Lear

Published Thursday 24 March 2005 at 10:40 by John Highfield

Is the Crucible the most exciting stage in Britain? You will certainly be hard pressed to find a production at the moment more stimulating or stunning than this.

Transformed into a vast building site by designer Dick Bird, director Jonathan Kent then fills the space with a truly epic drama, a visual triumph and an intellectual challenge.

If Shakespeare’s Lear blurred the line between high tragedy and black comedy then Edward Bond removes that line completely. The result is a harrowing, brutal, savagely funny study of a society in freefall which, at a time when one of the world’s great powers is advocating attack as the best form of defence and putting up barriers around itself, seems frighteningly relevant.

Ian McDiarmid’s Lear goes on an extraordinary journey from cold authoritarian to victim of his own regime, brutalised by his calculating, predatory daughters - the gloriously wicked Cladie Blakley and Sharon Small - but finding understanding and a sort of redemption in his relationship with Bond’s fantasy version of Edgar and the Fool, a moving performance from Bryan Dick.

Scenes of horrific violence threaten to overwhelm as a new regime sweeps in, promising freedom but actually coming up with more of the same. It is a bleak message but, if you get home and turn on the late news, you will find no comfort, only the unsettling fact that Lear’s nightmare is already becoming an inescapable reality.