Sir Ian triumphs with his frail Lear
LAST time we saw Sir Ian McKellen as King Lear with the Royal Shakespeare Company he stripped to his birthday suit. This time, he threatens to do the same — only to be stopped by his servants.
But the defining feature of this Lear is less his determination to disrobe and more the pathos of a lonely, frightened old man slipping into the oblivion of dementia.
So persuasive is the whiskery grandfather of the British stage that he seemed to me to be struggling with his lines, creating the sort of anxiety that comes with being around old people who you fear might fall over.
It’s not at all comfortable to watch, and when Sir Ian’s Lear pauses or hovers in his lines, you get the uneasy sense of a mind adrift.
It’s a dangerous game that sometimes loses the rhythm of Shakespeare’s verse and the sense of its meaning.
Jonathan Munby’s production, by contrast, is a strident piece of theatre that isolates McKellen, weighing him down with military regalia in the opening scenes where he tragically disowns his daughter Cordelia.
Groping through a mental fog thereafter, he seems to occupy a parallel universe. And yet, if he is unnervingly uncertain, McKellen’s soft features and rich, sibilant voice evoke warm humanity.
It’s as painful to watch as seeing your own father facing his last bewildering demons.
Most notably among Lear’s followers, Sinead Cusack is a female Kent who assumes the manner of an unpaid carer bemused at the King’s whittering and anxious lest he injure himself. Danny Webb is, likewise, warmly attentive as the tormented Gloucester, who follows Lear into purgatory for his sins. And Phil Daniels has a tender rapport with him, as a George Formby Fool with a banjo.
The bad guys, meanwhile, relish their wickedness, although I’d like to have seen Damien Molony as the illegitimate troublemaker Edmund being a more calculating bastard.
Kirsty Bushell, as the bad daughter Regan, is touchy feely in her depravity; while Dervla Kirwan is more austere and terse as her sister- incrime Goneril.
The action is driven on as a bleak epic with portentous music, but amid the storm that floods the stage in the first half, it’s the vulnerability of McKellen’s frail Lear that is this production’s shaky centre.
With barely 90 minutes between the matinee and another three-and-a-half hours in the evening, the 78-year-old is perhaps working too hard, but remains a theatrical stalwart.