Review: King Lear, Almeida Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

In the middle of that wind-wracked heath, a sapling sprouts; a shoot of green in a barren wasteland. It troubles you all through the interval and, by the time you’ve returned refreshed, so too is the stage. Grass has sprung through the brickwork of Tom Scutt’s labyrinthine castle. There’s an edge of Chenobyl, of nature creeping back in after man has plumbed the depths.

Lear reborn? Surely not? Well, um, yes, actually. Madness is the making of Jonathan Pryce’s king; it swipes humility into vanity’s place. Surrounded by those “men of stone,” all costumed in the tones of lichen and limescale, Pryce softens. Many Lears spend the second half glazed and distant, frazzled and out of their minds, so that you see symptoms and abstract frailty above all else. Not Pryce; he scales back after the (admittedly underpowered) episode on the heath, growing steadily more human and never so loopy that he might be dismissed. There’s always connection and, with it, newfound compassion, both to Clive Wood’s Gloucester and Phoebe Fox’s Cordelia.

However, Michael Attenborough’s production does very little beyond that. Indeed, it looks and feels mostly like an abstact, noncomittal Lear that could, thanks to Scutt’s warped futurish-medieval costumes (caught between Game of Thrones and Star Wars), date from any point in the last 40 years. Attenborough’s direction – all entrances, tableaux and exits – is becomes rather stilted and repetitious.

What comes out of this, however, is a real sense of the play’s patterns; the double-acts that run through it. Trevor Fox’s gruff Northern Fool, deadpan to the end, clings to Lear’s back as the stormclouds gather; a soul or shadow. Edmund and Edgar battle like clones. Goneril (Zoe Waites) and Regan (Jenny Jules) have an equal share of their father’s flintiness. The stone set, hexagonal and symmetrical, has something of Alice and Wonderland’s hall of doors, as if life were nothing but a sequence of infinite, identical chambers and choice a meaningless concept.

The only other revelation is Fox’s Cordelia. No eye-lash batting innocent, she is absolutely her father’s daughter and her sisters’ sister, matching their mettle whenever necessary. Fox can be stand-offish and sharp-tongued, where Cordelia so often simply wilts. I couldn’t help but wish for more of the same invention and invigoration elsewhere.