Reviews of Productions of King Lear

David Calder was Lear and Jodie McNee was Cordelia in a 2008 production at the Globe, directed by Dominic Dromgoole. It was told with 'minimal fuss' and even reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz for Lyn Gardner Tristram Kenton

David Calder and Jodie McNee in King Lear. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Lyn Gardner Review Monday 5 May 2008 09.01 EDT

Tolstoy was wrong. Most families are neither happy nor unhappy. They simply jog along, fingers crossed, hoping that everything will turn out all right. That appears to be the case with the Lears in Dominic Dromgoole's opening production of the Globe season. They might have been just fine if David Calder's king had not suddenly loosened one brick in the fragile edifice and brought it all tumbling down.Calder's Lear initially seems something of a merry monarch - the straightforward kind who might chuck chicken bones behind his left shoulder while fondling wenches. His division of the kingdom is a surprise to the court, which gasps when the map of England unfurls. Is this unexpected rashness perhaps the first sign of Alzheimer's? Or is the disease here a sudden fatal desire to hear and tell the truth? The truth is a dangerous genie - let it out of the bottle and it wreaks havoc. When Jodie McNee's pale Cordelia tells her sisters, "I know you what you are," it is as if she tells them something about themselves they had not known, and unleashes a capacity for doing ill that might have lain dormant if she had never spoken. Like father, like daughter. This Cordelia has more than a touch of Antigone about her: young, fearless, principled - and a bit of a menace.Dromgoole's production is good, and should eventually be excellent. It already gets down to the storytelling with minimal fuss and it understands that there are many kinds of fool and many kinds of families. Lear and his loyal friends out on the heath join hands against the pitiless stars

and for a moment I was irresistibly reminded of another raggle-taggle, self-constructed family up against the world - Dorothy and co from The Wizard of Oz. There are also some genuine five-star moments: Lear and Edgar hugging each other in recognition of a shared pain. Lear's sudden flash of understanding of his own vulnerability in the cry, "I would not be mad" - a line that makes your heart go into freefall.The casting is uneven: there are some really good performances, in particular Calder's magnificent, broken Lear and Danny Lee Wynter's wistful Fool are up against less good work, or actors who have not yet got the measure of the space. Give it a week to settle; by then this production will be giving the RSC's much-lauded effort a run for its money.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/may/05/theatre 1 February 2015

Pete Postlethwaite's Lear was the showpiece of Liverpool's year as the European capital of culture in 2008. It was staged at the Everyman, where Postlethwaite began his career as an actor Tristram Kenton

Singing in the rain ... Pete Postlethwaite in King Lear. Photograph: Tristram Kenton Tristram Kenton/Guardian

Review by Michael Billington Friday 7 November 2008

No Rupert Goold production is ever dull. But . . . his first Lear turns out to be a startlingly wayward, hit-and-miss affair. It is a production full of short-term effects rather than long-range vision, and it is scarcely redeemed by Pete Postlethwaite's return to the Liverpool stage where he learned his craft.Goold's production begins with Mrs Thatcher proclaiming: "Where there is disorder, may we bring harmony." But any expectation that we are going to see a production about the destructive effects of free-market capitalism are soon dashed. There is little evidence of social deprivation in this version. Nor is there a sense of anything momentous at stake. Lear is a workaday, brown-suited figure who divides up his kingdom at a family tea party, where he lapses into a verse or two of My Way. Kent looks like a local vicar, which rather minimises the effect of his banishment. And Cordelia is such a nervous wreck, you wonder how any father could have contemplated making her part of the power structure.It is good that we have got away from the old idea of King Lear as a mythic drama taking place near Stonehenge. But Goold has failed to put anything concrete in its place, or create a plausible world on stage. We are presumably in an anarchic modern Britain where the social order is breaking down. But the image of Lear's followers as woolly-hatted, face-painted football fans is

