Another director fails to tame Glenda Jackson’s Lear
King Lear Cort Theatre, Broadway
★★★★★
Glenda Jackson has made it plain that although triumphant acclaim met her performance in the title-role of King Lear at the Old Vic in 2017, she didn’t care for aspects of Deborah Warner’s staging. Jackson has now returned to the role on Broadway, in a production directed by American theatre’s whizzkid Sam Gold, and one would be curious to know what her views are of his interpretation – a far more eccentric and contentious affair.
Gold has set the play inside a majestically gilded box that could be read as a reference to the excesses of Trump Tower, though the idea of Lear as a bloated plutocrat is not explored further. Dress is modern, and the king a wizened little man in a dinner suit: irascible, snarling and thoroughly charmless, he makes no appeal to our sympathies even when he is rejected by his daughters and descends into madness. It is only in the final scenes of reconciliation with Cordelia that some glimmer of tenderness and pity shines through, almost grudgingly.
Jackson goes at it full pelt, and her performance has scalding, relentless force. But she is less nuanced than she was at the Old Vic, and some variety of vocal colour has been lost in the interim: it’s all pitched at one note, and despite the clarity and intelligence with which she attacks the verse, she communicates no sense of someone painfully learning the truth about the human condition. The play’s great moral turning-point, Lear’s cry of “Oh reason not the need”, passes as nothing but another diatribe, and even “Poor naked wretches” is more a scream against the injustice of the universe
than an access of compassion.
She fights against the tasteless inclusion of an intermittent soundtrack, composed by Philip Glass and played onstage by a string quartet. Mawkish, meandering and mumbling, it accompanies some of the play’s most intense episodes, including Lear’s curse, “Hear, nature hear”, and the storm on the heath. The text is obscured and the effect irritating.
Gold provides other distracting and unilluminating oddities too, such as a kilted Cornwall played by deaf Russell Harvard, who communicates via a sign-language interpreter; the doubling of Cordelia with the Fool (which Ruth Wilson doesn’t pull off with much conviction); and the transgendering of Gloucester by a distinguished elderly actor, Jayne Houdyshell, who bears an unfortunate resemblance to Peggy Mount. Goneril (Elizabeth Marvel), Regan (Aisling O’sullivan) and Edgar (Sean Carvajal) are insecurely taken, and it is only the Edmund of Pedro Pascal (of Narcos) who seems confidently at home as a straight down-the-line handsome villain.
With an old-fashioned round of applause at her first entry and tumultuous ovations at the end, Jackson’s Lear is hitting the Broadway audience in the solar plexus. But Sam Gold has not framed or tamed her star turn any more satisfactorily than Deborah Warner did.
Until July 7. Tickets: corttheatre.tickets