King Lear

Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, Box Office 0844 800 1110

Review by Russell Blackaller:

THE opportunity to see Antony Sher, one of the greatest actors of our time, play King Lear, should not be missed.

Gregory Doran’s latest production for the RSC enables Sher to come of age and Shakespeare himself would be proud!

Sher’s entrance is as grand as can be, with a huge fur coat emphasising his stature.

But as his inevitable decline rolls on, the figure dwindles down to just a pathetic mad old man in his undergarments.

Without stealing the show (unlike Paapa Essiedu’s brilliant portrayal of Edmund), Sher gets it spot on.

Shakespeare’s plays are as relevant today as they were when they were first written. In King Lear the theme is firmly focussed on family - more specifically parents and the love they expect from their children.

Most of us want to put our feet up at the end of a long hard life and reap the rewards of bringing up our children - to see them prosper and to return the care that we gave them. But the ‘punchline’ of this great text is that in reality we can’t write the script, we should accept one another’s flaws and to reach our goals, speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

Doran’s production extends the idea of family to a wider society, with omnipresent down and outs suggesting that we can all be ‘losers’, cast out into the cold.

When Edgar (played by Oliver Johnstone) pretends to be Poor Tom, we see the starkest contrast between a nobleman and a man reduced to ‘living in the gutter’, albeit pretend.

Johnstone’s portrayal of Tom’s madness is both impressive and highly disturbing, particularly as the idea suggested is that we could all be him.

The style of this production is a strange mixture. The music feels traditionally regal and unadventurous and the mainly black or white costumes draw sleekly on familiar Shakespearian period settings, but there is also something rather surreal about Niki Turner’s design that it often feels like a Samuel Beckett play.

And like Shakespeare, Beckett’s world was also entirely drawn from the reality of the human condition. In this production the Shakespearian language and Beckett style setting serve to make the experience more real – not less.

  • 8 out of 10
  • King Lear runs in Stratford until October 15 2016