never followed through. Even when an idea is pursued, it is hard to see its point. The notion of a heavily pregnant Goneril renders Lear's curse of sterility redundant; and, though we later see Edmund peering into her baby's abandoned pram, the evocation of Bond's Saved typifies the production's elevation of bright ideas above coherence.All we get are splintered images of chaos, disorder, disharmony. Postlethwaite's Lear lacks the vocal heft or dominant presence to hold the production together. He suggests less a testy autocrat than a mildly angry Rotary Club president, swallows many of his words ("I gave you all" goes for nothing) and is forced to play his mad scenes, for reasons I could not quite discern, in a floral frock. There is a certain pathos in his decline, but this Lear falls from a small height. John Shrapnel's Gloucester is far more imposing, at first resembling a burly athletics coach as he supervises Edgar's racetrack progress, and ending up a haunting icon of grief. Forbes Masson's Scottish Fool and Jonjo O'Neill's Ulster-accented Edmund add to the impression that the piece is intended to be a commentary on a disunited Britain declining into madness. If so, it is lost in the show's constant surrender to momentary effects and facile theatricality.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2008/nov/07/pete-postlethwaite-king-lear 1 February 2015

Pete Postlethwaite in Rupert Goold's King Lear at the Young Vic. Photograph: Tristram Kenton Tristram Kenton/Guardian

Lyn Gardner review: 8 February 2009

Rupert Goold's production with Pete Postlethwaite in the title role took a drubbing when it opened in Liverpool last year, with Postlewaite admitting that the production was perhaps misjudged. Some gimmicks have gone, but the 1980s setting remains, with the entire thing appearing to take place in an empty football stadium so overrun by weeds that you wonder what it is this Lear has left to distribute.. . . But the entire evening is unevenly textured. For much of the time, what happens on stage seems less about the civil war between Lear and his daughters and more about the internal battle of a director torn between a high-art European aesthetic and a classic repertory theatre pot-boiler. It's as if Goold has approached each scene as a complete play. There is no coherent overview.Yet the acting doesn't lack consistency, suggesting an ensemble that has risen above the production, and Postlethwaite's rib-thin Lear may not be a roaring fellow, but is somehow all the more moving because he is so obviously broken before he's even begun.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/feb/08/king-lear-young-vic 1 February 2015

Derek Jacobi in Michael Grandage's 2010 production at the Donmar Warehouse. 'I've always felt slightly young for the role,' he said. 'But now I'm 72.’ Johan Persson

Derek Jacobi as King Lear at the Donmar: ‘He begins with twinkling dignity and steps delicately, precisely into madness.’ Photograph: Johan Persson Johan Persson/Public Domain

Susannah Clapp Review: Saturday 11 December 2010

Distilled, unadorned, concentrated, Michael Grandage's production of King Lear remakes the idea of what Shakespeare's play can be. What it doesn't have is an absolute sense of wilderness: . . . Restraint suggests the huge forces that are being held back, and restraint is the keynote of Derek Jacobi's exquisitely calibrated performance.

