King Lear
As we found out to our cost last year, when Kenneth Branagh tried to bosh out a two-hour version, ‘King Lear’ is a play that resists being cut. It’s too long and too weird with too many characters to work in compacted form – as a minimum it gets lost in the lengthy section in which the eponymous monarch is off-stage being mad. You really need to be in it for the long haul with this thing. Enter Yaël Farber. The South African director is by no means the first to rack up a three-and-a-half-hour ‘Lear’. But her superatmospheric, wilfully poised style is perfectly suited to it. She simply has no fast setting – not even a medium one – and her heightened, nightmare-like aesthetic rises to meet the strangeness in Shakespeare’s tragedy of insanity and old age. If you’ve seen a Farber play before, you’ll recognise the hallmarks: the production takes place in a constant, doomy twilight, the night air chased by ominous violin drones and constantly filled with a light haze. Her second play for the Almeida – after 2021’s excellent Saoirse Ronan-starring ‘Macbeth’ – starts off on a modern note, however. Danny Sapani’s bearish Lear is dressed in a blue suit by his three daughters, and then hosts a press conference in which he gives his kingdom away in a detached voice heavy on mic reverb. The scene hints at some greater context to his abdication – usually Lear seems to stand down so he can go on a massive bender – but whatever the case, after the King and his daughters Regan (Faith Omole) a