King Lear conquers Covid to rule the Globe
King Lear (Shakespeare’s Globe, London) Verdict: Hits the sweet spot ★★★★✩
DESPITE its star, Kathryn Hunter, just coming back from a Covid break in the title role, and the director, Helena KautHowson, having been injured in a car accident two weeks before opening night — oh, and a cast member missing at this week’s matinee — this is a production of Shakespeare’s tragedy that the Gods of Theatre have been unable to prevent. And let us give thanks for that!
The show must — and has — gone on, with Hunter’s tiny, wizened Lear commanding a good deal of affection as the elderly monarch who divides his kingdom between his sycophantic daughters Goneril and Regan, while banishing the one he really loves: Cordelia.
Sometimes railing in a wheelchair, Hunter has the look of Davros from Doctor Who, only frailer and more vulnerable. She also has the physique of an autumn leaf and her delicate sense of Lear’s pathos is nearly blown away in the famous storm scenes.
And yet, as she descends into madness, she holds the stage with squawking eccentricity and pleading with invisible gods, rather than portentous rage or bombast.
The big pay-off is in the ending — which can leave the audience more exhausted than moved. Here, though, the restless open-air playhouse is rapt with silence.
One measure of Hunter’s success is the tenderness of her relationship with her court Fool (played by the Globe’s always terrific boss Michelle Terry). The Fool’s arcane Elizabethan gags usually cruise thousands of feet over the heads of the audience, but with Terry also playing Cordelia, she and Hunter find an intimacy that proves the beating heart of the play.
Kaut-Howson’s absence as a director can mean the drama lacks momentum, and the cast could perhaps dial up the heat on Lear. They sometimes seem fearful of breaking her, like a Ming vase.
Still, Ryan Donaldson makes a longhaired, Northern Irish, thinking woman’s crumpet of an Edmund, the interloping opportunist. Ann Ogbomo is nicely impatient as the wicked sister Goneril, while Marianne Oldham is craftier and more flirtatious as her sibling Regan.
It’s not a landmark production, but it is a sound and unusually sweet account of a seriously demanding drama.