Jacobi begins with twinkling dignity, almost a touch of Santa Claus and a definite echo of the Prospero he played in Grandage's Tempest: he relinquishes power leaning on a staff. He steps delicately, precisely into madness, his low-level vehemence making evident how full this play is of curses. He creates an electric shock in the storm scene, by seeming to do less than expected: his imprecations to the elements are delivered in a level whisper, as if they are an internal affair, not a regal warning. He saves his big roars for the howls of his towering final scene, when he enters carrying the dead Cordelia, then sinks back into a soft register for the closing moments – and a long, expiring sigh.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2010/dec/12/king-lear-jacobi-matilda-seasons-greetings-review 1 February 2015Review by Charles Spencer, 8 Dec 2010King Lear is perhaps the greatest of all Shakespeare’s dramas, but it is so harrowing, so despairing, so graphic in its cruelty, that it is also a test of endurance.Michael Grandage’s production proves outstanding, the finest and most searching Lear I have ever seen, and in this small space it often achieves a shattering power. But the director and his tremendous company also see the play steadily and see it whole. They capture the great epic sweep of the tragedy, but they are also alert to the detail in the text. Almost every performance seems fresh-minted and psychologically persuasive. I didn’t spot a single moment of hollow bluster.Christopher Oram’s characteristically simple design, brilliantly lit by Neil Austin, consists of nothing more than whitewashed planks. There is no attempt to evoke a particular time and place. The play itself is allowed to conjure its own world through the power of Shakespeare’s words and the strength and detail of the performances. The tragedy, normally played like a tremendous dramatic symphony, has here become the theatrical equivalent of a searching piece of chamber music. The result is as enthralling as it is deeply moving.Derek Jacobi’s Lear is initially a testy, self-indulgent old man with a pink face, silver hair and a touch of camp about him. He actually squirms with pleasure as Goneril and Regan deliver their slick eulogies in his grotesque test of love that sets the play in motion. His incandescent rage when Cordelia attempts to wake him from his complacency by telling the truth is electrifying in its intensity.But Jacobi, enjoying a blaze of autumnal glory as an actor, captures the full depth and breadth of the character. I have rarely seen Lear’s fear of insanity so touchingly signalled, and there is an extraordinary moment when he suddenly lets out a terrifying high-pitched scream as if granted a vivid glimpse of the fate that awaits him, before quietly delivering the words “I shall go mad” as if it were now a matter of irreversible certainty.In the storm there are lulls when the noise stops and he delivers his wild thoughts with a thrilling raptness. And the reunion scene with Cordelia (excellent Pippa Bennett-Warner) is played with a beautiful tenderness and humility. Jacobi’s relationship with Ron Cook’s extraordinarily sad, deeply loving Fool, delivering terrible jokes with mounting desperation as he tries to save his master’s sanity, is equally moving.In fact there is hardly a weak link in the ensemble. Paul Jesson marvellously captures Gloucester’s journey from complacent old buffer to a man who discovers wisdom and compassion in his blindness, while Gwilym Lee achieves the difficult task of making goodness interesting as Edgar.Alec Newman could usefully find a touch more charisma and wit as Edmund, but the evil sisters are brilliantly played. Gina McKee’s Goneril exudes a smouldering sensuality as she seduces Edmund and snarling contempt for her husband Albany as she grabs his testicles in a vice-like grip.Meanwhile Justine Mitchell, who initially seems so prim and proper as Regan, lets out a wild whoop of joy and skips like a girl at the prospect of blinding Gloucester.At less than three hours, this Lear hurtles along and you emerge feeling shaken, deeply moved and curiously uplifted - the infallible signs of a great tragic production.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8186991/King-Lear-Donmar-Warehouse-review.html January 28, 2015

Derek Jacobi’s King Lear: a character of tumultuous contradictions. Photograph: Johan Persson

Michael Billington Review: Tuesday 7 December 2010

"How can you bear another Lear?" someone asked me over lunch. And, if one's honest, there are times when Mount Lear, as a critic once called it, can seem as daunting a challenge to playgoers as to performers. But the miracle of Michael Grandage's production is that it is fast (under three hours), vivid, clear and, thanks to a performance that reminds us why Derek Jacobi is a great classical actor, overwhelmingly moving.

As so often, but more successfully than in his Hamlet, Grandage defines a Shakespeare play by its emotional rather than its social context: little hint here of the disintegrating Britain you get from David Farr's concurrent RSC production.

Christopher Oram's set consists of paint-dappled wooden boards that turn the Donmar into a stockade. Vital atmosphere is supplied by Adam Cork's sound score and Neil Austin's lighting. Lear's riotous knights are evoked by distant braying horns and voices. Even more remarkably, the central storm is suggested by a blazing white light that looks as if it might burst through the timbered walls. And birdsong, with its first world war echoes, is finally used to provide a counterpoint to human turbulence.But it is Jacobi's Lear that drives the production. And what is truly astonishing is the way he combines Lear's spiritual trajectory from blind arrogance to impotent wisdom with a sense of the character's tumultuous contradictions. Even the rubicund features and close-cropped white hair

suggest a mix of military autocrat and merry patriarch. And, having entered genially cuddling his adored Cordelia, Jacobi quickly unleashes a monumental fury. That's in the text. But what strikes one is the disproportionate nature of the rage. When Jacobi threatens Goneril by saying, of her sister Regan, that "with her nails she'll flay thy wolvish visage", he pictures the scene with vindictive savagery.Jacobi's special quality, however, has always been his ability to forge a bond of sympathy with the audience: one thinks of his Cyrano, Peer Gynt or Philip II.

