Theatre

King Lear
Until Aug 17
- Critics' Choice
Shakespeare's Globe, 21 New Globe Walk, Bankside, London, SE1 9DT
Rating:
By Lucy Powell

Posted: Mon May 12
Dominic Dromgoole’s ‘Lear’ is left largely to its own devices. Set where the source text specifies, ‘Olde Englande’, complete with Medieval veils, Middle-English music and storm effects emanating from giant iron drums, the Globe’s stage is entirely devoid of diversionary design tactics. Lear, the director implies, has no need of modernisation to find relevance. The crushing impotence of age descends on every man.

The performances, too, seem surprisingly unschooled, with some actors unable to project past the helicopters, and others, like Joseph Mydell as an ineffective, genial Gloucester, unwilling to sink to the sightless emotional depths. Sally Bretton and Kellie Bright are superbly sensual as Goneril and Regan in the ascendant, but both stutter at either end of the play. Daniel Hawksford as Edmond is no help, with neither the sexual magnetism nor the malignity of evil inscribed anywhere about him.

It may turn out that every undercooked performance rises to the challenge in the run. David Calder’s crownless King is breathtaking. A robust, rotund monarch, he makes mischief of the idea that he will ‘crawl… towards death’, so improbable does it seem that this hearty Lear could falter. But already, when Jodie McNee’s nicely brittle, clean Cordelia is banished, the crack in Calder’s voice speaks of the hairline emotional fracture that hides beneath his jovial, domineering bluster. Out on the heath, with the delicate Danny Lee Wynter as a poetic, white-faced Fool, hugging a bedraggled poor Tom, it surfaces with an aching, eloquent simplicity. It’s the fleetness of Calder’s emotional foot that is so dazzling, from overbearing bully to furious child to lonely old man, howling his sadness at the stars. With such an unshakable lodestone at its centre, this ‘Lear’ may yet pull all its errant pieces into alignment, and silence every grumble from the galleries.