Charles Spencer reviews King Lear at the Almeida, King's Cross

THE playwright David Hare offered Oliver Ford Davies some headmasterly advice as this fine character actor prepared to take on King Lear, perhaps the most daunting challenge in the entire dramatic repertoire. "Look, there are 11 scenes and no one can do them all," said Sir David. "You're bound to be able to do some."

In fact Ford Davies does much more than that. In a performance that triumphantly establishes him as one of our finest actors, he offers one of the most moving and intelligent Lears I have ever seen.

There are many moments in this deeply humane, deeply felt performance when it becomes impossible to hold back the tears. More remarkably still, Ford Davies, who normally seems the most benign of performers, does full justice to Lear's spiteful rage and terrible fury in the first half of the play. His transition from snarling tyranny to loving tenderness is played with such truth, and such clarity, that one feels like cheering.

But this marvellous performance is just the centrepiece of a breathtakingly fine staging of Shakespeare's greatest play. In his last production as joint artistic director of the Almeida, Kent in partnership with his remarkable designer, Paul Brown, has pulled off an astonishing coup de theatre.

The modern dress production initially suggests a world of luxury, wealth and taste. The entire auditorium has been covered in wood panelling and elaborate cornices, while the stage boasts a log fire, a luxurious carpet, gilded candelabra and characters dressed in immaculate suits and dresses. They look not unlike the Almeida's more ferociously fashionable first-nighters.

How on earth, you wonder, is Kent going to transform this world of pampered privilege, in which Lear's abdication is broadcast live on television, into the wild, storm-lashed heath where the king loses his mind?

Easy. Well, easy if you have the skill and daring of Messrs Kent and Brown. The walls collapse as the thunder cracks, real rain buckets down in gallons amid dazzling lightning flashes, and Lear, drenched to the skin, dances around with Poor Tom dressed only in his socks and Y-fronts. It is a thrilling theatrical metaphor for both the transience of political power and the fragility of human sanity.

It's a high-risk strategy. With such a striking staging, the show could easily seem little more than a box of tricks were it not for the excellence of the performances. There isn't, however, a dud actor on stage, and the company never seem remotely awed by the spectacle of the staging.

In a brief review, it's only possible to pick the highlights of Ford Davies's performance. But his fear of madness, which begins when he contemplates his own fragmented reflection in a shattered mirror, is deeply affecting, as is his gravelly ranting in the storm sequence. Yet it is his beautifully rapt reconciliation with Cordelia (excellent Nancy Carroll) and his abstracted grief as he tenderly cradles her dead body in his arms that nudge the performance into greatness.

David Ryall is almost equally moving as Gloucester, a genial complacent clubman whose path to enlightenment is almost as painful as Lear's, and the desolate yet blackly comic scene in which the blind man and the madman find themselves together on Dover beach is like Samuel Beckett with the addition of brilliant poetry.

Suzanne Burden and Lizzy McInnerny capture all the superficial glamour of evil as Goneril and Regan, James Frain plays Edmund with a horribly plausible smirk, and there is outstanding work from Paul Jesson as a strong, devoted Kent, Tom Hollander as a pained, puzzled Edgar, and Anthony O'Donnell, who plays the fool like the saddest, most unsuccesful club comedian you have ever seen.

Jonathan Kent is bowing out of the Almeida with a flash of inspiration.

His two evil daughters, startled to be called upon, respond with the aplomb you'd expect from women who have come straight from a Knightsbridge hairdresser and Giorgio Armani. (Gentle Cordelia favours Laura Ashley.) These are not the sort of people you'd expect to come across on a blasted heath, but, here, the heath comes to them. When the storm breaks, the panels collapse, and water pours through the ceiling and over the furniture.

Lear's Empire desk sees a lot of service - the actors crawl beneath it, using it as the entrance to Poor Tom's (imaginary) hovel. You may not be plagued with the over-literalness that sometimes overtakes me, but you may still find this setting as silly as the point is trite. How likely is one to walk into what looks like a cabinet minister's office to find an underling chained and fettered (during business hours, anyway)?