And here he is quite superb in the central mad scenes, taking us inside Lear's tortured mind without diminishing the king's residual moments of cruelty. He pursues the beggarly Poor Tom with a rabid curiosity eagerly inquiring "What hast thou been?" yet, imagining Goneril on trial, he spits at her shadow with undisguised hatred. And, even in the shattering encounter with the blinded Gloucester on Dover heath, Jacobi first tempts a fantasy mouse with toasted cheese before delightedly stamping on it.What also marks out Jacobi's performance is a sense of life's circularity. His features, through the alchemy of acting, seem to acquire in the final scenes an infant-like luminosity. And Jacobi pierces all one's emotional defences as he inquires, with a bewildered innocence, "Am I in France" or binds Cordelia to his breast with the rope that imprisons them both. But, even in death, there is contradiction as Jacobi emits blood-chilling cries on "Howl, howl, howl" before we see his flawed heart, not unlike that of the off-stage Gloucester, "burst smilingly".It is a tremendous Lear, to be ranked with those of Paul Scofield and John Wood.And there is intelligent support all round. Gina McKee's calculating Goneril is excellently contrasted with Justine Mitchell's manic Regan, driven into gleeful hysteria by the blinding of Paul Jesson's credulous Gloucester. Alec Newman's wickedly self-willed Edmund is also ideally offset by the transformative virtue of Gwilym Lee's Edgar. And Ron Cook's Fool is as remarkable in his silences, when he gazes on Lear with powerless compassion, as in his rebarbative, conscience-stabbing jests. But that is just another feature of the essential Shakespearean contradiction which Grandage's production so brilliantly captures.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2010/dec/08/review-king-lear-derek-jacobi ! February 2015

Greg Hicks as Lear in The Royal Shakespeare Company's 2011 Roundhouse production. 'He is especially fine in switching from ferocity to pathos,' wrote Michael BillingtonTristram Kenton for the Guardian

Outstanding ... Greg Hicks and Kathryn Hunter in King Lear. Photograph: Tristram Kenton Tristram Kenton/Tristram Kenton

Michael Billington Review: Tuesday 2 March 2010

Productions of this once unscaleable tragedy come thick and fast: it is only two years since Ian McKellen played the king at Stratford, and Derek Jacobi leads a new expedition at the Donmar in December. But David Farr's revival justifies itself if only because it gives Greg Hicks, that most flinty and resourceful of actors, the chance to plumb the depths of suffering.About Farr's production, I have mixed feelings. Its dominant image is of a realm in a state of disintegration. In Jon Bausor's quasi-industrial design, this is embodied in skewed girders, broken windows, sizzling strip-lighting: at one point, as in last year's Winter's Tale, the kingdom's flimsy walls collapse. While this might all be a take on modern Britain, there are too many competing allusions for coherence: we get soldiers and nurses out of the first world war, swords alongside rifles, and, at one point, medieval chants. Albion indeed seems to be coming to confusion.Against this, there is a good deal of attention to the text, and Hicks rises to the challenge of Lear. First glimpsed in exactly the kind of furred robe against which he later inveighs, Hicks has just the right rashness, spleen and tyrannical suddenness for the early scenes: he prankishly enters from the side the court least expects him, and kicks away the ruined map of his kingdom in disgust. His vibrato lends real weight to the terrifying curses he unleashes on Goneril. Yet Hicks also gives us the sense that, in the words of GK Hunter, Lear in exile "absorbs humanity and assimilates it to his own condition". He is especially fine in switching from ferocity to pathos, and, in the heath scene with the blinded Gloucester, from madness to piercing sanity. He could do still more to bring out the ravening curiosity which leads Lear to induce Cordelia to explore

