King Lear - Shakespeare's Globe (Review)
Review by Oli Burley
AS GUILTY pleasures go, The Globe’s King Lear will be hard to top this summer.
The play feeds on misfortune with such an emotional intensity that tragedy has never quite felt so self-indulgent. Sorrow, for once, is a joy to behold.
Lear is the first work of the Totus Mundus, or whole world, season in which artistic director Dominic Dromgoole examines “the glorious unruly diversity” of William Shakespeare’s work.
David Calder’s overwhelming depiction of the erratic Lear gives full voice to that range; his anger is quick to cool, his reason surfaces only to be smothered.
When, in an early fit of pique, he tears down a map of Britain he fails to realise he has already lost his kingdom and with it his self-authority.
Lear does not even own the stage in the early acts, but is eclipsed by his trying fool (Danny Lee Wynter) and Daniel Hawksford’s sinister Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester.
There is real menace while Edmund, clean-cut and eloquent, schemes against his legitimate brother Edgar (Trystan Gravelle) and their father (Joseph Mydell).
His treachery finds allies in Lear’s two waspish daughters, not least Regan (Kelly Bright), who seals the union by gorging out Gloucester’s second eye with her fingers.
That blunt action captures the direct nature of this Jacobean-dress production. Dromgoole does not clutter up the stage with props but tackles the tempest in Lear’s mind head on.
Only once are the King’s words lost, amid the tumult of a wind machine and the drumming that herald his arrival on the stormy heath, but that makes his isolation all the more complete.
Lear is most pitiful at the last when his suffering reaches its climax in the loss of Cordelia (Jodie McNee), who grows more persuasive as adversity climbs.
As his world collapses, so does his language and his final “never” brands the heart.
There are other standout performances, too, from Paul Copley’s endearing Kent to Edgar who, as the cunning Old Tom, brings zest and logic to a failing kingdom.
His reunion with a bloody-shinned Lear is indeed a rare moment of “reason in madness” which, like the eerie strains of an intermittent ballad singer, drifts away on the breeze.
King Lear runs to August 17