In any case, no amount of set- dressing makes up for the trouble at the top - a Lear who, as played by Oliver Ford Davies, could just about be a plausible retiring head of a junior school. There is as little majesty in his performance as there is variety. Lear arrogant, Lear affronted, Lear compassionate, Lear demented; all, with him, are curmudgeonly rant, the volume pitched between loud and louder. En deshabille Ford Davies reminds the women in the audience of what we have always known: that there are few sights more ridiculous than a man being passionate in shirt and socks.

The rest of the acting is all over the lot, a jumble of accents and mannerisms. As Goneril, Suzanne Burden belies her sleek appearance with broad gestures and rictus grins, looking like Joan Rivers doing a parody of a Nancy Reagan. David Ryall's dear old boy of a Gloucester sounds as well as looks, in his three-piece suit and watch chain, several generations older than his bastard son, who has the voice of a smugly amoral media expert. James Frain's Edmund, however, is one of the few onstage who speaks verse persuasively, and his voluptuous-but-shy pleasure at his villainy is very amusing. Rather more uncouth is the supposedly nobler son: as Edgar, Tom Hollander handles the text as clumsily as he does his sword. This Lear indeed represents the present-day world, but not in the way Kent intended - rather, as a portrait of individualism and huge intentions gone badly wrong.

When the young Oedipus killed his father at the crossroads, he did not know that he was committing a Freudian act. Neither, I should think, did Sophocles - though, when he created his Jocasta, he seems to have sensed that people often dream of things they are terrified of doing. How lucky we are by comparison. How nice to know what you are about. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are the unacknowledged legislators of the modern world: they tell you what you are aware of and what you are not, what you should feel guilty about, when it is okay to feel grief, anger or curiosity. They are the surrogate parents of mankind, which, as you know, cannot bear too much reality, but can never have enough of it, either.

Drama, rather than fiction, is the most profitable hunting ground for psychologists. So how come that none of them pointed out one of Shakespeare's most consistent pre- occupations, amounting almost to an obsession: fathers as the source of love, fear, guilt, resentment and mourning; their tyranny, their weakness and their absences. King Lear is the greatest failed father in literature: tyrant and victim, more substantial than Agamemnon, more overwhelmingly present than Captain Alving, more manifold than Fyodor Karamazov. This is the central concern and the main moral-political crux of Jonathan Kent's magisterial production at the Almeida.

The old King has his Shakespearian predecessors, fathers and father figures who fail through their excesses, their inadequacies or their unforgivable absences through selfishness or death: Old Capulet and Shylock, Henry IV and Falstaff, peppery old Leoneto in Much Ado, the late King Hamlet, his brother Claudius, and Polonius. The two dukes in As You Like It have a lot to answer for. Julius Caesar and King Duncan, fathers of their countries, stand condemned for tyranny and poor judgment. Still to come: gullible old Cymbeline, maniacal Leontes and the bookworm Prospero, the nearest thing in Shakespeare to a philosopher-king, and look what happens to him.

Oliver Ford Davies plays Lear as a self-centred, irascible paterfamilias who has decided to practise domestic tyranny at a national level. His entrance speaks volumes. The tall, bony body suggests an incipient feebleness, which is covered up by sheer bloody- minded willpower. The fingers flutter and fidget: the hypertension of the insecure. The eyes seem to see through you without actually looking at you. I say "seem to" because Lear, like King Duncan, is hopeless at seeing through people. What he does not realise is that he is right to abdicate because his judgment is gone. He thinks he can have the luxuries of kingship without its responsibilities; and he cannot hear the ghastly subtext of Goneril and Regan's flattery. Lear's mind is completely made up, and he expects the result of the opening conference to be, like the outcome of a totalitarian party congress, a foregone conclusion. Kent's production also makes clear that Lear had not consulted any of the powerful figures at court: all are taken by surprise.