"the mystery of things", but Hicks conveys the trajectory from hideous power to the possibility of a new life.The other outstanding performance is Kathryn Hunter (herself a former Lear) as the Fool, a boyish figure who tells the king unpalatable truths with touching directness; the image I shall treasure from this production is of she gazing on him with a sad-eyed, watchful concern.There is good work from Kelly Hunter and Katy Stephens as a strikingly well-contrasted Goneril and Regan, and Darrell D'Silva endows Kent with a saucy roughness. Even if the production straddles too many periods, it shows the RSC ensemble growing in authority and proves Hicks to be an actor in the first Shakespearean rank.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2010/mar/03/review-king-lear-courtyard-stratford-michael-billington 1 February 2015

Kate Kellaway Review: 12 March 2011

It is ironic that Jon Bausor's set for King Lear has an unfinished look, like a warehouse awaiting conversion. But the new intimacy of the theatre is perfect for Greg Hick's unusual and exceptionally moving Lear. He is not every inch a king but that is the point. He is every inch a human being: long-haired, impulsive, chaotic – even before his life collapses. In his early appearances he wears a hippyish fur mantle that gives way to trousers which he never does up and to a dotty flower arrangement on his head. I wept steadily through his mad scene.My only uncertainty about the new theatre, as I watched, was about how and whether elaborate sets will settle. I felt a slight pang during the over-minimalist storm scene, achieved with a handful of overhead lights, docile thunder and a carefully directed shower over Hicks's head. I'd like to hope wilder storms may, one day, be in the offing.But the production has many strengths: Kelly Hunter's Goneril is the fiercest of control freaks; Katy Stephens's Regan is glitteringly bestial, talons at the ready. Samantha Young is arresting, too, as Cordelia. Geoffrey Freshwater is as good as Gloucester gets. And it was an ingenious idea to cast Sophie Russell as the fool: it makes more of the fool's otherness. She is not what she appears: a wise woman beneath the exterior of an outspoken boy.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/mar/13/rsc-king-lear-romeo-juliet 1 February 2015

A performance to cherish: Greg Hicks as Lear in the RSC’s revival of King Lear which opened at the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian Tristram Kenton/Guardian

Michael Billington Review: Thursday 10 March 2011

It works. That's one's instant verdict on the transformed Royal Shakespeare Theatre. And it succeeds precisely because it feels new and strangely familiar. The old art deco lobby of Elisabeth Scott's 1932 building is still there. So too are the riverside vistas. Yet, as one strolls through the copious cafes and the expansive corridor linking the main building to the Swan, the prime impression is one of space, as if one were aboard a not too heavily populated luxury liner.The brand-new auditorium also doesn't come as a total bolt from the blue. That's partly because it has echoes of the Courtyard, the RSC's interim space up the road. But it feels much more intimate than its prototype. The back wall is only 15 metres from the front of the stage and the auditorium width has been narrowed. From my privileged perch in the fourth row of the stalls, I felt we were all sharing the same experience. And the old myth that arena stages favour the image over the word was effectively nailed: from where I sat I heard everything in what seems a very actor-friendly acoustic.But how did you enjoy the play, Mrs Lincoln? Well, wisely, the RSC has chosen to christen the revamped building not with a new production but with revivals of last season's King Lear and Romeo and Juliet. I admit I still have the odd reservation about David Farr's production of Lear. Its basic image, in Jon Bausor's design, is of a progressively disintegrating Albion, which may well be a metaphor for modern Britain. It yields some startling moments, as when Lear and his retinue announce their arrival at Goneril's house by simply bursting through the wall. But the combination, at one particular point, of sizzling striplights, medieval religious chants and khaki-clad first world war tommies produced a feeling of sensory and aural overload.

