Michael Attenborough (says the handbill) brings Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy to the intimacy of the Almeida stage. But King Lear is not an intimate play. It is immense, awesome in its all-shaking thunder, horrific in its cruelty, revolting in its tirades and explicit in its sexual disgust. The most tragic, the most pessimistic of all Shakespeare’s plays is epic; but the performance here diminishes its scale and makes it seem a domestic drama.
The production is crystal clear in its storyline, moves at a good pace, but it never excites. The set is the theatre’s own brick walls, which are fine for the castle scenes, but not so good when the action moves out of doors. The costumes are drab and the actors often seem to be just standing around in an artificial manner.
Jonathan Pryce is the sort of actor who has the power to fill a stage the size of Covent Garden or Drury Lane. He speaks the verse superbly and finds a lot of comedy in his mad scenes. The savage way he kisses Goneril and Regan suggests the king once had incestuous emotions for his offspring, an interpretation justified by the innuendo in the text. His high spot is the final heart-breaking scene with the dead Cordelia in his arms.
During the abdication, which opens the play, Cordelia is clearly as responsible for the tragedy which follows as her father is. But Phoebe Fox has been directed by Attenborough to be so bolshie, so defiant, so cold and so unfeeling that she comes across as unlovable as her sisters; and even when she and Lear are reunited in the great reconciliation scene she fails to be moving. When he talks of her soft, gentle and low voice it seems as if he is describing somebody else. Pryce gets far more support and affection from Trevor Fox’s Geordie Fool.