Glenda Jackson’s “ferocious” King Lear
Playwright: William Shakespeare Director: Deborah Warner The Old Vic, London SE1 (0844-871 7628) Until 3 December Running time: 3hrs 30mins (including interval) “No ifs, no buts,” said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Glenda Jackson as King Lear is “tremendous”. Having taken on the “sackcloth and ashes role” of member of Parliament for the past 24 years, the two-time Oscar-winning actress, now 80, has returned to the stage and pulled off an “eleventh-hour feat of human endeavour that will surely be talked about for years to come by those who see it”. Where does all her energy come from? “Or that voice, which can blast out with a force to induce shock waves? She’s so pale, so spectrethin – with an androgynous crop of lankish hair” – that this Lear might almost have been out on the blasted heath for months. How astonishing that such a “wraith” can suggest such “intense, implacable wrath” – tearing “metaphorical chunks off her brood as they take it in turns to disappoint her”. This is sensational stuff.
Jackson’s performance is “stellar” and “fearless”, agreed Ann Treneman in The Times. The sight of “her big red-raw hands spread out before us as she rants in the sing-song of the crazy makes you quail”. But then she takes off her trousers (she’s not the only one to do so) and “those frail stick-like legs poking out under her big white shirt makes you recognise, with a pang, that Lear may be a monster” but is also simply old. Like all the greatest Lears, Jackson shifts in an instant between “madness and sanity, anger and tenderness, vocal force and physical frailty”, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. It’s a “superb” and “shattering” performance.
Casting a woman as Lear has caused mild controversy, said Mark Shenton in The Stage. Yet it “turns out to be the least gimmicky feature” of Deborah Warner’s self-consciously “modish” production. I confess “my heart sank a little” at the opening sight of a line of blue plastic chairs, arranged against a series of geometric white screens. But fortunately, the concept is carried by the compelling performances of a cast of fine actors. Rhys Ifans makes a funny and “dominating” Fool, while Celia Imrie and Jane Horrocks are “appropriately icy, power-dressing studies in ambition” as Goneril and Regan.
I experienced a heavy sense of foreboding on hearing that the American streaming service Netflix was spending “gazillions” on a six-season, 60-part drama about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. But having binge-watched the “barrage of livery and footmen and Land Rovers and banquets” that comprise the first series of The Crown, I’m now a fan. Screenwriter Peter Morgan and director Stephen Daldry have set out to make the “benchmark televisual portrait” of Elizabethan Britain. And they’ve succeeded.
Starting, Godfather- style, with a wedding – that of the young Elizabeth (Claire Foy) to Philip Mountbatten (Matt Smith) – the series luxuriates in its reported £100m budget, said Gabriel Tate in The Daily Telegraph. The sumptuous production values are matched by the talents of the cast, said Martin Hoyle in the FT. Foy and Smith are both convincing in their roles, but what stands out is American actor John Lithgow’s recreation of an ailing, petulant Winston Churchill. “If Winston wasn’t like this, you feel, he should have been.”
That is precisely the problem with this portrait of the Windsors, said David Stephenson in the Sunday Express. Too often one finds oneself suspecting that it just wasn’t like this in reality. But does it matter, asked Tate. The key requirement is that it should hold together as drama as well as spectacle, and Morgan, who scripted the movie The Queen, ensures it does: the scene where a dying George VI (a “towering performance” from Jared Harris) joins carol singers in a rendition of In the Bleak Midwinter is especially stirring. It may not have happened, but it works. The makers of The Crown were right to refuse offers of assistance from the Palace, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. It has left them free to make “a rich, non-reverent drama”. This is Netflix’s “crowning achievement so far”.