At the production's centre, however, is a first-rate performance from Greg Hicks, and one that is subtly different from Derek Jacobi's at the Donmar. Jacobi stressed Lear's split-second contradictions; Hicks takes a more linear approach, showing the character's journey towards a painfully acquired humanity.

At the start, Hicks is a testy, whimsically powerful tyrant who delights in tricking the assembled court by entering from the side they are least expecting. Frustrated in his pre-planned division of the kingdom, he kicks away the map in disgust and snatches a coronet off Cordelia's head with a savage cruelty. And when he later threatens the recalcitrant Goneril that her sister will "with her nails flay thy wolfish visage", he brandishes his own vulpine claw in her face.But, as Lear descends into madness, Hicks moves one. At one point he kneels before the bearded, beggarly, semi-naked Poor Tom as if he sees in him an image of Christ. And, as so often with Lear, it is the simple things that affect one most. In his reconciliation with Cordelia, Hicks turns towards her and says with heart-piercing directness: "Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and foolish."And, in the final moments as he enters with the dead Cordelia in his arms, Hicks treats "Howl, howl, howl" not as some sky-rending cry but as an earnest injunction to the assembled company. It is a fine performance to cherish alongside Jacobi's.Although Sophie Russell is a perfectly good replacement for Kathryn Hunter as the Fool, I missed the latter's sad-eyed concern for her master. But Kelly Hunter's gilded serpent of a Goneril and Katy Stephens' lavishly sensual Regan are outstanding. And, on the side of virtue, Geoffrey Freshwater as the deluded Gloucester and Darell D'Silva as the abrasively loyal Kent are similarly impressive.The abiding image of this production remains that of a kingdom, and maybe a cosmos, falling into ruin and decay. Yet the beguiling intimacy of the new Stratford auditorium means that, even in a thousand-seat theatre, we are always emotionally engaged rather than simply gawping at a distant spectacle.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/mar/11/king-lear-review-stratford 1 February 2015

Tim Pigott-Smith in the West Yorkshire Playhouse production in 2011. 'The wonder of Tim Pigott-Smith's king lies not in the fact that he loses his mind,' wrote Alfred Hickling, 'but in the ordure he finds floating in his unconscious’ Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Highly strung ... Tim Pigott-Smith as King Lear at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian Tristram Kenton/Guardian

Alfred Hickling Review: Thursday 29 September 2011

A good Lear is someone who can get through three hours of howling and humiliation without genuinely going mad. A great one is someone alive to textual hints and suggestions one may not have noticed before. The wonder of Tim Pigott-Smith's king lies not in the fact that he loses his mind, but in the ordure he finds floating in his unconscious.He begins the evening as a highly strung, hatchet-faced dictator who strides in as if he's just completed a satisfactory inspection of his tanks. But the troubling signs begin to appear when he vents his fury on Goneril for dismissing his entourage, not only cursing her with sterility but pinning her to the ground in a manner that virtually qualifies as indecent assault.The image recurs during the storm, when Pigott-Smith stares in horror at his open palm and declares: "Hide thee, thou bloody hand; thou perjured, and thou simular of virtue/ That art incestuous." Perhaps it is overelaborating that he dry-humps a mattress while demanding to know if "there is any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?" Not in nature, perhaps. But that way madness lies.

Ian Brown's austere production is a very dark reading of a very bleak play, although there is some relief in the motley wisdom of Richard O'Callaghan's Fool and the sardonic disposition of James Garnon's Edmund, a sly saboteur whose features are set somewhere between impish delight at the destruction he wreaks and disgusted bemusement at how easy it is.The reunion of Olivia Morgan's iron-willed Cordelia and her broken father is among the most moving I have seen. If there is one slight misstep, it is the manner in which Neve McIntosh's Goneril and Hedydd Dylan's Regan are played as shrill she-devils from the start. Still, if they have been subjected to the things this Lear suggests, then they have every right to loathe him.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/sep/29/king-lear-leeds-review 1 February 2015

Wu Hsing-kuo plays Lear in the Chinese Peking Opera's production at the Edinburgh international festival in 2011 Liu Yang