Goneril (Suzanne Burden) is an accomplished chateleine: elegant and efficient, mistress of all she beholds - except her earnest, gentlemanly husband (Paul Shelley), with whom her relationship is cool. If it was ever anything else she does not seem to miss it. Regan (Lizzy McInnerny) is more the glamour puss - slinky, sexy and smug, much accustomed to being spoilt. Her marriage to Cornwall (David Robb) is clearly very much a going concern, but on her terms. Nancy Carroll's Cordelia seems to me an unfinished performance: the self-righteous, almost priggish independence of the first scene does not quite connect up with the caring generosity of the ending.

This is a modern-dress production. Paul Brown's set is a vast panelled interior with ostentatiously solid furniture. As Lear's world disintegrates, so gradually does the set; rain pours in during the storm scene. Come the end, the props and furniture are stacked at the back like rejects after a moral storm. The set as symbol. Fine, but there is something self-conscious, almost programmatic about all this. Sometimes it seems that the furniture is used simply because it is there. The mad Lear in a rain-soaked leather armchair lacks the true Shakespearian terror of comfortless open spaces.

This is the most Ibsen-like production of this play I have ever seen. By this I mean that Kent's reading excludes the luxury of warmth. As in Ibsen, there is nobody here who is fully sympathetic, except perhaps Paul Jesson's massive, manly Kent. Even the frank, attractive Edgar (Tom Hollander) seems more than usually gullible, as is his earnest, owlish father, Gloucester (David Ryall), whose loyalty to Lear is a matter of natural human duty rather than courageous generosity. On the other hand, James Frain's Edmund is an affable young man, elegant, plausible, humorous, polite: one of Castiglione's courtiers. What all this means is that you have to judge the great moral issues without giving yourself any emotional comforts or rewards. You judge actions, not souls.

Ford Davies's Lear learns something by the end, but, again as in Ibsen, he does not fundamentally change. It is the rather desperate idealism we have inherited from 19th-century Germany, overlaid with crass Marxist optimism, that has conditioned us to expect grown-up people to "change", ie improve, by experience. Ford Davies's Lear is much the same difficult, ratty old man at the end as he had been at the beginning. He has learnt that he had made a catastrophic mistake. He is penitent but not humble, and you watch him in judgmental compassion, a tough and dark pity. A great moral and political error had been made and has now been paid for: the King himself is the inevitable collateral damage. Like King Ixion of mythology, he is bound upon a wheel of fire; but Ford Davies never lets you forget that, like Ixion, Lear had created his own monsters.

This is Kent's last production as co-director of the Almeida, and it bears all the hallmarks of his great gifts: theatricality combined with intelligence, a willingness to take risks and reassess masterpieces, a fierce concentration on the text and what it tells you about the characters, and a rare and blessed ability to work for as well as with his actors, to liberate as well as direct them, and make them glow in their own light. I can't wait to see what he does next.

Ford Davies strides in and his decision to split up his realm on retirement is announced as a public TV broadcast. Ensconced behind a gold-embossed desk, he has the air of a benign dictator. He chuckles as Suzanne Burden's Goneril and Lizzy McInnerny's Regan step forward with nervous smiles to confirm filial devotion. This Lear seems sadly aware, deep down, that established certainties are about to disintegrate. When he banishes Nancy Carroll's Cordelia for refusing to tow the line, he shatters his looking glass. And soon after, as morality goes to the dogs and Ford Davies grows mad with grief, his mansion is stunningly rent asunder. Lightning flashes through fissures, wallsfall and rain pours on this ruin.

The tiny hovel where Ford Davies - stripped to his underwear - finds Tom Hollander's ragged, ousted Edgar is actually Lear's desk, shoved in a flooded corner. So there's no heath as such, but rather a journey into the King's crazed mind and dark visions of a political scene turning barbaric.

