An all-star cast, but this Lear didn’t quite roar
It is another big year for King
Lear (BBC Two). After Glenda Jackson’s towering effort at the Old Vic last year, 2018 has already seen Antony Sher’s performance at Stratford, while in July Ian Mckellen will take his version to the West End.
No doubt conscious of the competition, director Richard Eyre assembled so many galacticos for his bells-and-whistles modern-day-set TV version that at first it was hard to concentrate on anything else. Say, isn’t that Emma Thompson and Emily Watson as Goneril and Regan? Oh look, there’s Tobias Menzies from
Game of Thrones doing Cornwall. Here’s Florence Pugh, making – very successfully – the unusual transition from Lady Macbeth to Cordelia. The two Jims, Broadbent and Carter, moustached-up for Gloucester and Kent. Oswald (Christopher Eccleston) looks familiar, too. Who? Yes, exactly – the Doctor. And blow me down, if it isn’t Andrew Scott as Edgar, eyeballs akimbo.
At the centre of it all was Anthony Hopkins, growling and prowling. He has history with the part: he was so traumatised by playing the king at the National in 1986 that he gave up the stage soon afterwards. One of the many challenges of the role is that it starts at 10, energy and volume-wise, and slowly dwindles to 0. During the divvying-up ceremony, I worried that he might bellow his way through the whole play, but he improved as he calmed down. By the time Lear met the blind Gloucester with Edgar, outside a concrete shopping centre, all three actors were purring. Scott was excellent throughout, which will be no surprise to anyone who saw his stage Hamlet, recently shown on the same channel.
In general there were few complaints about the all-star cast, or the script, which was chopped heavily but smoothly so that the audience could get to bed in good time. The real weakness was the setting, the kind of contemporary alternate-universe British military state we have seen a thousand times before. Perhaps it once felt fresh, but in 2018 it is as straight as you can play it. Range Rovers pulled into a glossy Tower of London. Men in fatigues strode around. Bombers streaked over the countryside. It’s quite something when a modern setting serves to alienate Shakespeare’s language, rather than make it more appealing. It worked best when it retreated into the background. For all its grand canvas of war and royalty,
Lear is in some ways a very small play, an accumulation of petty errors and jealousies. This King Lear was best when it was quietest. Ed Cumming
So John and Kayleigh drove off into the sunset together in Peter Kay’s
Car Share (BBC One). Well, no, actually they didn’t, because Peter Kay had a nifty little joke up his sleeve for the last scene of this funny and poignant, but never icky, finale.
It took up where the second series of Kay’s will-they-won’t-they left off: when John (Kay), the daft ’apeth, was unable to reciprocate Kayleigh’s (Sian Gibson) declaration of love. Early next morning, a nervous John dropped off a cassette tape (a nice touch for the technophobe recipient) at her house. It contained a sweet song, Will You
Be My Car Share Buddy?, that John, who had been up all night, had written and sang for her. The song, in one of the fantasy musical interludes that punctuated the series, was given the full boy-band treatment (filmed in moody black and white, with lots of soulful looks to camera) as Kay performed with four members of Take That. It was a terrifically rendered spoof.
Next thing we knew, Kayleigh jumped in John’s car and they started chitter-chattering like old times about everything from defecating to wedding invitations – only this wasn’t their nuptials, but a colleague’s. What an imp Kay is, with his feints and teases, not taking the direct route to the happy ending he knew every viewer demanded. It was writing and plotting of the highest quality, to keep us guessing until the very last shot.
When the closing minutes arrived, Kay went out with a bang, literally. A beautifully choreographed long-form gag, full of belly laughs and cartoonish comedy, started when sweet, scatty Kayleigh spotted a hedgehog in the road. In trying to rescue it she was oblivious to the sequence of events she sparked: car crashes, a major traffic jam and John’s beloved Fiat 500 almost written off. It was a neat metaphor for the mayhem Kayleigh had caused in John’s well ordered life.
Kay gave us the tear-jerking resolution we all wanted, but he had a parting gag: John and Kayleigh, sharing earphones, listening to his song on her Walkman, holding hands and smiling. On a bus. In a series called
Car Share. Perfection. Veronica Lee