The Stage

King Lear

Published Wednesday 8 December 2010 at 14:02 by Michael Coveney

Fast and furious, Michael Grandage’s characteristically lucid and engaging revival of the greatest play in our language, led by a robust and vigorously querulous Derek Jacobi in the title role, looks built to last. Which is just as well - it will be broadcast live around the UK on February 3 before touring the country and visiting New York.

Derek Jacobi in King Lear at the Donmar Warehouse Photo: Johan Persson

The action is compressed in a white stockade, the whole Donmar boarded up by designer Christopher Oram with paint-scuffed planks. Gloucester, painfully well played by Paul Jesson, has his eyes removed in a bundle of bodies up against the wall, and the scenic bareness works well, too, for the cliff top at Dover.

This is not a politically detailed or extravagant Lear like the two latest RSC versions with Ian McKellen and Greg Hicks. It is fraught and concentrated, with Goneril and Regan (Gina McKee and Justine Mitchell) more watchful and rivalrous than voracious and fire-breathing. Alec Newman’s Edmund is an ebullient bastard, Gwilym Lee his fraternal madman in disguise. Michael Hadley is a striking Kent, making a wonderful meal of his litany of insults.

Jacobi’s dyspeptic monarch is a stickler for ritual and manners, comically put out when Cordelia (Pippa Bennett-Warner) cannot heave her heart into her mouth. I have never seen the “hysterical passion” done so well and, as the storm breaks through the cracks in the stockade, Sir Derek virtually whispers the incantation. His story becomes a lesson in hospitality and care in the community, and you really do believe he is more sinned against than sinning - the final scenes are played as one long beautiful exhalation, an elegy for broken families and a society turned upside down.