This production intelligently suggests a back story for the degenerates who gain ascendancy. James Frain's outstanding Edmund, before hardening into a villain, is a sweetly smiling youth whose sensitivity is wounded by being introduced as Gloucester's bastard. Burden and McInnerny, flinching as they taunt their father, imply they've been bullied for years. Indeed, Ford Davies - the cuddliest old softie in British theatre - proves a Lear of startling authority and snarling ferocity.

The first three Acts tear along impressively - with Shakespeare's iambics driven by intense, naturalistic emotion. After the interval, regrettably, several key players and the director's sense of momentum go awry. The hurricane ceases, preparing us for healing scenes. But David Ryall's blinded Gloucester mutters his speeches of despair and stoicism as if he's reading the phone directory. Carroll rushes lyrical lines and Ford Davies could quieten some of his on-going rants.

However, his path in and out of madness is otherwise superbly charted and the tenderness of his death scene - when he cradles Cordelia's corpse like a new-born baby - is heartrending. A great performance.

King Lear - Oliver Ford Davies Fool - Anthony O'Donnell Cordelia - Nancy Carroll Earl of Kent - Paul Jesson Earl of Gloucester - David Ryall Edmund - James Frain Edgar - Tom Hollander Regan - Lizzy McInnerny Goneril - Suzanne Burden Duke of Albany - Paul Shelley Duke of Cornwall - David Robb

By MATT WOLF
There comes a time in any worthwhile production of "King Lear" -- and Jonathan Kent's largely stirring Almeida production is certainly that -- when the sorrowful heart of this mightiest of plays bursts wide open. That moment arrives relatively early in this final Kent staging after a decade co-running (with Ian McDiarmid) the Almeida, to generally thrilling results. (The pair step down in July.) In one of his many spasms of rage, Oliver Ford Davies' Lear smashes the elongated mirror by his desk, returning to it soon after in fearful recognition of the damage he has wrought. "O let me not be mad," he says prayerfully, the shattered glass offering its own silent rebuke. By then, the die is cast and Lear's decline is clear, his downward journey a march toward chaos that gets tempered too late by love.

Kent planned his farewell production around Ford Davies; this is their fifth collaboration. The playhouse is perhaps best known internationally for its visiting stars (Cate Blanchett, Juliette Binoche, Kevin Spacey), but it has been no less crucial for allowing British actors -- whether Oscar nominees (Ralph Fiennes) or otherwise (Richard Griffiths) -- repeated chances to shine. In the past, Ford Davies has specialized in a bemused quizzicality of an achingly moving sort: His doubting cleric in David Hare's "Racing Demon" won him an Olivier Award a decade ago and remains one of the most unaffectedly anguished perfs in my experience. And his last line in that play -- "Is everything loss?" -- could equally be asked by Lear, who ends Shakespeare's tragedy "a ruined piece of nature" embodying what the Duke of Albany calls "this great decay."

The question was whether so apparently gentle and genial a presence as Ford Davies could summon from within the fury that starts Lear on his momentous fall. The answer is mostly yes, given a Lear who is at his best once he ceases to bray. Making a near-incantatory song out of "and my poor Fool is hanged," or uttering the closing litany of "never's" as a wounding decrescendo, this is a Lear that "Racing Demon's" Lionel Espy would recognize (and not just because of the actor's inimitably hangdog posture): However animated he seems by anger, his mad monarch is fueled by loss.

It's somewhat surprising, then, that the production finds what humor it does, much of it of the spiky, barbed sort sounded by Anthony O'Donnell's altogether first-rate Fool. A squawking chicken one minute, his bottom a drum for Lear to beat out a tune on the next, this Fool fully abets Lear in what Goneril refers to as the king's "new pranks." At the same time, there's a cautionary slant to the Fool's tricks here, as if they exist merely to divert attention away from a onetime ruler turned "poor, infirm, weak, and despised." Similarly redefining a key supporting role is Suzanne Burden's ravishingly rapacious Goneril, a sleek and sexually charged malcontent whose elegant coiffeur -- both she and Lizzy McInnerny's able Regan have Princess Diana hair -- conceals a cold, most likely absent heart.