Lifelong obsession … Wu Hsing-kuo in King Lear. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Michael Billington Review: Sunday 14 August 2011

I suspect Wu Hsing-kuo is the Taiwanese answer to Orson Welles. He has not only written and directed but also performs, in Mandarin and with the aid of nine musicians, this one-man version of Shakespeare's tragedy. And while it's not a practice I would wish to see widely imitated, there is no denying the actor's extraordinary virtuosic power.Strangely, it is as Lear himself that I find him least beguiling. That, I suspect, is because he strictly follows the stylised conventions of Chinese opera and shows us an old man whose lower features are obscured by a prodigious amount of facial hair: indeed, Lear's long white beard – sometimes tossed in the air like a horse's mane, at other times fretfully combed and parted – seems to be an index of his emotional state. But there is a gripping Pirandellian moment when Wu Hsing-kuo sheds his wig and beard, and asks, in his own person, "Who can tell me who I am?" The answer seems to be that he is an actor caged and imprisoned by his lifelong obsession with King Lear.That pays off handsomely in the second half when he essays the play's other key characters. He is good as a dog-toting Fool who unexpectedly tells us, "A funny thing happened in Edinburgh." He is quite brilliant as, with a simple change of costume and gait, he becomes Lear's daughters: his Goneril and Regan, with their exaggerated twitching of the shoulders and fluttering hand movements, become almost menacingly coy. I was, however, puzzled by one aspect of his

portrayal of Gloucester: he shows the blinded duke scaling a rocky promontory before his attempted suicide, whereas Shakespeare's Beckettian joke is that he hurls himself at a piece of flat ground. But this is one of the few flaws in an evening that is clearly a product of an ungovernable, deeply personal fascination with Shakespeare's play. Where Robert Lepage's one-man Hamlet, Elsinore, was all about technical trickery, this Taiwanese solo Lear is unequivocally a celebration of acting, even down to the Wolfit-like curtain calls.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2011/aug/14/king-lear-review 2 February 2015

King Lear ReviewBy Bill Dunlop - Posted on 15 August 2011

Venue:  Royal Lyceum TheatreCompany:  Contemporary Legend TheatreRunning time:  90minsProduction:  William Shakespeare (playwright), Wu Hsing-kuo (writer and director), Lin Hsui-wei (producer), Tim Yip (costume design), Chang Wang (set designer), Lee Yi-chin (composer)Performers:  Wu Hsing-kuoChinese traditional opera and King Lear may seem to some a strange juxtaposition, yet this production surprisingly takes us closer to the roots of Shakespearean theatre than might be supposed. Wu Hsing-kuo’s

interpretations of Lear, the Fool, Gloucester and other characters draw strongly on the characters from Chinese traditional opera, which themselves have an equivalent in the western tradition of Comedia del Arte.Wu Hsing-kuo is a remarkable actor, working within a tradition but expanding its previous boundaries enormously. His acrobatic and interpretational skills combine here to provide some of the most outstanding "two hours traffic" seen on any stage. For this is more than a re-telling of the King Lear plot in an unconventional (if it can be so mis-described) form. Wu meditates on the role of actor as interpreter and active creator as well as offering his own penetrating perspective on the most ambitious of Shakespeare's plays.A few years ago this reviewer was fortunate enough to see the late, wonderfully eclectic Ken Campbell's 'The School of Night', in which actors and audience members came up close and sometimes uncomfortable with the creation of iambic pentameter for 'stock' characters and situations. An education, essentially, in how Shakespeare's actors worked and contributed to the final 'script'. This has relevance here as Chinese traditional opera also has its share of stock figures and it's on this common tradition of improvisation that Wu draws, while taking it beyond and opening it to a wider audience through use of major texts of the western canon.By doing so, Wu frees our understanding of King Lear from the strait jacket imposed by nineteenth and twentieth century preconceptions, against which even actors as distinguished as Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Pete Postlethwaite and most recently Derek Jacobi have struggled.Wu’s performance becomes not only significant in its own right, but a necessary corrective to a mono-cultural view mired in recent history.Although Wu is the only actor on stage, this is a production driven almost as much by music as the actor. The music of Chinese traditional opera or Jingju uses melodic families as the basis for appropriate tunes – a technique familiar to those with a working knowledge of Scots traditional music, where phrases allow players to slide easily from one tune to another with virtually no rhythmic break. The musicians here wove a skilful soundscape throughout the production, prompting but never dominating the interaction of performer and audience.The set design subtly created opportunities for Wu’s acrobatic skills to shine while suggesting moor, seashore and palace in most discreet ways. The stage, however, was always rightly dominated by Wu Hsing-kuo, an actor who is a most remarkable interpreter of differing traditions, which his performance managed to encompass with insight, skill and physical agility.

