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.
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