Not all the production operates at this high level, with even Ford Davies succumbing at times to the generalized high-decibel wash that can afflict Kent's stagings of Shakespeare (cf. his "Richard II" two seasons ago but not his "Coriolanus"). Ford Davies isn't helped by a vocal timbre that makes it sound as if he is gargling the verse -- on that front, he's shown up by David Ryall's faultlessly spoken Gloucester -- though virtually anyone would have trouble shouting down a clangorous storm scene that makes for some pretty amazing spectacle: Paul Brown's elegantly paneled contemporary set -- in visual terms, the play could be taking place in Gosford Park -- collapses in bits and pieces even as the rain sweeps in (audience members in possession of their own porous country manse may well get a particular fright).

Elsewhere, the modernism of the staging is sufficiently reined-in not to irk the purists while audacious enough to suggest that Peter Sellars might have lent an assist. (Lear delivers his opening partition of the realm before TV cameras until his querulousness gets the better of him and the plug, quite literally, is pulled.) Cast out onto the heath, the floral-crowned, fallen monarch enters into a timeless physical landscape, accompanied by a Gloucester whose earlier loss of his eyes found him seated alone on stage, his head encased in a lampshade, like some absurdist figure out of Magritte.

One could wish for an Edmund who is a shade less casual toward the language than a newly close-cropped James Frain (though Tom Hollander, after an all too typically petulant start, deepens beautifully into the contrasting part of Edgar). And some may find the scenic wizardry -- Mark Henderson's near-expressionist lighting included -- overwhelms the import of the play rather than informing it. But listening to Lear speak of "this great stage of fools," one feels the ever-primal pull into darkness of a play that dares say and show the most terrible things only to achieve a paradoxical cleansing by which you feel better about being alive.

Sets and costumes, Paul Brown; lighting, Mark Henderson; music, Jonathan Dove; sound, John A. Leonard; fight director, Terry King; movement, Kenn Oldfield. Opened Feb. 12, 2002; reviewed Feb. 11. Running time: 3 HOURS, 5 MIN.
With: Sam Beazley, Paul Benzing, Hugh Simon, Darren Greer, Lex Shrapnel, David Sibley, Richard Trinder.
Date in print: Sun., Feb. 17, 2002

"The modern dress production in initially suggests a world of luxury, wealth and taste" (Daily Telegraph) in which Oliver Ford Davies plays Lear "as a self-centred paterfamilias who has decided to practise domestic tyranny at a national level" (Sunday Times). Soon enough, though in a production that "often brilliantly, blends symbolism with realism" (Sunday Telegraph), "the walls of Paul Brown's astonishing set disintegrate under the impact of the pitiless storm" (Guardian) and the Lear of such "startling authority and snarling ferocity" (Independent on Sunday) is humbled.

Kent's "visually stunning swansong production" (Mail on Sunday) shows his customary "theatricality combined with intelligence" (Sunday Times), although some critics felt that "lighting, costumes and accessories do the actors' and director's work" (Independent), and that "the sense of momentum goes awry" in the second half (Independent on Sunday). Ford Davies gets fine support from a good trio of daughters "with Suzanne Burden outstanding as a snakily vain Goneril" (Observer) and James Frain's Edmund is "not the usual cartoon villain but a genuinely troubled illegitimate son" (Sunday Telegraph).

Ultimately, "the real power of this production is its evocation of a family in crisis and by extension of a world in chaos" (Mail on Sunday). "Not a life-changing Lear, but what it does capture excitingly is the way individual actions breed national disintegration and cosmic disorder" (Guardian).

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