http://www.edinburghguide.com/festival/2011/edinburghinternationalfestival/kinglearreview-8896 2 February 2015 

Jonathan Pryce as Lear and Phoebe Fox as Cordelia in Michael Attenborough's production at the Almeida theatre in 2012. Michael Billington thought Pryce gave 'a striking, individualistic performance in a carefully considered production’ Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Jonathan Pryce as Lear and Phoebe Fox as Cordelia in Michael Attenborough's considered production at the Almeida. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Michael Billington Review: Tuesday 11 September 2012

Jonathan Pryce is the latest actor to scale Mount Lear and, although it's getting a bit crowded on the summit these days, he gives a striking, individualistic performance in a carefully considered production directed by Michael Attenborough. It's one, I'd say, that leaves you in a state of quiet admiration rather than swept off your feet.The emphasis is on King Lear as a family, rather than a cosmic, tragedy. It begins deceptively mildly with a smiling, beneficent Pryce placing a coronet on Cordelia's head before she has had a chance to speak. But one soon realises this ceremonial cosiness is a facade and that when Goneril talks of her father's "unruly waywardness" she speaks the simple truth.

Even more pointedly, there are strong hints that Lear has abused his older daughters. When Lear, having divided his kingdom, turns on the recalcitrant Goneril, Pryce savagely kisses her and threatens to "resume the shape which thou dost think I have cast off for ever". And when he later tells Regan it is not in her nature "to oppose the bolt against my coming in" the words acquire an ominously sexual ring.Pryce's Lear, in short, is no majestic ancient but a dominating and seemingly exploitative father, who undergoes a spiritual purgation through suffering. This is a Lear one understands rather than sympathises with.It is striking how, even in madness, Pryce's Lear remains sharp, quick and observant: the confrontation with the blinded Gloucester on Dover heath, which actors often milk for pathos, here has a wild comedy as Pryce cries "Ha, Goneril with a white beard."There is also a buried violence, so when Pryce announces he killed the slave who was hanging Cordelia you believe him. And it seems totally appropriate that he expires with a convulsive fit rather than in a state of gracious passivity.

I shall remember the evening for Pryce's performance more than anything else. Tom Scutt's design of brick-walled arches neatly echoes that of the Almeida itself, but his costumes have a flavourless, dun-coloured universality. And the supporting performances are good without being radically surprising.One exception is Phoebe Fox, who makes Cordelia a refreshingly ballsy figure, whose initial response to dismissal by her father is to defiantly stay put. It is also good to see Richard Goulding's Edgar sporting with servant girls rather than being a born goody-goody, and revealing a streak of vengefulness towards Kieran Bew's Edmund when he has him at his mercy. And Zoe Waites and Jenny Jules lend Goneril and Regan a palpable sense of inherited wrong and resentment even if it doesn't justify their subsequent monstrosity.This, in short, is a Lear that deals with the breakdown of a family rather than a universe and one largely distinguished by a central performance in which the Pryce is absolutely right.

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/sep/12/king-lear-almeida-review 1 February 2015

For UTUBE movies of Lear Performances:

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2014/jan/13/king-lear-simon-russell-beale-national-youtube

Most of the photos in the above reviews came from the following web site:

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2009/feb/06/king-lear January 27, 2105