King Lear

An abandoned jester’s cap; suspended sandbags haemorrhaging their contents; a distraught, elderly man trapped in a shaft of scorching light, rain beating remorselessly on his grey head. David Farr’s RSC production of Shakespeare’s towering tragedy is crammed with striking stage pictures – at times, there’s almost a surfeit of visual motifs. It’s an arresting, often cruel ‘Lear’, with Greg Hicks an arrogant, energetic monarch whose piteous slide into insanity is charted with precision, if not always with enough compassion.

Jon Bausor’s industrial set of crumbling iron and ominously fizzing electrics houses an anachronistic Britain of First World War uniforms and Edwardian evening dress, as well as medieval furs and robes. If the design aesthetic’s purpose never fully emerges, it does engender a sense of wholesale loss of life, decay and confusion. Hicks’s sardonic, over-confident king is catastrophically oblivious to his tenuous grip on authority. His shock and rage, when confronted with his daughters’ betrayal, are as violent as they are impotent; as he spits his foul curse of sterility at Kelly Hunter’s fine Goneril; she crumples, stricken.

Sophie Russell dons the Fool’s coxcomb to replace Kathryn Hunter in the role, and her tender concern for Hicks’s monarch is poignant. There’s excellent work, too, from Charles Aitken’s Edgar, Geoffrey Freshwater as Gloucester and Katy Stephens’s Regan. Regrettably, Samantha Young is a watery Cordelia and Tunji Kasim’s Edmund is unpardonably bland. Yet overall, the production has a bleak impact, even if it bruises, rather than breaks, the heart.