I’ll Fool around with Glenda!
Welsh actor to co-star in new King Lear
NO kIDDING: Rhys Ifans is returning to the stage to play the fool. More accurately, the actor will be playing king Lear’s Fool in a production of Shakespeare’s tragedy that marks Glenda Jackson’s theatrical comeback after 23 years as a Labour MP.
Jackson, who won two Oscars before she entered politics, will (as this page revealed) take the title role of Lear in what is likely to be one of the most exciting examples of gender-blind casting ever seen on the London stage.
Ifans formally accepted the part of Lear’s scheming clown this week after being approached by Deborah Warner, who is directing the play at the Old Vic from October 25. Ifans joins Harry Melling, who will play heroic Edgar, who tries to watch over Lear and Gloucester, his father.
Ifans is no stranger to Old Vic artistic chief Matthew Warchus: they worked together at the National Theatre in a version of Volpone, which Warchus directed. And although Ifans is nobody’s fool, he delivered a delicious portrait of one when he played Hugh Grant’s Welsh lodger in the film Notting Hill, memorably posing for the paparazzi in his underpants when it was discovered that Julia Roberts’s fictional movie star was dating his flatmate.
Ifans was well-regarded as an actor before Notting Hill, but once audiences saw his comic timing, his career took off.
Tickets for king Lear are going to be thin on the ground. Priority booking for Old Vic members opens at noon on Wednesday and seats go on general release from May 31, also from 12pm.
Director Warner told me that Jackson’s quarter of a century in Parliament was an example of someone going off to research an ‘interior life’.
‘But from an actor’s point of view, that can only be thrillingly meaningful, with respect to what they bring back,’ she said.