful day here, cold, with a bluebell sky. We had a great day. It’s late tonight, but I’ll post pictures tomorrow.)