God save us from the King

Gandalf, also known as Ian McKellen, has awarded himself another lap of honour by bringing King Lear back to London. Jonathan Munby directs. His eccentric decision to hire actors who don’t resemble their characters will baffle anyone who hasn’t studied the play in advance. The casting may be ‘colour-blind’, but the audience isn’t. Anita-Joy Uwajeh (Cordelia) evidently has no white ancestry and therefore cannot be Lear’s natural daughter. A newcomer might deduce that the king’s cruelty towards her stems from her second-class status as an adoptive child. And anyone trying to unravel that mystery will be equally baffled by Sinead Cusack’s Kent. Of the four women on stage in the opening scene, three are members of Lear’s family so it would be reasonable to assume that the fourth, Ms Cusack, is also a relative. Is she Lear’s sister, his cousin, an aunt perhaps, or his wife? Even I found her role hard to decipher and I’ve sat through this problematic play a dozen times or more.

The difficulty arises from the main character and his shattered personality which appears in the following manifestations: self-pitying despot, irascible scrounger, ranting visionary, chastened penitent. None of these is particularly sympathetic and the characters around him are, with the odd exception, a loathsome bunch of schemers and killers. The artistic texture of the play is unendurably harsh and alienating. Long screeds of barmy rhetoric are interrupted by scenes of bullying, torture, poisoning and summary execution. The first half, which lasts two hours in this production, moves sluggishly and the second half seems rushed and overcrammed with sudden plot twists. Amid the dross, the odd gem shines. ‘Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand [etc]’ says Lear, denouncing the perverted lust of magistrates who enjoy flogging prostitutes.